Sederrific!

4 April 2002—I love Passover. OK, I’m not always so thrilled at giving up bread for a whole week, but I’m endlessly fascinated with the holiday itself. Each year, even in a year like this one when I haven’t had a lot of time to devote to the holiday, I am more excited by it than ever.

It wasn’t always so: I remember as a teenager feeling relieved for being excused once from going to the seder (pronounced say-der, it’s the ritual dinner of a Passover celebration, complete with blessings, symbolic foods, and traditional songs) because I was in the middle of my chicken-pox outbreak. Our family seder was fun, but something was missing for me. I don’t think I actually realized that I felt that way, as I couldn’t articulate why I wasn’t really engaged by the holiday.

As I neared the end of college, I began to understand what it was that I was missing. For the first time, even though I’d been living away from my parents for four years and had had the opportunity to travel on my own, I was still living in a protected space. I was anxious to leave it, though at the same time I was scared. It wasn’t like I was living in captivity by any means, though I did feel trapped in my obligation to finish my undergraduate degree. I could have dropped out, but I was scared of the consequences. Graduation would set me free, let me loose into the world, and make me be completely responsible for myself.

At the same time, I had been taking a course that examined the politics of religion, which focused in major part on the hypocrisies of televangelists, but in that class I had finally begun to actually read the Bible, specifically the first five books of the Old Testament that Jews call the Torah. In it I came across something troubling. From the first time I had read the Passover story in children’s books, I understood it like so: the Egyptian Pharaoh had enslaved the Israelites, God tells Moses to ask Pharaoh to let the Israelites go, Pharaoh refuses, God brings plagues, Pharaoh still refuses, God brings more plagues, Pharaoh still refuses, and finally God slays all the first-born of the Egyptians, leaving the Israelites untouched. Finally Pharaoh relents, and the Israelites win their freedom.

But in reading the actual language of the Torah, what God tells Moses is this: Go ask Pharaoh to let the Israelites go. He will be willing, but I will harden his heart, and he will change his mind and refuse, and then I will bring plagues upon Egypt. The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart is mentioned in three different places of the Passover story in the book of Exodus. That pretty much makes it a pattern.

How one approaches the hardening depends greatly on how one views the existence of God and the authorship of the Bible. Let’s say, for example, that you believe that God exists, and the Bible is the absolutely true narrative of ancient times, miracles and all. In this version you have a God who is not simply content for Pharaoh, in the sweet baritone words of the gospel soloist, to let God’s people go. God has to harden Pharaoh’s heart in order to justify the vengeance brought about with the plagues.

On the other hand, if you believe God exists in the abstract, or you believe God is a handy explanation for the things science can’t yet explain, then the Israelites (or at least their leaders) had created this conception of a vengeful, all-powerful God. In the view of my professor, it was in the interests of the religious leaders to create an angry God who made it easy for His followers to mess up, so that in some sense the followers would always be looking to God for forgiveness and thus remain in humble servitude to God and the leaders of the religion.

A cynical view, to be sure, though not one easily dismissed.

The biggest problem for me, however, lay in the final plague, what we call the slaying of the first-born. In the story as it appears in the Torah, God instructs Moses to tell the Israelites to dip hyssop in lamb’s blood and use it to mark the doors of their houses, and to stay inside their houses that night. In this way God would know which houses belonged to the Israelites, and He would pass over them (this is where the name of the holiday comes from) as He slew the Egyptian firstborn throughout the country.

If you conceive of God as omnipotent and omniscient, the idea of marking one’s doors seems unrealistic, as God thus ought to know whose house was whose. This issue has been cursorily addressed by rabbis who try to get around it by suggesting that it wasn’t God who went throughout Egypt that night but rather an agent, an angel of death sent by God. Well, that’s not how it reads in the Torah. (Plus I’ve already written a whole essay on how I feel about semantics in Judaism.)

If you conceive of God as an explanation for unusual natural phenomena, that line of thought breaks down at this plague. Whereas earlier plagues were apparently indiscriminate in their attacks, affecting everyone in their paths, the final plague is specific, targeted. No amount of coincidence can account for the way this plague carries out its deadly charge.

Regardless of your conception of God, it seems to me that this last plague was almost certainly committed by human agents acting in the name of God.

My problem is that during Passover, as we celebrate and in a symbolic way reenact our flight from the narrow places (the literal translation of the Hebrew word for Egypt), human complicity has been removed. It’s not surprising, as one of the tenets of the holiday is that we’re praising God for our redemption. The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart is meant to show that God is ultimately responsible for the Israelites’ freedom, not Pharaoh, and so it is to God that we owe our liberation. Moses is not even mentioned in the Passover story as it’s related during the Passover seder. Any human agency in the story has been completely swept away.

I don’t see how we can fully claim our liberation without acknowledging our part in what it took to achieve that freedom. At one point in the seder we remove ten drops from our wine glasses to express a lessening of liberatory joy in deference to the losses the Egyptians experienced because of the plagues. It seems to me that ten drops are not enough.

This whole argument avoids entirely the question of what "really" happened with the Israelites in Egypt, a debate that rages today. There’s very little in the records kept by the Egyptians. We have Holocaust deniers in our midst, though the evidence to the contrary is strong. In three thousand years, how strong will that evidence remain?

The debate over Biblical veracity doesn’t affect me that much. In some sense, it matters more to me what we do with the text we have and how we use it to get a sense of who we are as a people. I’m not a Biblical scholar, I just saw something problematic and wanted to address it.

That spring, as I was about to graduate from college, I had gone home for Passover. My mom picked me up from the airport. I was just coming into the complicity argument, and as my mom and I drove home, we ate a chocolate croissant–what would be our last taste of leaven for a week–and I told her what I was thinking about.

She thought it was interesting. During the seder that night, she asked everyone to pause for a moment, and then she turned the floor over to me. I expressed the components of the complicity argument as best I could. I was hoping to spark discussion, perhaps get an answer I had overlooked, something that might make me feel better. When I was finished speaking, there was an awkward silence. Finally there was a collective "huh" and then we proceeded with the seder.

It took me five years to figure out what I needed to do, and in 1998 my housemate at the time, Mark, and I created our own seder, which we called The Café Zoe Progressive Egalitarian Passover Seder. (Now it’s simply the Café Zoe Passover Seder, but it’s still progressive and egalitarian.)

Mark and I decided to make our own haggadah, the book containing all the blessings and stories that make up the seder, since we couldn’t find one haggadah, even out of the hundreds the amazing Ira Steingroot has amassed at Cody’s Books, that quite captured what we wanted to do with our seder. So, with the help of Ira’s handy book Keeping Passover, we made our own.

That first year I was still working as a print designer, so I wanted to do something as low-tech as possible. I made an outline of the haggadah based on the pieces I liked from other haggadot, plus readings related to liberation, complicity, and other themes we wanted to highlight at the seder. When I was done with the outline, my friend Richard and I went off to a copy shop armed with all the books I had selected as sources, with scores of bookmarks for all the pages with pieces that would go into the seder. We also had a box of matzahs.

I wanted our haggadah to have a nice graphic quality to it, so Richard covered me as I spread matzahs over the glass of the photocopier and made copies of the matzahs in various configurations. We had to do it so quickly so as to not get noticed and kicked out by the staff of the copy shop, it almost mimicked the rush that made the matzahs in the first place.

Once I got home, I began to assemble the pieces by tearing them from their sheets and taping them down on my matzah paper. Totally low-tech–I didn’t even use scissors. I had written and printed out my own transliterations of the feminist-language blessings we were going to use, and I wrote and edited some of the sections, including the one where I raised the question of the human agency that had previously been left out. I also included the section about adding an orange to the seder plate, a practice that was just beginning to become better-known.

A page from our first haggadah.

All of these went into the Haggadah, which took every night of the week preceding the seder to finish, but it got done. When I went back to the copy shop to get them copied, the copy shop almost wouldn’t do it because of copyright issues, but I bluffed my way through that, and we had them in time for the seder.

One of the central tenets of the seder is that the participants are supposed to feel as though they personally left Egypt that night, thousands of years earlier. Even for Jews that’s a fairly tough challenge, but we were going to have a good number of people at the seder (ten out of thirteen) who weren’t Jews.

We had decided to structure the seder, and the Haggadah, so that there would be places during the seder at which we would share stories related to various themes of the seder. The idea was that people would feel more connected to the celebration if they saw how its themes continued to play out in contemporary life. We wanted to hear all kinds of stories: funny or serious, they only had to be meaningful to the the person telling the story.

In anticipation, we sent out emails about a week before the seder, with questions for people to think about. We had no idea how it would go off, or whether people would really be into talking. I actually had arranged for different people to have stories for each section, kind of like the way we were orchestrating the potluck dinner. I didn’t want the participation sections to fall flat.

As it turned out, I’d had no reason to worry. Once one person began telling a story, that unlocked a related memory in someone else, and the stories streamed out of the whole group. We didn’t get to the actual meal until ten-thirty that night. We had started at seven. The meal isn’t even the end of the seder; there are more blessings and songs and wine, and more stories to tell as well. The seder wasn’t over until after midnight, but everyone went home happy, feeling that they had taken part in a meaningful, spiritual event.

I couldn’t have been happier. It was one of the rare moments when I’m so engaged in something that I want it to go on forever. At one point I broke my attention from what someone was saying and just looked around the "table" (one of the facets of our first two seders was that we reclined on cushions on the floor and laid a futon flat as a table, but now we have actual tables, thanks to the generosity of Saint Vincent’s Day Home, and our guests with back problems are much happier). I was truly humbled at how a common space such as a living room could be transformed into a holy place, grateful for the generosity of friends who had given so deeply of themselves to take part in our experiment.

Subsequent years have been just as wonderful, all different. Aside from Mark and me, there isn’t anyone else who has been there every year, so we always have new stories to tell and share. We vary the questions a bit each year. I’ve since redesigned the haggadah on the computer, as I discovered in year two the limits of editing a tear-and-tape version (the words "page 14 1/2" should give you an idea). We change the readings a little each year, highlighting different sections.

And the seder has only gotten longer. The second year we started an hour earlier, at six, but people shared so many more stories that we didn’t end up eating until almost eleven. Blood-sugar levels were seriously messed with. The year after that, we invited people to come at four, and we had appetizers first. We started promptly at five and managed to get to the meal by about eight-thirty, ending the whole seder by eleven. That’s more reasonable, but we now had to alert prospective guests that it was a seven-hour affair. Undaunted, our friends and family have continued to join us each year.

This year was my first year with Sarah at the seder, and we loved sharing it with each other. (She had created her own seder and haggadah before, too; see how right we are for each other?) My mom and stepfather also attended this year, which was wonderful to have them both there (Mom had joined us once before). Sarah’s friends Mia and Kim were both in town, and fortunately they were able to join us as well. Mark’s girlfriend, Jennifer, hadn’t been to a seder before, and neither had Kim. Our friends Chuck and Lisa, who recently got married, and Jessica had all been with us at Passover most years, and it’s a blessing for us to have them share the continuity with us. Lisa said during the seder this year that sharing Passover with Chuck at our seder was their first family tradition. It just makes me happy all the way through. It’s Sarah’s and mine now, too.

I had hoped to write this in advance of the holiday, but as usual, preparations took up most of the week leading up to the seder, and here it is, the holiday over once again, and I’m still writing. I had leftover matzah-ball soup for dinner tonight. It’s not your typical matzah-ball soup, but it’s one of our seder traditions here, because our seder is mostly vegetarian. I always make the tomato and wild mushroom soup from the Greens Cookbook, and thanks to the generosity of Random House, I’ve been given permission to share the recipe here.

Plus, Sarah has generously offered to share her wonderful matzah lasagne recipe with everyone. It’s the most wonderful matzagne in the world, and if you make it, you’ll be the hit of your seder (unless you go to a vegan seder, of course).

I’ve also included here a PDF of our most recent haggadah, so you can see what we do with our seder. Feel free to use it if you like it, or modify it however you like. Have fun with it–making our own seder is one of the most personally meaningful things I’ve ever done.

Next year at your house?