Mar

20

2026

Hannah Gold (assistant editor): My family has used We Tell it to Our Children: The Story of Passover for our intergenerational seders since the mid ’90s, when my parents won a set at a JCC fundraiser. If you’re looking for a family-friendly option, this is a guaranteed hit. It’s less of a conventional haggadah and more of a script of the Exodus story, embedding prayers and foods where they fall narratively. The set comes with black-and-white illustrations of the characters to be photocopied, cut out, colored in, and taped to chopsticks or pencils, creating puppets for participants to hold as they play their parts. The script includes a narrator plus nine puppet roles, though some, like the Taskmaster or Yocheved, are brief, so a single guest could play various characters—those too young to read are assigned to the role of the sheep, who only bahs. Everyone can join in for the songs, which borrow familiar tunes but add new lyrics that advance the plot.

This haggadah is participatory, kooky, and fun for small children. It is also deeply uncool, and I would not recommend springing it on adult guests who are not prepared to sing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” rewritten into a lament of slave labor. In We Tell it to Our Children, Israel is a place “that would take us many, many hours to get to from here if we flew very fast in a plane.” For a more politically engaged seder, your narrator might have to improvise a few additions.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): We use the Yedid Nefesh Haggadah, which attempts to make a traditional seder maximally accessible. It has a complete Hebrew text, a translation into readable English, a transliteration of the parts one might sing, and a relatively unobtrusive, inoffensive commentary. Its pages are intuitively designed and uncluttered.

I am skeptical of the implicit claim of many contemporary haggadot that a book can lead a seder; my professional intuition, as a teacher of old literature, is that, on their own, premodern texts—no matter how brilliant or thoughtful—make nothing happen. I suspect that many buyers of haggadot with fancy bells and whistles (questions for discussion, modern meditations, updated plague-lists and the like) are making a category error: It is as if they were looking for advice on how to host a party in the assembly directions for their sectional. I also find the common practice of circular reading of arcane texts and then unplanned, uninformed discussion baffling; that’s a pedagogical modality appropriate for a last-minute substitute teacher in a middle school English class, but for no one else.

Instead, I prepare a class on one of the texts in the haggadah, with one or two supplemental texts (traditional and modern), simply presented context so people can understand it (a good resource for this background is the scholarly commentary in the Schechter Haggadah, which incidentally also has lovely illustrations), and several open-ended questions for discussion. The rest of the text, I explain, can be chanted in about five minutes to fulfill one’s obligation in recitation; those who are not so moved can read parts silently or simply breathe meditatively during that short interval.

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): I can’t recommend a particular haggadah any more than I have been able to use a single one at the many seders I have led over the decades. For the most DIY of Jewish holidays—the only one officially centered in the home, not a synagogue—I say: make your own. The seder, by definition, offers the outline. Fill it in as the times—and the folks gathered—demand. After all, as Vanessa Ochs points out in The Passover Haggadah: A Biography, ad hoc home Pesach ceremonies took place beginning in 70 CE, with written versions not appearing until the 11th century, and not proliferating until after the invention of the printing press in 1440. (The first printed haggadah was produced in Guadalajara, Spain around 1480.) What’s more, the model for the seder as we have come to know it emerged from the Hellenistic period: a Greek symposium of food, drink, and, most of all, discussion. For me, the most meaningful seders are the ones where we all debate the themes and provocations of the ritual a lot more than we read.

This is not to say we should ignore the gazillions of haggadahs that have been created through the centuries. We should steal copiously from slickly published volumes and homespun zines alike—from those promoting commentary by rabbis of various ideologies to 20th century variants that began mapping the Exodus story onto contemporary liberation struggles. My own collection includes, among others: a facsimile of the 14th century Sarajevo haggadah; a velvet-covered copy of the one Arthur Szyk illustrated in Poland in the mid-1930s, which drew parallels between Pharaoh and Hitler; the Let My People Go haggadah from the 1970s focusing on Soviet Jews; the famous countercultural “Freedom Seder” of 1969 opposing the Vietnam War and supporting various civil rights movements; lots of feminist, queer, labor, immigrant, and ecological ones; JFREJ’s Black Lives Matter take from 2019; and the “Gaza Liberation Seder” produced by Barnard and Columbia students for the observance in the campus encampment two years ago. That’s not to mention inserts—from the 1944 prayer for eating chametz on Passover from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to poems from the First Intifada. Pulling from these varying texts (often by distributing them around the table and inviting folks to pipe up when they see something worth sharing) is a way of instantiating, through this thoroughly performative ritual, its palimpsestic nature. That makes sense for a holiday about recognizing ourselves as people—and as a people—in history.

In the analog days of yore, I literally copied and pasted materials into an ever-fattening loose-leaf notebook, that—notwithstanding decades-old wine stains on the pages—resembles more than anything a stage manager’s promptbook. A section for each seder element includes references to discussion-provoking passages from printed haggadahs, as well as accumulated poems, testimonies, short stories, and drashes, many contributed by participants. (Among perennial favorites: For the story-telling part of the seder, Marge Piercy’s “Maggid”; for the Hallel, the “Footnote” section of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”) In recent years, rudimentary Adobe-designed and printed versions have kept that notebook on the shelf, but the principle has not changed: Keep the bones, collectively produce the flesh. Indeed, it has become more emphatic.

Lately, I have pared the document down to a two-page outline—taking us back to the millennia-old guide (plus a few prompts). I keep the stack of haggadahs and yellowing xeroxes on hand at the table, but it’s the conversation that matters most. Often, just asking each person to say why they wanted to be at a seder that night is enough to spark deep, hours-long discussion—and singing, and jokes, and argument, and advocacy. Day-dayenu, day-dayenu.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Favorite haggadahs? God save us. Anyway, there’s only the Manischewitz haggadah. Everything else is chametz.

This week’s parshah, Vayikra, opens a new book of the Torah; following the Mishkan’s construction as outlined in the Book of Shemot’s concluding chapters, it begins by describing the sacrificial order that will take place within it. The first chapter primarily describes “the dinner details” of the various potential offerings—what is given alongside the sacrifices, including the oil and salt that accompanies each. These descriptions are punctuated by a repeated refrain: that the odor emitted by each sacrifice creates a “pleasing smell to God.” The Mishnah explains that this repetition is intended to convey an egalitarian ethos, asserting that God accepts all sacrifices regardless of their size or monetary worth, as long as the sacrificer brings intentionality to the ritual.

But more notable than the number of times the phrase appears is its theological claim: that God likes the smell of a good barbeque, finding the scent of the Temple sacrifices delicious. The plain reading of the text—that God has olfactory preferences—is strange in traditional Jewish theology. As the 11th-century Spanish commentator Ibn Ezra puts it, “Heaven forbid that God actually smells or eats. God neither smells nor eats.” Instead, he claims, we should understand the verse as using human behavior as a metaphor for conveying Divine pleasure. Other interpretations also aim to metaphorize: One early midrash plays on the sonic similarity between the words in the phrases “a pleasant smell” [“reiach nichoach”] and “a serene spirit” [‘nachat ruach”] to suggest that the sacrifice brings God tranquility. Rashi invokes this interpretation to teach that God is pleased by the sacrifice because it is a testament to our obedience, rather than because there is anything unique or inherent to the smell—or sacrifice—itself that God “likes.” The Rambam, who famously rejected all anthropomorphic imagery, understood the sacrifices as a tool for training the Israelites to forgo their idolatrous instincts, explaining that the sacrifice’s fragrance is pleasing “since it serves to remove idolatrous doctrines from our hearts.”

And yet our phrase has a history that precedes this week’s parshah and the laws of sacrifice. It first appears all the way back in Parshat Noach, well before the initiation of the sacrificial system presented in Vayikra. In this instance, God has just destroyed most of the world to remove the evil that took root among the earliest generations of humanity. After 40 days of flooding to purge this widespread wickedness, Noah—whose family members are the only survivors—offers a series of sacrifices, which many commentators understand to be an expression of his gratitude. Upon receiving this sacrifice, the Torah recounts that “God smelled the pleasing smell” and resolved to never again “doom the earth because of humankind, since the devisings of the human mind are evil from youth.” In this story, God is not pleased by Noah’s obedience, as Rashi would have it, nor is God using this sacrifice to wean Noah from practicing idolatry, as would be the case in the Rambam’s imagination. The delicious aroma here is the smell of a single good action amidst unimaginable devastation; met by Noah’s gratitude simply to exist during the apocalypse, God is pleased.

In The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, Tamara Cohn Eskenazi acknowledges, like the earlier commentators, that God delighting in the smell of this offering might make some “uneasy,” but she suggests that even more glaring is God’s subsequent “change of heart.” Crucially, God’s response to the offering is not one of hope that humanity might transform for the better; rather, God recognizes the evil potential humanity holds, and nevertheless resolves to refrain from destroying the earth again. This newfound acceptance, Eskenazi argues, demonstrates that “God—not humankind—changes as a result of the flood,” and God is pleased to embrace humanity in its fullness. Each subsequent sacrifice summons this image of God accepting us alongside our flaws, and reaffirms God’s commitment to humanity, despite our fundamental, inescapable evil. In this way, the sacrificial system and God’s pleasure therein provide an antidote to a nihilism that might otherwise overtake us. It is a reminder that even amidst apocalypse, our actions matter.

Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.