“There’s one night in the year when children come to the table without being pissed off,” Edgar Bronfman, Sr., said one recent Tuesday evening. “Seder.” He was standing on a dais in the Grill Room at the Four Seasons restaurant, where he was hosting a party designed to upend the traditional Passover meal, and also to launch his new book, “The Bronfman Haggadah.”
Bronfman’s hundred-odd guests—most of them younger than thirty-five—were not asked to follow a script, to pray, or to eat parsley dipped in salt water, as tradition dictates. Instead, they stood around eating devilled eggs and bites of grilled quail. Ikhyd Bronfman, Edgar’s four-year-old great-grandson (his parents are Benjamin Bronfman and the rapper M.I.A.), ran around as if he owned the place, which he kind of does (the Bronfmans have been part owners of the Four Seasons for over a decade).
Bronfman said that he wrote his version of the Haggadah, the text that guides the Passover meal while telling the story of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt, with children in mind. “I was thinking that their ears would be open that night if you tried to gently teach them what Judaism is all about,” he said in a short speech. “I don’t believe in God,” he said later. “I do believe in Judaism. I believe in ethics, morals. Our gifts to humanity are enormous. I remind everybody that the Sabbath was the Jewish gift to civilization.”
Bronfman’s Haggadah, which is illustrated with watercolors by his wife, Jan Aronson, includes quotations from such goyim as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and there is no Hebrew in it. God is depicted as an “energy,” as opposed to an anthropomorphic deity, and Moses plays a starring role (traditional Haggadahs usually minimize mentions of Moses, to emphasize God’s, not man’s, role in freeing the Jews).
Aronson’s illustrations attempt to capture these departures. In her rendering, the burning bush is not really on fire. “I figured Moses was trying to decide what he was going to do with his life,” she said. “And he went out to tend to the sheep, either at sunrise or sunset, and the light was coming through the bushes, and he was meditating. And it dawned on him that what he should do is go back to Egypt and take care of the business that was left. And so it wasn’t a burning bush per se.”
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the first Asian-American rabbi in North America, summed up the new Haggadah’s approach to Judaism to the crowd with a quotation from “The Book of Mormon” (the Broadway show, not the religious text). “It’s a metaphor!” she said, and then she led the room in the singing of “Oh Freedom,” a Negro spiritual.
At the bar, a young actress and model named Alicia Henry, who said that she was brought up Episcopalian, discussed her interest in Kabbalah, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Western and Eastern astrology. “It’s actually really significant,” she said of the last of these disciplines. “I’m a fire type.” A woman next to her nodded and said, “They’re all good signs.” A Buddhist, she talked about raising her children Jewish, and vegetarian. A few yards away, Timo Weiland, a fashion designer whose Swedish family is Protestant, described a recent, less energizing party: “I was d.j.ing a gay wedding at the Standard, and it was the most uptight crowd ever.”
Noah Bernamoff, whose Mile End Deli catered the party, grew up as a Montreal Jew, just like the host. “In our home, we used the Maxwell House Haggadah, which grocery stores would give away to promote Maxwell House coffee,” he said. “ ‘It’s free! How could I not take a stack of those?’ That’s what was running through my grandmother’s head.”
Toward the end of the evening, a well-known Methodist, Chelsea Clinton, arrived with her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, who was brought up in a religious Jewish household. “We celebrate all of our holidays together, with our families,” Clinton said. “And Passover really embodies that. Sometimes my parents come. He has ten brothers and sisters. And a lot of our friends come to our Seder.”
Clinton said that she plans to incorporate “The Bronfman Haggadah” into her future Seders. Like her host, she seemed to relish the interplay of the literal and the metaphorical. When the conversation turned toward the ten plagues, she said, “Did you guys hear about the outbreak of locusts in Egypt right now? Such funny timing!”
John Ortved is the author of “The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History.” A contributor to The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and The New York Times, he also blogs about bears.
Illustration by Jan Aronson.
