A ton of verbiage and background information of uncertain relevance prior to presenting the reason the vast majority of people came in the first place.
Highland Park, NJ, April 6 – “Game recognize game.”
So declared Hannah Rosenblum, 35, who maintains a website dedicated to cooking, upon realizing that the central text of the Passover Seder features the characteristic layout of a ton of verbiage and background information of uncertain relevance prior to presenting the reason the vast majority of people came in the first place: the eats.
“This is exactly the formula,” she observed, struck speechless for minute as she digested the implications. “The Haggadah, which in its basic form is thousands of years old, anticipates a main element of food-blogger culture that we wouldn’t hit on until recently. When people talk about the timeless wisdom of the ancient Rabbis and prophets, they have no idea – I certainly didn’t until now – of the level on which that holds true, down to the most intricate structural and content details.”
A standard Seder – the word means “order,” reflecting a process that participants experience through the elements of the ritual – begins like any other festival evening meal, with a cup of wine, but quickly diverges from the typical holiday event by introducing activities, unusual foodstuffs, narrative expositions, and poetic songs in a protracted ritual that can take an hour, often more, to reach the actual meal.
“It’s uncanny,” Rosenblum remarked. “Even the advertising angle. My text might be geared toward optimizing SEO, but it certainly helps to create space for ads and generate a bit of revenue. Well, what do you think Maxwell House did all those years by putting out a free branded Haggadah with coffee purchases? And that’s just the most famous example. Plenty of companies or organizations have printed their own editions to gain attention.”
She also noted the hook that a blogger’s personal connection to the recipe or its elements resonates with the Haggadah’s teaching that “in each generation, a person is obligated to view himself as if he has left Egypt,” both of which serve to keep the reader engaged before the food part eventually arrives. Many bloggers have hit on a compromise to both ease the reader’s experience and satisfy SEO and advertising needs by including a “Skip to Recipe” button. Haggadah users have always had a “Skip to Shulhan Orekh” button in the form of just turning pages, though with significantly more guilt involved than when one scrolls past the useless fluff that bloggers feel compelled to include.
Rosenblum’s realization has inspired her to include for Haggadah-influenced content and design, such as games, poems, artwork, and curiosities to keep the children or ADHD-addled engaged until the food.
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