Abstract: Applying historical and theoretical lenses to the early development of the kibbutz Haggadah, this essay analyzes in detail three Haggadot created by the same group of writers between 1929 and 1937. The essay aims to show three things. First, the invention of a hybrid form fusing the languages of secularity and religiosity is not primarily parodic but is an example of the “literary carnivalesque” as described by Mikhail Bakhtin. Second, this literary invention is consistent with conversations in the Yishuv about drawing on elements of “religiosity” to create a new secular culture. Third, perspectives from ritual studies, especially Arnold Van Gennep’s concept of “liminality” as developed in Victor Turner’s discourse of communitas , can shed light on this invented cultural form. Before the kibbutz Haggadah attained its fixed form as a ritual of spring and the commemoration of the mythic origins of the Jewish people, it functioned as an initiation into and annual affirmation of the new order of life being created by the workers’ collectives. The diachronic narrative drawn from these Haggadot shows that as the catastrophe of Nazism unfolded in Europe, the low, comic style depicting kibbutz life lost its appeal; by 1937, the writers had learned to write in a solemn, authoritative style that affirmed the dignity of the occasion, if not, given the larger context of Jewish suffering, its full measure of joy.
Herbert J. Levine (Wed,) studied this question.