These are not calculated to inspire devotion. The page now open at the Met shows two finely dressed women working over a pan of broth; one, holding a cup of it aloft with a look of fear and disgust, hesitantly offers it to a man slowly turning a spit on which a rack of lamb is cooking over an open hearth. But he has no need of broth. He is drinking from a full goblet of bright red wine; he already seems a little dazed, his eyes half-closed. He is a vagabond, his green robe is in tatters and two goiters protrude from his neck: “an iconographic sign of deprivation,” Ms. Kogman-Appel explains.

The Haggadah includes a statement, “Let anyone who is hungry come and eat,” and it is considered an obligation to feed the poor and invite all to join in a Seder. Clearly something like that is happening here. But the artist is not idealizing the gesture. Without diminishing the text or the act of charity, he is insisting on the difficulty of both.

The illustration is placed on a page where a well-known Seder song, “Dayenu,” appears. (It translates as “It would have been sufficient.”) But the animal on the spit is clearly meant to illustrate the Paschal lamb, one of the Seder’s three central symbols. That subject isn’t reached until the last line of the next page. Is this a deliberate misplacement? Or is the illustration doubling as commentary on the song’s subject of sufficient assistance?

The illustrations of other central symbols are even more unsettling. Adjacent to a paragraph explaining the importance of matzo, ben Simeon shows a grim yellow chimp, shaking a tambourine that appears to be — a matzo!

Since these illustrations accompany rabbinical commentary, their invocations of the grotesque seem almost mischievous. But it happens repeatedly, as if the scribe were using his illustrative marginalia to show us something not about the text, but about the world within which its rituals are practiced. This is how we live, it seems to say, the context for our celebrations and aspirations.

The Met, probably inadvertently, makes this message even more compelling. The museum has selected medieval objects of daily life that seem to replicate those pictured in this Haggadah. These are not Judaica, but secular objects: goblets, pottery, pitchers, cloth. Here, slightly lopsided and flawed, is an early medieval glass goblet that resembles the one offered the vagrant. And mounted on the wall is a fragment of silk velvet made between 1500 and 1700 that seems to be taken from one of the two women’s shirts.