We’re two days into Passover, a major Jewish holiday.  The highlight is always two nights of services at the dinner table with families and friends, with varying shares of food, prayer, stories, and discussion.  This service, the seder, varies tremendously from home to home, as each household makes its way through a haggadah, with more and less conflict and warmth–as immortalized in Woody Allen films.

“Haggadah” means telling or narration, and the story that’s told is about the liberation of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt.  Although key elements of the tale are basically consistent, the tone, length, and meanings of the story are all over the place.

On length: the longest service I’ve ever participated in, many years ago, featured commentary and discussion on absolutely everything, and we didn’t get to dinner until after midnight.  All the participants were in their twenties, and there were no hungry kids waiting for dinner.

On meaning: religion helps people make sense of their lives, and rituals reinforce a sense of one’s place in the world.  People take very different messages from the same sets of stories and religious dicta, and devout doesn’t mandate a certain kind of politics.  Radical pacifist Dorothy Day and proto-fascist Father Charles Coughlin both saw themselves as committed Catholics.  Contemporary Christian clerics finds ways to promote tax cuts or tax justice in the Gospels.

The haggadah is a site where we can see the outcomes of activist Jewish efforts.  The story of liberation from Egypt can be used to make many different points.  In one reading, it’s about how special the Hebrews are, and about their sacred tie to the land of Israel.  Another take is about a universal drive for social justice, with an explicit argument that the liberation from slavery should make seder participants particularly vigilant in fighting against the oppression of others.

Such contrasting visions play out in different haggadahs; it’s easy to find conservative, leftist, environmentalist, and feminist haggadahs in bookstores–and now, on line.  All manner of causes have been represented by activists seizing the holiday and appropriating the story for their own purposes.  The rituals and symbols change in response to the concerns of the present: vegans, for example, hold their seders without a shankbone to represent the Passover sacrifice.

But recounting the experience of slavery, even many generations on, should leave a lasting impact on the way we think about the world and about justice.

The drama of the events commemorated–and the flexibility of the service–make it every politico’s favorite holiday.  President Obama–who is not Jewish or Muslim–has been hosting a seder each year  for a long time–well before he got to hold the ceremony in the White House.

You can make your own:

The Open Source Haggadah lists 16 key elements of the service and offers different texts for each, with politics ranging from “revolutionary” to Zionist, and religious orientations that range from orthodox to explicitly secular.  More–and newer–texts are available at Haggadot.com.

Contrasting intepretations of religious doctrines are hardly peculiar to Judaism.  What’s particularly interesting here is that you don’t need to read theological tracts to see the debates played out.

And to see how important movements of the past century have taken on the religious and cultural text of explaining themselves and their visions in the context of traditions that data back thousands of years.  One outcome of feminism, for example, are passages read aloud at dinner tables across the country that were recovered or written by activists a few decades ago.

And, somehow, I think these stories matter: our understanding of the past shapes our visions and actions for the future.