It’s almost Seder night. After much preparation, we’re going to finally recline, as instructed, and retell a story that, well… we already know!
The Haggadah, the story of the Israelites’ slavery and redemption from Egypt, reads nothing like a history. There’s no single narrator, no hero, no tidy chronology. It’s fragmented, digressive, full of odd rabbinic anecdotes. And yet we read the whole thing, every year, even though we know how it ends.
The text itself appears self-aware of this. Right at the start, it tells us: even if you are wise, even if you already know the story, you are still obligated to retell it tonight. And the most radical thing about the Haggadah is how it insists we put ourselves at the center of the telling.
We don’t say God redeemed our forefathers. We say God did this for me. First person. As if we were there. We sing Dayenu as if each miracle was performed on our behalf, personally. The Exodus, told in this way, is not past tense but perpetually present, annually retrieved and reconsolidated into our own lives.
This turns out to be exactly how memory works.
The philosopher Mark Rowlands writes about a memory he has of his father, an episode that occurred in his childhood that he can picture vividly, except that in his mind’s image, his father appears as an older man, not the 35-year-old he would have actually been at the time of the event. The reason, Rowlands argues, is that the memory was not really authored by him at all. Mark would have been too young to form the memory himself. But his father, dramatically retelling the story countless times, imbued this memory in him. Mark now owns the memory, it lives in his brain, but his father authored it.
Rowlands calls this the division between ownership and authorship. We assume memory is a private, faithful recording of what we experienced. But memory is soft and labile. Each time we retrieve it, it returns to a malleable form, open to being recast. The person who speaks it aloud, who keeps returning to the episode, narrating and shaping it, becomes its author. The listener, who receives the story again and again, finds his own memory reconsolidating around the teller’s version.
The Haggadah knows this. It ritualizes it.
Each year, the memory of the Exodus is retrieved in its soft, labile state and reshaped through the Haggadah’s narrative contours: we listen to the rabbis debating through the night in B’nei Brak; we point to ‘Pesach, Matza, Maror’ and their symbolic meaning. As we ask our questions and speak our interpretations aloud, we become both authors and owners.
At the Seder we don’t commemorate the Exodus, we edit ourselves into the collective Jewish memory.
dinabrawer 