The Passover Seder

The Passover Seder is one of the most powerful rituals of the Jewish year. Gathered around a table with friends, family or a bit of both, we share the story of how a group of slaves in Egypt came to be the Israelites. We share the earliest memories of our people and combine them with the lessons that have been learned. And then we eat a delicious meal whose ingredients (and lack of certain ingredients) reinforce our stake in the whole thing. The Seder is what Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, a scholar of Jewish ritual, calls a “sacred drama,” and one that asks something of us in this moment.

Passover seders are all about storytelling and recounting how our ancestors were slaves in Egypt and were led out of slavery by God.  For Rabbi Hoffman, what makes it sacred is the personal stake of the actors. No one is performing the ritual for a separate audience. Rather, the Jews who take part in a Passover Seder are both actors and audience at the same time. As actors, everyone who attends the Seder is expected to take part. Maimonides, the great medieval Spanish-Egyptian rabbi, offers many ways to include everyone present, even including small children. That might not strike us as peculiar now, but think that at any given Shabbat or Festival service, Jewish tradition typically has very little for a pre-Bar or Bat Mitzvah child to do, at least in formal roles. They are welcome to attend, and we do try to include kids in various ways, especially at family services, but participating in many of the most significant roles, such as reading Torah, is reserved for adults. At the Passover Seder, we encourage even small children to constantly interrupt with questions. All the more so are the adults asked to see themselves as though they themselves were brought out of Egypt. But the people taking part in a Passover Seder are expected to go beyond being the storytellers. They are also the audience. And that matters, because Rabbi Hoffman says:

When the actress playing Lady Macbeth leaves the theatre, she is not expected to murder someone on the way home; when Jews put down their Haggadah, they are expected to have a heightened Jewish identity and to be more attuned to their Jewish responsibilities. People…who leave the Seder and ignore the plight of the homeless have missed the point.

That is a high bar.

Rabbi Hoffman goes on to say that dramas present both a problem and a response. The Passover Seder is an open-ended drama, though. The problem was the existence of oppression and the value of freedom. But it was also how the Jewish people were formed, and why it matters for there still to be a Jewish people. Each year, we must look at contemporary challenges to the freedom and well-being of people.  Those challenges include a world that is still marked by conflict, that is afflicted by rising antisemitism, and by a growing inability to see one another across our differences. Increasingly, we see each other only as strangers to be afraid of.  And each year we should look at how we got here as a Jewish people and why it still matters to be Jewish today. As Rabbi Hoffman says, “If we finish the Seder knowing for certain why the age-old tale of Israel’s origins informs the people we are and the lives we pledge to lead, then, and only then, can we conclude Dayyenu—that, and only that, is enough.”

That is what it would mean, this year, to say Dayyenu.