Four Classes on Four Haggadahs: Visions of Memory and Redemption

The Passover Haggadah is among the most widely read and beloved books in the Jewish tradition. This Pesach, Tikvah invites you—and your children—to study four modern haggadahs and the big ideas of history, politics, aesthetics, and theology that structure the Seder.

Inviting Rabbi Sacks to Your Seder
with Rabbi Dr. Daniel Rose

What would Seder night at the Sacks’ household look like? Using his Haggadah, we will explore the core ideas at the heart of Seder night and discuss how they can enrich your own seder. In the pages of The Jonathan Sacks Haggada, the Jewish people are seen as a nation of educators; covenantal time is unspooled as a narrative of hope, turning history into memory; and the seder participants are charged to shoulder the Jewish national mission to build a society that is antithetical to Egypt, a society dedicated to freedom under law.

The Four Cups of Wine and the American Covenant 
with Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern

How has the Jewish struggle for national independence shaped American ideas about liberty? From the earliest European settlers, to the American frontiersman, to the American slaves longing to claim their own freedom, the American imagination has been formed by the biblical text of Exodus. Rabbi Halpern will trace the poignant ways that the Jewish reenactment of our ancestors’ escape from Egyptian oppression has resounded throughout American history.

Echoes of Egypt
with Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman

Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman is one of the foremost biblical scholars of his generation, and Echoes of Egypt is a Haggadah unlike any other in this series. His signature argument is that the Torah performs a deliberate act of cultural counter-proclamation: it takes the literary forms and propaganda of Egyptian royal power and turns them against Pharaoh. The parallels between pharaonic inscriptions and the biblical passages that make their way into the Haggadah are not coincidence. They are polemic. Berman summons us to hear the Egyptian echoes that reverberate in the Haggadah’s voice.

A Visual Midrash: The Graphic Novel Haggadah
with Jordan "Gorf" Gorfinkel

What happens when the Exodus story meets the graphic novel? Jordan Gorfinkel—veteran Batman editor for DC Comics—has spent his career thinking about how sequential art does what centuries of written commentary have always attempted: make ancient stories immediate, visual, and impossible to set aside. In this class, he’ll show how the choices a graphic novelist makes—what to show, what to withhold, where to place the gutter between panels—turn out to be the same choices that editors of the Haggadah have always made.