I love the Haggadah, the guidebook to the Passover seder, because it's one of the few Jewish texts that embraces imagery, and because its imagery has evolved to reflect the perspectives of particular periods and communities. One section in particular, the Four Sons (updated to Four Children) frames various approaches to questioning and answering the Passover narrative. They each embody types: the Wise Child, the Wicked Child, the Simple Child, and the Child Who Does Not Know How To Ask. It's the representations of the Wicked Child that fascinate me. The Wicked Child is said to cut himself off from the community, and in turn the community is obligated to ostracize him. He is what we might call a “self-hater." For hundreds of years, Haggadot in Europe depicted the Wicked Child as a warrior, his uniform updated for the region and era in which the story was retold. It was a point of Diasporic pride that Jews and war—and, by extension, Jews and empire—were incompatible. Not just incompatible: mutually exclusive. Judaism was fundamentally opposed to tyranny and all its trappings. Soldiers were intrinsically wicked, their armaments signifiers of depravity.
Then, after 1948, this imagery was reversed, and the uniform vanished. Not only was it no longer acceptable to depict the Wicked Child as a soldier; it was now often the Wise Child, typically the hero, who'd get that role—depicted as an Israeli soldier, of course. There are Israeli Haggadot with soldiers everywhere, not just among the Sons. And not just Haggadot; some of my favorite Rosh Hashanah cards involve soldiers, tanks, gunships, and aircraft carriers. "Have a sweet New Year, also here's a hand grenade!" It's almost a parody of the traditional antipathy for warriors, and a brutal denial of what used to be intrinsic to Judaism. I know Zionists will read this differently—pre-state Jews feared armies because they had no sovereignty, we need our own nukes, etc. The gleaning I take is that neither culture nor self-imagery is static. Contexts change, authenticity is subjective, culture is fluid. The one constant is that the Haggadah itself, and everything it represents, is our cultural firmament, and it is everybody's. Imagery, tradition, family, history, narrative: they're all part of the ever-morphing palette of art.
Who knows, maybe one day we'll stop policing legitimacy based on conformity to twentieth-century dualities etched in stone. In the meantime, we have comics.
Eli Valley, Diaspora Boy: Comics on Crisis in America and Israel (2017)
