My Passover seders have changed a lot over the years. I can think of them in different eras. The first era was hosted by my Bubbie of blessed memory, with 30 or more people, using that yellow and brown Haggadah that has graced many a 20th-century American seder table, with its woodblock illustrations. Bubbie would make homemade gefilte fish, each person getting a piece on a small plate before the soup course, with one boiled carrot slice and one piece of parsley for garnish, and if you were lucky, a little scoop of “yoich,” fish bone jelly. My cousin Johnny would always get an extra matzah ball in his soup.
The next era was hosted by my great aunt Eleanor, with a photocopied interpretive feminist Haggadah, a Miriam’s cup, and 1970s folk illustrations. Same characters around the table, different table and text, same feeling of togetherness. As the younger generations married and had their own children, our family seder broke off to just the Boston branch of our family, instead of all of my Bubbie’s siblings and their children. We shifted to the Reconstructionist Haggadah in my 20s, a little more traditional than the photocopied Haggadah, but still progressive and American. We recited Martin Luther King Jr. quotes on freedom interspersed with neo-Chassidic commentary and lyrical introductions to the different sections. Then, my parents started hosting seder at their house, and the group got smaller. We now had not only Miriam’s cup but an orange on the seder plate, a Sephardic charoset, new faces in friends and even those who had never been to a seder before.
When I married my husband, I attended his family’s seders for the first time. From them I learned the traditions of placing small bowls of candy around the table so the children will ask questions and be rewarded with candy; of reading the whole Haggadah, not just the part before the meal; of what it’s like to sing your way through Hallel until the last line of the seder, “B’shanah ha’ba b’Yerushalyim” – “Next year in Jerusalem!”
The first seder Aaron and I ever hosted was in Jerusalem during our first year of marriage. We had at least 30 rabbinical students and partners over, and we went until 3:00 am with questions, discussions, dish after dish of food, and bottle after bottle of wine. A raucous and celebratory marathon.
In this latest era, our seders have been in Toronto, Miami, Montreal, Vancouver, and Boston with a rotating cast of participants. Two years, we were alone with our children in pandemic solitude – dressed in Egyptian and Israelite costumes, stuffed with candy and brisket and laughter.
Many Jews have these kind of seder memories – times when the seder stayed the same for many years, and then when it shifted hosts to a new generation. Many of us have even the wording and cadence of our childhood Haggadah ringing in our ears, a phrase or sentence we can never forget from the awkward English translation of our youth. There is a sense of both unchanging repetition and also a sense of times of deep change and rupture to that rhythm of seders we remember.
In addition to freedom, difference is actually a big theme of the seder. “How is this night different?” we ask. We take care to make Passover different from other times in certain ways.
Maimonides teaches in his Laws of Hametz U’Matzah 7:3 that making something unusual or different is very important:
On the first night of Pesach, one should introduce some change at the table, so that the children who will notice it may ask, saying: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” And he in turn will reply: “This is what happened.” In what manner, for example, should he introduce a change? He may distribute parched grain or nuts to the children; remove the table from its usual place; snatch the unleavened bread from hand to hand, and so on. If he has no children, his wife should ask the questions; if he has no wife, they should ask one another: “Why is this night different?”—even if they are all scholars. If one is alone, he should ask himself: “Why is this night different?”
There is much to be said about this teaching, especially about the idea of disrupting even your own sense of sameness if there is no one else to do it for you. But when learning it recently with Erika Frankel, Leah Kahn, and Arielle Krule, who together created Hillel International’s Jewish Learning Fellowship curriculum that I taught for many years, I was struck by something I hadn’t considered before: What is the ikar, the essence of this teaching about difference?
Yes, it’s a holiday and not a regular workday, but we don’t laser focus on “tonight being different” on all the rest of our holidays – they have other themes and key phrases. What is so essential about Passover being different from all other nights that it’s ingrained in the mitzvot of celebrating the holiday?
Then I realized: It’s simply the idea that things can change.
Yes! The idea that things can stay the same for a long time and then they can change is an essential teaching of the seder. It’s not just the ways in which seder night is different from all other nights. It’s the very fact that something can be different from what it’s always been.
For 400 years, the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt. There was no reason for them to think that someone could ever change the situation. They had been beaten down and taught that this was the way the world worked. That they would always be slaves. And then one day it changed. Moses returned and miraculous plagues arrived and messages were sent and suddenly everyone was packing their bags and escaping into the night toward the sea.
This year, what will you do in the seder that is different? So that everyone will ask, “Why is this different?” And also, “What seems intractable but maybe can actually, perhaps miraculously, change?”
“Passover Table – New Jersey,” photo by Rachel Citron, 2008
Rabbi Julia Appel is Clal’s Senior Director of Innovation, helping Jewish professionals and lay leaders revitalize their communities by serving their people better. She is passionate about creating Jewish community that meets the challenges of the 21st century – in which Jewish identity is a choice, not an obligation. Her writing has been featured in such publications as The Forward, The Globe and Mail, and The Canadian Jewish News, among others.