Leading the Passover Journey: The Seder's Meaning Revealed, the Haggadah's Story Retold

From the opening pages, in which Rabbi Laufer shares a bit of his family's own history of enslavement and eventual liberation during the Holocaust, this book captures the emotional resonance of the Passover festival with its themes of exile, triumph and freedom. Laufer, who lectures widely in North America and Israel, suggests that readers take up the book thirty days before Passover as a way of gaining entry into the seder's traditions and understanding the spiritual issues behind them. Short chapters address ""chametz"" (the leavened bread that observant Jews eschew during the holiday), the order of the meal, sacred time and space, the symbolism of the various food items on the seder table, the nature of freedom and enslavement, and other issues. At the heart of the book is a long and thought-provoking chapter on the oral nature of seder storytelling, with Laufer walking readers through the Four Questions and the other parts of the ""Maggid,"" or verbal narrative. This book is for anyone who wants to understand the seder in a more spiritual way, or to connect the diverse pieces of the ritual into ""a single, meaningful, cohesive story.""