The Chief Rabbi's Haggadah: Hebrew and English Text with New Essays and Commentary
by Jonathan Sacks
256pp, Collins, £16.99
It's Passover next week, the 14th of Nisan, 5763, so you'll be needing your haggadah. The word means "to tell": the haggadah is the book which is read aloud at the Passover seder, the great Jewish ritual meal. It tells the story of the exodus from Egypt, being pieced together with prayers and psalms, and requiring simple ritual responses, the sipping and spilling of wine and the breaking of matza, so that the seder becomes the archetypal Jewish occasion - a meal with a book, more dinner and symposium than religious ceremony.
The Passover meal is also, of course, a family gathering. The youngest child at the seder is accorded the honour of asking the Four Questions: why do we eat unleavened bread; why do we eat bitter herbs; why do we dip the carpas (lettuce, or celery) in salt water and the maror (the bitter herb, usually horseradish) in haroset (a mixture of wine with apples and almonds and cinnamon); why do we sit reclining? Why, in other words, is this night different? The reading of the haggadah, the telling of the Passover story, is an answer to these childish questions.
"No story", writes Jonathan Sacks, the Chief rabbi "has had greater influence in inspiring revolution or evolution towards a just and humane society. It is the west's great meta-narrative of history." He cites John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, but he might equally have mentioned Martin Luther King, or indeed any individual or culture or society that has sought to find freedom from slavery.
The Chief Rabbi's Haggadah takes its place among the many thousands and many centuries of haggadot, from Rav Amram Gaon's original ninth-century prayer-book, the first to include the seder service, to the infamous feminist haggadah published in Ms Magazine in 1977, and Roberta Kalechofsky's recent vegetarian Haggadah for the Liberated Lamb . These days you can even get a humanist haggadah, a Passover seder for Christian families, gay and lesbian haggadot - in fact, it'll probably only be a matter of time before you can get a haggadah that doesn't mention God, matza, the Jewish people or Israel at all. Maybe one day we'll have a West Bank and Gaza haggadah.
"Anyone who contemplates adding to this number," admits the Chief Rabbi, "must ask not 'Why is this night different?' but 'Why is this edition different?'"
Well, this edition is different because it contains 21 essays by the Chief Rabbi. The translation of the haggadah text from the Hebrew by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin and adapted by Sacks with commentary is interesting, answering the imperative of chiddush - finding the new in the old. But the essays are what will interest readers, whether Jewish or non-Jewish - this is where Sacks attempts to escape his own constraints and find freedom.
In his first essay, "The Story of Stories", Sacks defines his style of studying and teaching Torah as Torah ve-Chokhmah , "Torah and wisdom". His wisdom, it emerges during the course of the essays, resides in a series of profound, spontaneous and generous equivocations. There is no sacerdotal role in Judaism: a rabbi's task is to teach, to make fine discriminations and judgments. And Jonathan Sacks is the Chief Rabbi.
Yet it is hard not to be impressed with the clarity of his prose, which is always clean and bright and dry: he is not a man much given to the messy complications and stickiness of meta-phor. He is an accomplished, one might say a gentlemanly, writer, who throughout his essays maintains himself successfully between contraries: Judaism is about salvation and not redemption; it relies not so much upon history as upon memory; the Jew abides not by what he calls linear time but "covenantal time" (time "not as continuous advance, but as a narrative with a beginning and distant end").
This clear rhetorical strategy allows Sacks to intuit numerous ambiguities in Freud's Moses and Monotheism , and in the most brilliant essay, "The Missing Fifth", to detect some of the profound underlying gaps in the structural symmetry of the haggadah itself.
But what anyone reading The Chief Rabbi's Haggadah under the current circumstances will be looking for are his comments about Israel and the Middle East. Here his equivocations are at their most profound. Read in the context of Sacks's previous book, The Dignity of Difference , in which he stated that "No one creed has a monopoly on spiritual truth", and which caused huge controversy even among his most loyal supporters within Orthodoxy, the Haggadah can perhaps be read as an apology. Or possibly a reassertion. It's difficult to tell: Sacks remains the master of the multiple assertion.
"The story of the modern state of Israel," he writes here, "with its restoration of Jewish sovereignty, the ingathering of exiles from 103 countries, speaking 82 languages, the rebirth of Hebrew, the language of the Bible, and the rebuilding of Jerusalem, Israel's ancient capital, exemplifies one of Judaism's most hope-creating truths: that a vision can shape the destiny of a people." This will undoubtedly please the Zionists.
But then again, he writes: "We are not fully free if others are oppressed." And "to be a Jew is to work for peace and justice". One hardly expects from the Chief Rabbi the kind of criticism of Israel that you find in the work of the so-called "new" Israeli historians such as Benny Morris and Zeev Sternhell. But Sacks's book is none the less a timely reminder of the need for fairness and compassion for everyone - including for the basic human rights of the Palestinians. He doesn't make this connection explicit, but then a good teacher always lets you draw your own conclusions.
In an interview with the Guardian at the time his previous book was published, Sacks said: "You cannot ignore a command that is repeated 36 times in the Mosaic books: 'You were exiled in order to know what it feels like to be an exile.' I regard that as one of the core projects of a state that is true to Judaic principle. And therefore I regard the current situation as nothing less than tragic, because it is forcing Israel into postures that are incompatible in the long run with our deepest ideals." Passover is the Jewish festival of freedom, and the haggadah is therefore a useful handbook of what it means to be free, whoever and wherever you are. It is to his credit that the Chief Rabbi does not evade this.
· Ian Sansom's novel Ringroad will be published by Fourth Estate next year.