Fruits of Freedom

PASSOVER

Fruits of Freedom

This Haggadah, written by a biblical ethnobotanist, offers a new perspective for your seder.

AVERY ROBINSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

Dayenu: it would be enough if I had a practical, well-designed Haggadah with English translation; this alone is exciting.

Dayenu: a Haggadah that offers many explanations of the different ritual elements (so that guests can distract/understand for themselves). Dayenu: a Haggadah that helps me better understand what is Passover? And why, after a year of working out the kinks in my rye sourdough, do I have to spend a week eating the most basic, uninteresting and digestively difficult crackers? Dayenu: a Haggadah designed for foodies.

Dayenu: a Haggadah for those who have spent the pandemic noticing all of the different trees and

plants in their neighborhood again and again and again. The recently published Fruits of Freedom, The Tora Flora Hagadah does this and more. It illuminates the multi-layered meanings of the Passover seder through understanding “the natural and agricultural history of the Biblical and Talmudic worlds” within the context of the underlying multicultural environments (and different ecosystems) where Jews lived. Written by Jon Greenberg, a “Biblical Jon ethnobotanist” who has worked as an Greenberg agronomist at Cornell and the USDA, The Torah Flora Hagadah offers an accessible anthropological explanation for many components of the Passover seder.

TOP: Ancient Egyptian depiction of “Hyksos” (Canaanites or Hebrews). Note the colorful robes, suggestive of the “coat of many colors” that Joseph wore. BOTTOM: (left) Ancient Egyptian depiction of grape harvesting and wine production. (right) Illustration in a 14th-century Spanish

Haggadah depicting a lordly hare controlling or beating a dog while being served by a modestly dressed pig. Such imaginative animal scenes were commonly used in medieval and Renaissance Haggadot as a code for thoughts that could not safely be expressed in public.

The wine cup of pharaoh Tutankhamun (“King Tut”). One of the reasons for the four cups of wine at the seder is the four mentions of pharaoh’s wine cup by the wine steward as he described his dream to Joseph. These cups were also used in divination.

Fruits of Freedom is designed to help us understand the most fundamental of Passover questions: Why? Why is this dinner so different? Why must we publicly burn our chametz? Why must we roast our korban pesach (paschal lamb) on pomegranate wood instead of our standard backyard barbecue or in the oven? Why do some people eat a banana as their karpas? Why did horseradish (root) become so acceptable when the Mishnah specifically indicates that maror is from the leaves or stems of plants and the Gemara does not include it as one of the acceptable plants on its list?

With nearly 100 images, many of them botanical, Fruits of Freedom takes a cultural and ecosystem approach to “reveal unfamiliar meanings of every detail of the seder, from the table settings and menu to the color of the wine and ingredients in the charoset.”

The Passover seder is, at its core, a highly circumscribed dinner party that is arguably the greatest intergenerational informal educational environment ever designed. It’s a poly-sensorial and multilingual experience where the Four Questions, conventionally recited by the youngest, is just one of the many ways in which the seder is designed to teach.

As an environmental educator and culinary historian, the Fruits of Freedom Haggadah particularly speaks to me. Opening the maggid section, Greenberg asks “Leaving Egypt in haste — how fast was that?” to introduce leavening processes for a society that relied on, and barely understood, wild yeasts.

In the discussion of chametz whimsically titled “Leaving Bread, Leaving Egypt,” Greenberg’s commentary provides a historical cultural primer on Egyptian culture where people quite literally worshipped the god of fermentation of bread and beer. Abstaining from bread and beer, the Hebrews define their break from Egyptian slavery and cultural subservience with matzah, which is the most deliberately unleavened bread you could possibly make.

There is so much fascinating material included in this book. Gleaned from many disciplines, sources and eras, Fruits of Freedom makes the Passover seder so much accessible through translation and contextualization.

Whether you are a foodie, environmentalist, historian or simply hungry for a little bit of everything, this food-forward Haggadah will be sure to nourish your own Passover seders for many years to come. Dayenu. to be. People have been using them for decades, so it connects them to their family.

“The fact that it’s free at a supermarket — right there where you’re buying your brisket, your matzah and your wine — has helped keep up the tradition. If the ease in getting them wasn’t there, people might buy a box of matzah and invite some friends and family over, but they may not have the actual text. So, (for example) they may not know when to drink the four cups of wine.”

The accessibility of the coffee maker’s Haggadah led it to become the official Haggadah of the Margolis family. Paul Margolis, a Chicago native and Bloomfield Hills resident, said that when his dad was in the military, the Haggadah was easily accessible. Plus, reading from the same book year after year led to some fun family traditions.

“It’s bound to happen, somebody is going to do something funny, or there’s something that gets said that makes everybody laugh, and then it becomes something you remember going forward,” Margolis said.

One of their traditions is a game they call “pick the viz.” Based loosely on predictions made by a Chicago sports broadcaster, they guess which family member will get one of the two paragraphs with the abbreviation “viz.” (meaning “namely”) in it as they go around the table reading passages from the Haggadah.

“If you read that section, there was this big cheer at the table because you got the ‘viz.’ paragraph,” he said about the word, which is used right before talking about the four sons (updated to children in the 2011 edition) and listing the 10 plagues.

Although his wife, Caroline, remembers using a variety of Haggadot, the couple is partial to the Maxwell House version.

Natalie Finerty of West Bloomfield also grew up reading from the Maxwell House Haggadah. It wasn’t until she had kids that she learned there were alternatives and swapped out the ubiquitous Haggadah for a more kid-friendly one.

Still, she has fond memories of reading from the pages of the Maxwell House Haggadah and could always tell which pages were skipped versus the ones they read, based on whether the pages were crisp and clean or worn and stained.

“We definitely skipped a lot,” she said.

With six editions printed, not everyone seated at Finerty’s Seder table had the same version. Often, it became a case of frantic page-flipping to find the text that matched what was being read out loud, she recalled.

The most recent overhaul occurred with the 2011 edition. Updates included separating the Hebrew and English on opposite pages and revising some images and English translations. Outdated words like “thee” and “thou” were dropped.

According to Rosenfeld, consumers frequently contact the New Jersey-based advertising agency to ask for previous editions of the Haggadah to replace damaged books from their collection.

They don’t have previous editions. But they do have copies of the 2011 version that can be shipped to those who can’t get them at the local grocery store.

The books are still free but cost $3 each for shipping. Grocery stores in Metro Detroit do not appear to have copies with this year’s Passover food selection.