Rav Reuven Leuchter, one of the generation’s leading baalei mussar and original Torah thinkers, added his own Haggadah to the plethora of Seder literature in order for us to develop a consciousness of ourselves as an integral part of Klal Yisrael, each of us finding a seat at the table.

Though it's still nearly two weeks before Pesach, I’m feeling better prepared for the Seder than I can ever remember. The reason: I’ve been learning Rav Reuven Leuchter’s newly released English-language translation of his popular Haggadah Living Our History, in preparation for our conversation.

Every year as I approach the Seder, I feel that the dozens of vertlach in my hands are only tangentially related to the Seder night mitzvah of sippur yetzias Mitzrayim — more talking about the telling than the telling itself. Rav Leuchter’s major achievement is, more than anything else, to have presented the Haggadah as Chazal’s concise and powerful relating of the story of galus and geulah.

The ability to be mechadesh even in a text as familiar as the Haggadah undoubtedly derives in part from Rav Leuchter’s long tutelage under Rav Shlomo Wolbe ztz”l. When Rav Wolbe was leaving his position as menahel ruchani of Yeshivas Beer Yaakov to move to Jerusalem in 1981, he received a call from a Swiss-born yungerman named Reuven Leuchter asking Rav Wolbe if he would be willing to continue their rebbi-talmid relationship as chavrusas.

“To my amazement, he said yes,” Rav Leuchter told Mishpacha. For the next 20 years, Rav Leuchter traveled to Rav Wolbe once a week, where they studied Rav Chaim of Volozhin’s Nefesh HaChaim and other works. Rav Leuchter became one of Rav Wolbe’s most prominent disciples and today, he runs numerous mussar vaadim in Israel, trains young rabbanim for careers in outreach, heads a kollel, and is a prolific author.

As we sit at his dining room in the new section of Telshe Stone outside Jerusalem, Rav Leuchter explains what drove him to write a commentary on the Haggadah — the feeling that “we have lost the forest for the trees.”

But didn’t he find it intimidating writing about a text that almost every great figure from the Rishonim until today has addressed, with a dozen or more new Haggados appearing every year?

He stands up and pulls down from the bookshelf a Koren Haggadah with no commentary. “This is the Haggadah I use at the Seder, and my preparation is to study the text over and over again.” He confesses that he has never had any trouble finishing the entire Seder, including Hallel, by chatzos. A visiting married son confirms that, and adds that when he was a kid he was always embarrassed the next morning in shul when everyone was asking, “What time did your Seder finish?”

In Rav Leuchter’s description of his personal Seder preparation, I recognize what he recently described at an Aleinu conference in London as learning “b’oni,” — i.e., without a lot of seforim, but rather by “banging your head against the wall until the words of the text become clear.”

Rav Leuchter insists that the power of his Seder is increased by its comparative brevity. “In most families, the rest of the year the father speaks and the children listen, while on Seder night, the children all share what they have learned and the father listens. By me, though, it’s the exact opposite. I’m conscious of fulfilling the mitzvah of “Vehigadeta l’vincha” — of telling over the story of the Exodus. Of course, one has to be careful to shape the story in a way that is appropriate to every age level, and to encourage the children to ask. But at the end of our Seder, everybody is still awake and entranced — from seven to 87.”

Still, how does a commentary on the Haggadah fit with Rav Leuchter’s commentaries on Nefesh HaChaim, on Rav Yisrael Salanter’s Ohr Yisrael and the work in progress on the Ramchal’s Daas Tevunos, all difficult and challenging seforim?

“One day,” he says, “it suddenly struck me that the central message of Daas Tevunos is actually the Haggadah in story form. When we bless Hashem in the Haggadah for guarding His promise, we are saying that Hashem has a master plan for the world, and it will ultimately unfold. Our actions may determine the manner in which it will unfold, but they cannot derail the plan itself. We are His ‘business,’ and He will personally guarantee our success. And that’s the theme of Daas Tevunos as well.”till, how does a commentary on the Haggadah fit with Rav Leuchter’s commentaries on Nefesh HaChaim, on Rav Yisrael Salanter’s Ohr Yisrael and the work in progress on the Ramchal’s Daas Tevunos, all difficult and challenging seforim?

The story form of the Haggadah is crucial, says Rav Leuchter. “A story goes beyond dry knowledge. It forges a personal connection between the audience and the events related. The five great Tannaim who made a Seder together in Bnei Brak, for instance, knew every Midrash about Yetzias Mitzrayim, and yet they still became fully engrossed in the Seder, in the story of their narrow escape, as part of Klal Yisrael, from oblivion and death.”

Developing a consciousness of ourselves as part of Klal Yisrael is a central theme that runs throughout the Haggadah.   For instance, we begin the Seder by inviting all who are in need to come and eat with us, to remind us, as Rav Leuchter writes, that “our connection to geulah is only insofar as we connect to Klal Yisrael.”

One can look at the Rasha for confirmation of this. “The Rasha, the ‘evil son,’ could be fully Torah-observant,” Rav Leuchter explains. “He fails, however, to recognize that with Yetzias Mitzrayim, Hashem no longer relates to us as individuals, however righteous, but as members of Klal Yisrael. As the text itself says, ‘By excluding himself from the Klal, he has denied a fundamental of belief.’”

But how does one develop that Klal Yisrael consciousness? What are its markers?