Passover Haggadah: Hebrew and English Text with New Essays and Commentary [Hardcover]

This book has two parts: a set of essays on the haggadah, and a commentary on same. Both are often at least somewhat interesting. Some points I liked:

*Sacks suggests that maybe the Four Questions is about the broader questions of identity - not just "why do we do X?" but "who am I?" and "who is this people I belong to?" Similarly, Moses' prophetic career begins the same way.

*Sacks has a surprisingly "liberation-minded" (although by no means Marxist) interpretation of the Exodus; he interprets Moses's movement from prince to liberator as evidence that a "child of slaves can be nobler than a prince...To have faith, as Judaism understands it, is to recognize God's image in the weak, the powerless, the afflicted and the suffering".

*Why does the Seder state early on "Let all who are hungry come and eat." Sacks explains that sharing "is the first act through which slaves become free human beings." A slave, or at least someone with a slave mentality, is too afflicted and terrified of the future to risk sharing.

*Why does the Seder refer to God executing "judgment against Egypt's gods."? To some extent, the plagues parody Egyptian idolatry. For example, Egyptians worshipped a sun-god- so the plague of darkness blots out the sun. They worshipped a frog-goddess of childbirth, so they were afflicted with frogs - perhaps because of their attempts to interfere with Jewish childbirth.

*Why does the Haggadah refer to "wise" and "wicked" sons, something not really hinted at in the Torah? The first reference to a wicked child is from sayings attributed to two second-century rabbis. Sacks points out that the authors of this work lived in a terrible time for Jews; Rome crushed a Jewish rebellion in the 130s, and the post-rebellion persecution might have combined with the growth of Christianity to cause quite a few Jews to leave the fold and become "the wicked son."

Occasionally Sacks views Judaism a bit too much through rose-colored glasses, or is a bit too harsh towards pagans: for example, after describing the revelry at Greek symposium, he suggest that "Greek culture rapidly disintegrated after the days of Alexander the Great"- which strikes me as at best a matter of opinion, given that Egypt and Syria were ruled for centuries thereafter by Greek empires, while Romans and Jews seemed to borrow liberally from Greek culture.