Meir Soloveichik on the Politics of the Haggadah
The Tikvah Podcast
Tikvah
4.6 • 620 Ratings
🗓️ 19 April 2024
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Next week, Jewish families will sit at their seder tables and relive the drama of Jewish liberation from Egyptian oppression. The text used, the Haggadah, is one of the most widely read works of the rabbinic tradition. It has an inescapably national aspect, and its main themes, when seen in the right perspective, suggest to the rabbi Meir Soloveichik that it can be understood as a preeminent work of Jewish political thought: tackling themes of freedom and oppression, covenant and constitution, state and society, the nature of law and the dreams of a people.
Soloveichik discusses that and more here, in the first lecture in his eight-part course, “The Haggadah: A Political Classic,” which is available in full at meirsoloveichik.com.
Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Next week, Jewish families everywhere will sit at their sater tables and relive the drama of Jewish liberation from Egyptian oppression. |
| 0:15.7 | The text that we use, the Hagada, is one of the most widely read works of the rabbinic mind. The |
| 0:22.1 | Hagada has an inescapably national aspect, and its main themes, freedom and oppression, |
| 0:28.7 | the covenantal founding of a constitutional order to govern a people whose memory extends through |
| 0:34.0 | the generations, the nature of law, state, and society, the characteristics |
| 0:38.6 | of this people, and their eschatological dreams. When seen in the right perspective, these |
| 0:44.0 | themes together suggest to the Rabbi Mayer Silavichik that this work can be understood as a preeminent |
| 0:50.3 | text in Jewish political thought. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan |
| 0:55.7 | Silver. This week, to celebrate and enhance the Jewish celebration of Passover, I'm bringing you |
| 1:01.6 | the first lecture in Rabbi Solovecic's eight-part course, the Hagadaa, a political classic, |
| 1:07.7 | which is available to members of the Tikva Society and all subscribers at |
| 1:12.1 | mayorsolovacic.com. That's M-E-I-R-S-O-L-O-V-E-I-C-H-I-K.com. If you enjoy this, you can |
| 1:23.1 | subscribe to the Tikva podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Spotify, I hope you'll leave us a five-star |
| 1:28.7 | review to help us grow this community of ideas. I welcome your feedback on this or any of our other |
| 1:34.0 | podcast episodes at podcast at TikvaFund.org. And of course, if you want to learn more about our work |
| 1:40.2 | at Tikva, you can visit our website, Tikvafund.org, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. |
| 1:46.1 | Here now is the opening lecture of Rabbi Soloveitchik's The Hagada, a political classic. |
| 1:55.7 | It is well known that in 1956, millions of Americans were privileged to experience the cinematic achievement of our age, the film The Ten Commandments, in which Cecil B. DeMille provides us with actual video footage of |
| 2:23.0 | the Exodus. It is less well known that in 1923, a year before Charlton Heston was born, |
| 2:34.3 | DeMille created his original version of the Ten Commandments, |
| 2:39.8 | a silent film. |
| 2:41.9 | As the writer Marshall Weiss describes, |
... |
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