A Hasidic Commentary on the Passover Haggadah for the New World

Abstract

Abstract Todat Yehoshua (1935), a Hasidic commentary on the Passover Haggadah by Rabbi Yehoshua Heschel Rabinowitz of Monastyrishche, Ukraine, later of Brownsville, New York, offers an important perspective on Orthodox experience in North America in the interwar period. On his reading, the Haggadah invites an understanding of history that recognizes and contends with all that is radically unholy: from secularism, enlightenment, and Zionism in the Jewish camp, to Marxism, communism, anarchy, Nazism, and contemporary antisemitism. As a Hasidic tsadik and émigré rabbi, R. Yehoshua Heschel sought to revitalize religion as an existentially vital facet of being, while encouraging those around him to forge a Jewish identity loyal to the past and empowered to rise to the challenges of the present.