This is painful

I know I'm a snarky bastard. But when I read some of these religion and culture columnists and see just how earnest they are about their silliness, it's really hard to not want to smack them.

Take Mark Oppenheimer, who's previously bemoaned the over-saturation of the Haggadah market and bitched about how Reform Jews should pray Tachanun because it would give them a sense of what it's like to feel vulnerable before God, "like the Catholic confession." Oh-Kay.

What's Mark sad about now? Kindles. Yeah. But not for the reason you think.

the Kindle is yet another step away from from old media like vinyl and paper. This matters to collectors and nostalgic types (of which I am one), but the really important issues raised by the new technology, the ones all of us face, are social and romantic. Simply put, our gadgets give us too much privacy.

Fine, Mark, I'll bite. Why is privacy bad?

One by one, the meaningful artifacts that we used to scatter about our apartments and cars, disclosing our habits to any visitor, are vanishing from sight.

What?

Nowhere is this problem more apparent, and more serious, than in the imperilment of the Public Book—the book that people identify us by because they can glimpse it on our bookshelves, or on a coffee table, or in our hands. As the Kindle and Nook march on, people's reading choices will increasingly be hidden from view. We'll go into people's houses or squeeze next to them on the subway, and we'll no longer be able to know them, or judge them, or love them, or reject them, based on the books they carry.

This is a delicate matter. I can already hear some readers turning the page (perhaps a Kindle "page"), muttering that only an elitist jerk picks friends or lovers based on what they can be seen reading. 

It's not elitist, it's just dumb. Among other things, it assumes that there's no filter between people's public and private reading. There are plenty of books I read about religion, sex, or war that I would never bring to my work, because I don't need any of that baggage. Hell, I've bought Bill O'Reilly books on occasion (granted, ten years after they went to print, and from a thrift store). When I go on interviews I spend a fair amount of time thinking about what books are acceptable so I don't come off too weird. I'm guessing I'm not the only one who's figured this out. On the "gathering intelligence" scale, you're better off asking the friends of the object of your affection what their interests are, not deciding you totally know them based on the fact that you saw them reading something that one time.

Well, maybe. This essay is for the rest of you, the ones who freely admit to having been seduced by a serendipitous volume of Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John glimpsed on a potential girlfriend's living-room shelf or by a spine-broken copy of Robert Lowell sitting atop that boy's nightstand. Maybe that was your first time in the apartment, you had been reluctant to go, and now you wanted to linger a while …

Mark, I'm really trying to be nice here, but you are coming off like the lamest guy ever (and I went to a "nerdy" college). All I can say is it's a good thing you're already married.

Not convinced? Fear not! Mark has some TMI stories about his early dating escapades to share. No privacy issues here!

When I was 22 there was the dazzling brunette who, weeks into the relationship, when I asked why she had agreed to a date, said, "I liked your books." In that first studio apartment, I had deposited a box of college reading I had never gotten to: my Oxford Study Bible, a book about Second Temple Judaism, and Awash in a Sea of Faith, a history of American religion. At a small party I threw, to which I had invited the few people I knew in town, she—dragged there by a friend—had been intrigued by these books sitting on that bookshelf. (Ikea, of course.)

Excuse me? So she decided she liked you based on books she saw in your apartment, books you had never even bothered to read. Yeah, I don't know how young people are going to be able to muddle through this crazy love thing without physical books on the shelves. How else are we going to impress the opposite sex into thinking we're smarter or deeper than we are?

When I was 26 there was the English teacher at the summer school where I was teaching who noticed my copy of Best American Essays 1996. Her face broke wide open, into a big, eager smile, and she said, "The page from Anna Karenina!" I knew exactly what she was talking about: a passage in Ian Frazier's essay "Take the F," one of the included essays, where he spots a torn page while walking along Carroll Street in Brooklyn, bends over, and discovers that it's page 191 of Anna Karenina. The next day, she slipped a copy of a different Ian Frazier essay into my faculty mailbox, and then books were exchanged, and so forth …

Books were exchanged, then fluids were exchanged. Got it.

And then came my bride. Early gifts from her: a paperback of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which she couldn't believe I hadn't read, and Love That Dog, by Sharon Creech. Oddly, I gave her Our Guys, by Bernard Lefkowitz, about the high-school gang rape in Glen Ridge, N.J. I'm not sure what I was thinking.

Fair enough, I'm not sure what you're thinking now.

So what will you do, Kindle generation, when you cannot tell which of the quiet boys holding the e-reader on the subway is engrossed by the latest, predictable legal thriller, and which one by a cheery, long-forgotten Laurie Colwin novel? If by some chance you do end up with the right one, what do you buy him a month later, when it is time for that first, tentative, not-too-expensive present—a gift certificate for a free download?

How about a free punch in the nose?

Look, Mark, I also like giving books as gifts, and I also enjoy reading physical books, but of all the things to take a cultural stand on, this is really a silly one. Yes, common connections help you get the first date, but to single out books people read on the subway as the cornerstone of successful relationships is, I think, taking your Andy Rooney Jr. act a little too far. You're only 40, for God's sake! Besides, in a day of total media overload and over-sharing mania, I honestly don't mind people keeping a little something to themselves.

As a sign of civilizational decline, this is a minor matter. After all, love will always find its way. Even books, like romance, will live on. They will continue to be exchanged, and in fact their quaintness will only increase their value. When they are truly rare, to give one as a gift will imply the batted eyelashes. Books will, in short, suffer the fate that has already befallen letters sent by mail: preciousness.

You know what's not precious? This column. It's not entertaining, it's not clever, it's just odd.

Worse, they will no longer be that perfect lending object: inexpensive, plentiful, deeply felt. We'll look back fondly on a time when we had hundreds of these things, any one of which could, if she admired it, be stuffed in her backpack as she left. Or, if you weren't so generous, she could surreptitiously "borrow" it, then have an excuse to return it. Maybe she would give it back, maybe she wouldn't. Maybe she would find it a year later and have to hide it from another, newer arrival in her life. Maybe it would find its way back to you, left on your doorstep under cover of night, standing in for all the conversations that you and she were too cowardly to have.

Wow, it's like the literary equivalent of Lifetime plus saccharine plus a hammer to the temple. Sweet New York Review of Books.

Here's a tip, Mark: if you want to ensure that at least one book will never be made into a downloadable version, write one based on this terrible essay. It's bullet-proof.

Battle of the Haggadahs: The Revenge

Slate decided to reprint Mark Oppenheimer's rant about how having too many different Haggadot at Passover ruins the unity and uniformity of the holiday. It was stupid then, and still is. Oppenheimer's argument basically boiled down to, "My version of cultural Judaism is about bubbe, zayde, and Bernard Malamud," not, heaven forbid, mixing goyishe politics with the part about how we should all appreciate our freedom- wouldn't want things to get too relevant, after all.

Oppenheimer's article also included a loving tribute to the most staid of Haggadot, the Maxwell House Haggadah.

I think the best response to this attitude was from Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, via Velveteen Rabbi:

I am here to free you from the Maxwell House Haggadah, to free you in your Pesach celebration!
...But you are not just free to use better Haggadahs, (the ones with good translations and more openness), you are also free to use the material as a jumping-off point for playing, for elaboration. Like the Siddur, the Haggadah is a kind of a cookbook filled with recipes. You can’t eat a cookbook, even ones with the tastiest, the most nourishing recipes. You must do the cooking to turn recipes to dishes. And it’s similar with the Haggadah: You make the words three-dimensional, four-dimensional. Every Seder you have is a different way to bring the words off the page with different “spices,” different life-conditions.

Amen. Oppenheimer's entitled to want to use as many Maxwell Houses as he wants (take ours, we got them free from the supermarket), complete with weird, old-style Ashkenazi transliteration, (who writes hadlik as "had-leek", or "Adir Hu" as "A-deer hu"?) and those iconic (boring?) pictures sprinkled around ever-so-slightly. Enjoy. But there's no reason to discount what everybody else is doing as invalid just because you want stay cloistered in the land of coffee-scented Haggadot.

BZ from Jewschool also found Oppenheimer's pooh-poohing infuriating:

I think his diagnosis is completely backwards. Oppenheimer suggests that the diversity of creative haggadot can be attributed to the Jews who are primarily “secular Americans” and feel “unease” around Judaism, and that those who are more secure in their Jewish identies will opt instead for the unadorned Maxwell House. On the contrary: “Secular Americans” who have a minimal connection to Judaism but nonetheless attend a seder out of nostalgia or ethnic identification are more likely to, like Oppenheimer, read the Maxwell House from rote, while those who make Judaism more a part of their year-round lives are more likely to add layers of meaning on top of the traditional haggadah text, whether by using a creative haggadah or simply by making discussion an important part of their seder.

Pretty much.

For the curious, here are some segments from my own Haggadah. Needless to say, it's a bit more, shall we say, Leitzniyut than Mr. Oppenheimer or the Maxwell crowd might approve of.

The Seder Plate

You may have noticed that our main platter looks weird. We assure you, we did not steal it from a cafeteria. The Seder Plate is used to hold the six depressing symbols of the meal. As we explain what these are, please remember that yes, Passover is supposed to be a happy holiday. Just… give us a few minutes.

The symbols on the seder plate are:

1. Z’ro’a, a roasted lamb bone, usually a shank bone, a symbol of the lamb sacrifice that used to be offered in the Temple in Jerusalem at this time, then roasted and eaten with the meal. Traditionally, the function of the bone was to remind the Jews that their seders were not complete while they were still in exile. Some might choose to see the bone as a symbol for anything missing or incomplete in their own lives. (Vegetarians sometimes use beets, which isn’t nearly as cool.)

2. Karpas, a green vegetable. This is dipped in salt water to symbolize the tears of the Hebrews in Egypt. As if slavery wasn’t depressing enough, now you get to eat tears.

3. Haroset, a mixture of chopped nuts, apples, wine and spices. It is a symbol of the mortar and bricks made by the Hebrews as slaves. Tastes slightly better than it looks (and sounds).

4. Beitzah, a roasted egg, another piece of food we can’t eat because there’s no Temple. (To compensate, we have prepared a whole bushel of hard-boiled eggs. Take that, you stuck-up egg!)

5. Maror, bitter herbs, usually Romaine lettuce or horseradish, to symbolize the bitterness of slavery. Slavery is sad, but watching people eat maror is pretty darn funny.

6. Hazeret, extra maror for the korech sandwich, one of the weirdest sandwiches you will ever see (but more on that later).

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The “Four” Questions and their Misleading Answers: A Smart-Ass’ commentary

Asking questions is a very old Jewish tradition. Unfortunately, not all good questions always get accurate answers. Even the title “Four Questions” starts things off on the wrong foot by confusing everyone. There is actually only one question, there are four answers, and they are mostly wrong.

How is this night different from all other nights?

1. On all other nights we eat hametz and matzah. On this night, we only eat matzah.

This, of course, is a lie, because no one ever eats matzah unless forced to.

2. On all other nights we eat all kinds of vegetables; on this night, maror.

Not only does horseradish barely count as a vegetable, the Haggadah also seems to be presuming a lot about the Jews’ table habits. Just how many summer salads were there in the ancient world?

3. On all other nights we do not dip our food even once; on this night, twice.

Apparently no one told the Haggadah about chips and salsa. Or pita and humus.

4. On all other nights we eat either sitting or reclining; on this night we all recline.

Only those of us privileged enough to have personal Roman orgy couches. The rest will have to make do with the floor or by slouching on chairs. Sorry.

Maybe tomorrow I'll post my version of the Exodus story.

More from the Activist

I made the mistake of looking at Mark Oppenheimer's Slate archive and found this gem from last Yom Kippur. Not only is Mark not a fan of multiple haggadot, he also apparently is annoyed by fact that some Jews aren't praying the right way.

The rabbinic sages... never intended for Yom Kippur to be the only day of atonement, just the most important one. The Jewish tradition provides for a daily prayer of contrition, called tachanun. But with the spread of Reform and Conservative Judaism, few of whose adherents pray daily, its recitation has become scarce.

Because praying the magic penitential prayer would actually make Jews better, right? Is that the insinuation here?

In this fall away from regular contrition, Jews are hardly alone, for tachanun's slide into desuetude has mirrored a similar trend among Christians. The Christian faithful, too, used to steadily make confession. But the Reformation nearly killed off the practice among Protestants, and in the 40 years since Vatican II, Catholics have also dropped the practice en masse. On this Yom Kippur, Jews and Christians may wonder if a return to old rituals of accountability might do us some good.

Ok, first of all, Mark. "desuetude"? There's no real reason to use that word over, say, "dis-use", unless to make yourself feel smart at your reader's expense. That's what we in the biz call an "asshole move."

And you seem to be displaying the same arrogance problems you did in your other column. Yeah Jews and Catholics, get your asses in gear! You lazy bastards! Get back in the booth or in shul and feel guilty, say that tachanun, regardless of whether it means a damn thing to you or not. It's just like Amos would have wanted. It's not like Judaism really cares about sincerity anyway.

Reform Jews do not pray tachanun. But for Orthodox and even Conservative Jews—a majority of American Jews, that is—its recitation is supposed to be daily, with the exception of the Sabbath, festivals, and other joyous occasions, like the day of a wedding.

Actually, Mark, a Conservative friend of mine tells me that everybody hates doing tachanun and people use any excuse they can to avoid it- "any mildly festive occasion; the entire month of Nissan; the rebbe's son's half-birthday, or the alternate Tuesday after a full godamn moon".

Btw, Reform has been the largest American denomination for a while. Check it out: Orthos + Conservatives = 36% at most. Majority of Jews? That's some awesome math there.

I guess what I'm trying to say, Mark, is, "What the hell are you talking about?" Do you know?

The prayer generally begins by repeating David's cry in Samuel II, "Let us fall, I pray thee, into the hand of the Lord, for His mercies are many, but let me not fall into the hand of men." Worshipers used to enact this "falling" by lying completely prostrate on the floor. Today, one sits and buries one's head in the crook of an arm instead. David's invocation is followed by Psalm 6 (for Ashkenazi Jews) or Psalm 25 (for Sephardic Jews), and the prayer ends with a pleading for mercy.

Except, my friend says, on Mondays and Thursdays, when they read Torah and add tons of other prayers and apparently making tachanun about eight times longer, but hey, 3 out of 5 ain't bad.

It's impossible to know how many Jews think contrite thoughts while praying tachanun. Only a minority, even of the Orthodox, are fluent in Hebrew, so while the words are deeply moving, their urgency may not be apparent to most worshipers.

Because we all know that knowing the language your prayers is written in always translates to sincerity. Just look at Protestants.

And most weekday services I have seen are conducted at such breakneck speed that real meditation on the words' import would be an unlikely feat.

Hey Mark, such is the dilemma of morning prayer- folks have jobs to go to. They aren't going to wake up even earlier to go to shul and have a meditative experience; it's just not going to happen. (More likely they'd fall asleep.) Right now you have to bribe folks with schnapps just to get them to show up.

Finally, tachanun has purposes other than begging for forgiveness; it's a general prayer of unburdening, not just of one's sins but also of one's worries and fears.

And that's great, but again, where are you going with this?

Nonetheless, putting your head down in your arm somehow reminds you that prayer is meant to be humbling, a gesture of one's own weakness. The first time I saw this embodied contrition, it was almost embarrassing to watch. It seemed to render the worshipers so vulnerable.

Mark, not to interrupt your love-fest or whatever, but I don't see the connection between using your arm as a pillow and vulnerability. If that works for you, fine, but don't make this out to be some universal thing. And my Conservative informant tells me that there's a whole bunch of laws you have to go through which dictate exactly where you put your head (in your arm, on your forearm, if there's a Torah scroll, if you're not wearing teffilin, etc). So even in the moment of nude Jewish humbleness, there's still fun rabbinical legalism. Sorry to harsh your mystic buzz.

That, I would guess, is what the Catholic rite of confession is like: naked, unprotected, scary.

Mark, please stop talking to yourself. Seriously. You are an awful religion correpondant. Why don't you freaking ASK a Catholic dude?

And just as tachanun has declined among Jews, confession (once officially known as penance, now as reconciliation) has become far less routine among Catholics, many of whom no longer know that it's required.

Hey, let's SHOOT them! Damn Catholics. This is great- now Mark is Pope of two religions. Let's get some Muslims and guilt-trip them, too.

Its decline has numerous causes. In the United States, fewer Catholic neighborhoods exist to reinforce religious observance. Vatican II's emphasis on empowering the laity led many to question their rituals for the first time, and millions decided that rote recitations of sins were unnecessary. Then, too, the status of priests has been falling for decades, and the recent pedophilia scandals make them seem the most unlikely of confessors to many.

Or maybe they just stopped wanting to do it, and so they did. I mean, the weird humiliation factor doesn't seem like it would have helped keep it a fun priority on the list.

It would be naive to think that more people performing more regular rites of contrition would instantly change the world. Regular Catholic confession did not prevent the Crusades. And I doubt that Jews were better people when they occasionally practiced now-archaic contrition rites like malkot, in which a Jew would lie on his face in synagogue the day before Yom Kippur while another lashed him 39 times with a leather strap. There's no evidence that Episcopalians who do penance are more humane than Pentecostals, who have abandoned priestly atonement rites.

Damn straight. Now where's the but, Mark?

But theologically speaking, the hope is not that my act of atonement will enact improvement on a broad scale—it's that the observance will help improve me.

But if religion is self-directed, then you should be able to reformulate whatever rituals you want.

If there's one area in which ancient religions and modern secularism are in accord, it's that our thoughts can influence our actions.

Thanks, Oprah.

Paying close attention to our failings can help us overcome them—this is why Alcoholics Anonymous works, after all, and why many people benefit from psychotherapy.

No comment.

Tachanun provides a routinized opportunity to take stock of the promises we make to ourselves. Saving up a year's worth of sins for Yom Kippur, on the other hand, can make them seem either impossible to recollect or too great to surmount. The goal is the same, to hold oneself to account, but it can elude us on the day that we feel most required to find it. Tachanun, like confession, offers chances throughout the year to find help along the way.

So are you saying people who aren't doing tachanun should? Or that this is another thing to take a look at? WHAT'S THE POINT?

Ugh. Once again, Mark, do whatever you want- but stop talking up tachanun- do YOU do tachanun, btw, Mark? You never quite clarified that- as if it's the end-all-and-be-all of Judaism. Jeez. Get the hell off your high horse and stop guilt-tripping people for, God forbid, deciding what parts of their religion they actually want to follow.

Armchair Activists

I'm occasionally accused of being an armchair activist, which isn't really true. I'd like to think I don't really tell people how to live their lives, rather, I try to expose a bit of stupid now and then and encourage people to be slightly less-assholeish. But if a family tradition, say, making your own haggadah, works for you, then go for it.

But some dudes think this is bad. Specifically, Slate's Mark Oppenheimer. It seems the idea of so many different haggadot really puts a bee in his bonnet (or, for the yeshivish, a nit in his kippah). Why?

There are only four or five important translations of the Bible into modern English, and each generation needs at most two or three translations of Homer. We couldn't possibly need so many Haggadot—the Hebrew plural—and it's worth interrogating why we think we do.

...Theologically speaking, there's no problem with multiple Haggadot. While most of the Haggadah consists of Bible verses and traditional prayers, passages of interpretation constitute a significant portion of the text, and there's nothing sacrilegious about altering them or quarreling about them at the Seder, the Passover meal...Thus a raft of modern Haggadot (and supplements to them) have been designed to provoke disputations and appeal to different ideologies: feminist, liberationist, Zionist, humanistic, multicultural, and so forth. Many people create their own Haggadot, often with themes like "freedom" or "diversity"—there's even an open-source project to customize yours.

So what's the problem? Well, because they detract from the unity of the tradition, apparently.

Diversity within a religious tradition can be a source of strength, but it can also be a weakness. One of the inarguably great aspects of religion is how it gives communities of people shared experiences: Jews the world over know about the Haggadah's "four questions," the singing of the rousing hymn "Dayeinu," and the traditional foods on the Seder plate. Although traditions vary from region to region—and the Seder, conducted in the vernacular, thus comes in as many versions as there are languages Jews speak—there are certain common Passover rituals that most Jews will recognize.

So what? Why are these things in conflict? Not everybody does Passover the same way- go to a Sephardic seder and you'll notice qite a few differences. And I did an Italian ladino version of Dayenu last year that, while a little strange, was perfectly unobjectionable.

The question, then, is how diversified and variegated a cultural tradition can get before it loses meaning to the people who invented it.

DUH?

It's one thing to add an orange to the Seder plate, an innovation meant to honor Jewish women. But what if one family uses a Haggadah that focuses on vegetarianism, while another reads from one about Palestinian liberation?

So fucking what?

Both noble causes, to be sure—but are the families celebrating the same holiday?

Considering that both haggadot are meant to give an additional context to the overlying focus of the holiday, I'd say, YES. Giving two different drashes on the same story doesn't invalidate the central commonality. What kind of question is that?

If they're not, then when their children marry someday (after a touching courtship commenced when they were counselors at a Jewish summer camp), will they see Passover as shared cultural patrimony, something that unites them, or will they have fraught quarrels about which version of the holiday to pass on to their children?

Are you serious, Mark? The biggest problem with people celebrating different versions of the same holiday is not how it affects the larger state of Jewdom, but the fact that it creates inter-Jewish mixed marriages? Shit, why not have everybody marry their cousins and be done with it. And what prevents people from using MULTIPLE haggadot? There are TWO nights you can do seders, after all, and the holiday does come around every single year. Worrying about dueling Passover haggadot is like saying that an Ashkenazi from the US shouldn't marry an Israeli because they have conflicting fried food customs on Hanukkah and their kids might feel conflicted in the great latkes versus sufganyot debate.

All traditions splinter, and the good fragments will survive while others eventually prove ephemeral. And a Judaism that was hard and unbending would be worse than one that's too flexible.

A nice freebie. What else you got, Mark?

But there is a deeper problem, I believe, with Haggadot popping up like matzo balls in April. The diversity of Haggadot is a symptom of the unease that many Jews feel about Judaism. For some, the unease is political: Passover is a holiday about liberation, so the Haggadah has special meaning to those who feel that Judaism today is insufficiently attentive to left-wing political causes. For others, the unease is just a species of what all secular Americans feel around religious tradition, and Jews like this are always looking for a Haggadah that is "contemporary" or "relevant" enough to produce religious sentiment with a minimum of embarrassment.

Hang on, the fact that Jews are actively making Judaism meaningful and relevant to them is a bad thing because it suggests Judaism isn't meaningful and relevant to them? What the hell kind of argument is that? These people are ENGAGING with their Jewish identity and tradition. As long as they aren't making up complete horseshit and claiming it was delivered on Sinai (Kabbalah Center), where's the harm?

Many Jews think that if only they could tweak the liturgy just so (or associate the religion with enough Hollywood stars) they would feel better about Judaism.

What an inane bullcrap strawman. Seriously, Adam Sandler?

Such longings misunderstand the complex nature of religion.

Which Mark Oppenheimer, prophet from Sinai, has divined through a lifetime of talking to himself.

Liberals' desire for religion purely in service to social justice is as wrongheaded as conservatives' conception of religion as social control, and "relevance" is not the only test to apply. Religion makes some of us better people some of the time, but that's not all it's good for. You could found a religion whose core teachings included universal health care and a woman's right to choose, but it would have all the aesthetic grandeur—and durability—of the Green Party.

And now aesthetics are the marker of meaning and value? So Catholicism beats the Jains because they have nicer stuff and hats? What the hell are you talking about, Mark?

I try to work for peace, animal rights, and higher taxes, but while my Judaism supports those values, I got them from my secular mom and dad. Judaism, to me, is other things: a reminder of my grandmother when I say the mourner's prayer in her memory once a year, a closeness to my neighbors, several of whom will attend a Seder at my house. It helps me appreciate the art of Genesis, say, or Bernard Malamud. Religion is richer, and more interesting, than its implications for public policy. Passover is, too.

I'm happy that Judaism has nice cultural implications for you, Mark. I'm sure it does for millions of other Jews, too. But to suggest their Judaism isn't authentic because it involves politics or tweaking the liturgy as opposed to fond memories of Bubbe or Malamud is moronic. What makes YOUR version of cultural Judaism supreme?

The Haggadah I like best is the old Maxwell House Haggadah, filled with the "little kitschy scribbles" others find objectionable. According to Maxwell House, nearly 40 million of these handy little booklets have been distributed since 1934, when the coffee company first hit on an ingenious way to win Jewish customers' loyalty. The 2007 edition is, like all its antecedents, apolitical and middlebrow, geared for mass appeal. But it's clear and concise, and, most important, my parents and my in-laws all grew up on it.

In other words, it's the nostalgia appeal. Again, great for you, Mark, but why should everybody HAVE to use the same Haggadah? I'm unconvinced it really makes a difference. And this isn't about relevance- a giant coffee can on my Haggadah isn't very relevant to me, either- how about a little variety once in a while? If you want to use the reprint of the Haggadah your alter zeide brought with him smuggled in his colon as he fled the Cossacks from darkest Belarus, go ahead, but why knock other people's minhags? Aren't they as legitimate- and pigheadedly subjective- as your own?

What it lacks in poetry, it makes up in ubiquity. It's the Haggadah most evocative for my extended family, and there's majesty in that simple claim, a claim that no better, smarter, more beautiful edition could ever make.

Everybody's tradition was new once, Mark. If you like Maxwell House, then that's your choice. But OWN it, damn it. Don't pretend like the Maxwell House haggadah is timeless or without its own contexts, an ancient custom that miraculously appeared and was passed down from Moses or found in a cave somewhere. It's a freaking coffee company, for crying out loud, this isn't like some esoteric secret the Baal Shem Tov pulled out of his ass. In your rush to avoid being "trendy" or relevant, you're forgetting that every choice we make about what traditions, rites or rituals we follow is itself a choice- and I for one don't see what's gained by making everybody march to the beat of a single drum, or making everybody read Hebrew in the same Yiddish pronunciation (or Sephardic, for that matter!)

No, another new Haggadah won't "transform" Passover- but since when has that been the claim? And is the alternative, magically eliminating everybody else's family haggadot except for the one YOU like, somehow supposed to bring people together? Judaism is heterodox, it IS pluralistic, and ESPECIALLY when it comes to home observance- that's part of what makes us so interesting as a religious civilization and a people. Yes, part of religion is the sense of community and shared experience, but that doesn't have to be the result of some enforced uniformity. We are a people, but we're also individuals. We're families, AND we're family. That's how it's been for as long as anyone can remember, for better or worse, and that's what we've got to work with. We can't go back to a single tradition, and I for one wouldn't want to.

Mark, do what makes you happy- make your own decisions, and your own traditions- like we've all been doing for thousands of years, and with any luck, will keep doing. Just don't rain on my parade.