Passover is one of the most significant holidays of Judaism. Many Jews consider it second to the Shabbat. It is the first command given to the Israelite ancestors during the period when Moses was rescuing the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. It teaches that Judaism stresses the need for all people, not only Jews, must be free, use their intelligence to learn and improve themselves, become all they can be from what they learn, and use what they learn to improve the world for all that is in it. The message is repeated often in different ways in the Haggadah, a word meaning “the telling (of the message).”

In Echoes of Egypt: A Haggada, Rabbi Dr. Joshua Berman—professor of Tanakh at Bar-Ilan University and an internationally respected biblical scholar—brings his formidable academic expertise into the home dining room of the Passover Seder. The Seder is a non-biblical setting where the message is repeated by reading the Haggada. The result of Berman’s book is a presentation that is intellectually serious, visually stunning, and........

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