You Shall Tell Your Children

Book excerpt: Argues for and enacts a reading of representative "Shoah" texts found in contemporary "haggadot" from liberal Judaisms in the U.S. based on a hermeneutic of trauma. The ongoing ritualizing of the "Shoah" in Passover "haggadot" requires special attention to the problematics raised by placing a non-redemptive event into a redemptive narrative. The hermeneutic of trauma developed in this study attends to the history, ideology and construction of memory surrounding "Shoah" texts and the implications of these for ethical readings that allow mourning and prevent forgetting. After reviewing academic discussion of memory and representation of the Holocaust and setting out the critique of redemptive memory, analyzes how the creators of the Reform "haggadah" created a text of both continuity and contrast with their Reform legacy and their rabbinic heritage. Places this text, along with its Conservative counterpart, within an American discourse of Holocaust-redemption and argues against this as the basis for a viable American Jewish identity. Examines ritualizations that draw on Holocaust icons and presents non-redemptive readings of these memory texts. Investigation of the non-rational and embodied aspects of the ritual leads to the argument that the Holocaust, as an event at the limits, cannot be embodied in its full extremity. Argues that these ritual memory texts - and by extension ritual theory itself - should be read to privilege the tension created by the contrast between Exodus and Auschwitz. This move, which acknowledges these commemorations as traumatic text, breaks open the redemptive frame of the "haggadah" and presents a limited, yet real, possibility for hope.