NEWS FEATURE: Personalizing the Passover Seder

c. 1997 Religion News Service UNDATED _ Those who think Passover Seders are tightly scripted affairs that have remained unchanged for centuries might want to be at Susan Schnur’s Hopewell, N.J., home when the first of the Jewish holiday’s two ritual meals is celebrated on Monday night (April 21). Schnur goes to great lengths to […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Those who think Passover Seders are tightly scripted affairs that have remained unchanged for centuries might want to be at Susan Schnur’s Hopewell, N.J., home when the first of the Jewish holiday’s two ritual meals is celebrated on Monday night (April 21).

Schnur goes to great lengths to personalize her Seders. In line with the holiday’s theme of physical and spiritual liberation, she has guests bring photographs of individuals _ historical or otherwise _ who have inspired them to struggle for their own sense of freedom. She also has them read”weeper verses”_ brief writings from Jewish and non-Jewish sources _ that move them and can be shared with the group.


In addition, she has guests march through her bathroom, where the shower and sink on opposite sides of the room have been turned on full force to simulate the parting of the Red Sea. And as part of the Seder meal, she serves”liberated eggs”produced by free-range chickens.”Passover is 3,000 years old. The point is to make it fresh by loving it and making the Seder your own,”said Schnur, a Reconstructionist rabbi and editor of Lilith, a New York-based Jewish women’s magazine.

The modern Passover Seder developed gradually following the first century destruction by the Romans of the Second Jerusalem Temple, ending the Jewish practice of marking the holiday with animal sacrifices. Meant to remind Jews of their ancestors’ Exodus from slavery in ancient Egypt, Seders are generally held at home with friends and relatives, and are the most widely celebrated of all Jewish rituals.

Seder means”order”in Hebrew, a reference to the ritual’s 15 sequential steps. Nonetheless, said Baltimore Orthodox Rabbi Shimon Apisdorf, the Seder ritual still is loose enough to accommodate a broad range of individualized extras that make the gathering personally more meaningful.

Moreover, he noted, such extras, provided their intent is to draw the participants into the Passover story, are sanctioned by Jewish tradition.”The `Shulkhan Arukh’ (an authoritative 16th-century code of Jewish law) talks about scattering nuts around the Seder table just so kids will ask why they’re on the table,”said Apisdorf.”The purpose is just to get a dialogue going about Passover.” Jewish communities around the world have developed their own Seder customs, and for some contemporary Jews, personalizing the Seder is rooted in these long-cherished cultural traditions.

At Janet Ovadiah’s Seders, for example, guests take turns participating in a custom common among Jews from Arab nations.

One by one, the guests put a piece of the unleavened bread called matzoh that is eaten at Passover in a cloth pouch and sling it over a shoulder, just as an ancient Israelite might have carried his belongings through the desert after fleeing Egypt.

The guest is then asked in Arabic where they came from and where they are going, and responds in Hebrew,”Mitzrayim”(Egypt) and”Yerushalyim”(Jerusalem).”It’s very beautiful,”said Ovadiah, who directs Sephardic House, a New York center that promotes the cultures of Jews from the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern regions.”Everyone is physically involved in a meaningful re-enactment of the Exodus.” For others, Seder customs are decidedly more contemporary. In recent years, some American Jews have added to their Seders political and social elements drawn from such issues as race relations, the environment, Soviet Jewry and the Israeli-Arab struggle.


This year, Tibetan liberation from Chinese domination has been added as a theme by some Jewish activists.”The Talmud (the body of traditional Jewish law) teaches that in messianic times we will recall at Passover not just the liberation from Egypt but the liberation of all peoples from their oppression,”New Orleans author Roger Kamenetz, a prime mover on the Tibet issue, wrote recently in the magazine Reform Judaism.

Gail Lebowitz, a housewife in Potomac, Md., makes a feminist statement by adding an orange to the Seder plate, the special dish that traditionally holds a half-dozen ritual food items used in the Seder. Oranges are not a traditional Seder element.

She explained the custom by telling a Jewish story that generally goes as follows:

A woman asks a rabbi why traditional Jewish law does not allow women to read from the Torah Scroll, the parchment scroll from which the weekly scriptural passages are read. The rabbi, a staunch traditionalist, mockingly responds that a woman has no more business reading from a Torah Scroll than an orange has being on the Seder plate.”I have two daughters and I feel strongly about women’s concerns,”said Lebowitz.”People react with amusement, but it’s an important statement for me.” Rabbi Arthur Waskow invites his Seder guests to bring an object that represents a personal issue of freedom or slavery. The objects are then placed on a”freedom plate”on the Seder table next to the traditional Seder plate.”Passover is not just about physical freedom; the Jews leaving physical slavery in Egypt,”said Waskow, who directs the Shalom Center in Philadelphia, which promotes environmental and social justice causes.”On the spiritual level, Passover is about dealing with those internal constraints that hold us back.” Smokers trying to break the habit have put packages of cigarettes on Waskow’s freedom plate, while others whose lives are ruled by tight schedules have placed watches there. One year Waskow contributed a book manuscript he had been working on for five years.”Boy did I feel a slave to that project,”he said.

Sometimes Seder customs are intentionally lighthearted.

Apisdorf, author of”Passover Survival Kit”(Leviathan Press), a book that humorously explains the holiday, puts plastic frogs on his Seder table to help younger guests relate to the plague of frogs, the second of the ten plagues Jewish tradition says God unleashed upon the ancient Egyptians.

He also puts red cellophane around glasses at the Seder table”so the kids can play at turning water into blood”_ a reference to the first plague.”The key to a successful Seder is to make people feel comfortable,”said Apisdorf.”If the kids are not engaged in the Seder, then none of the adults will be. So it’s OK to play around a bit so the kids and everyone else can enjoy the Seder.” For some, Seder traditions are meant to enhance their own connection to the ritual and are not meant to be shared with others at the table. Pearl Krasnjansky is among them.

Krasnjansky lives in Honolulu, where she and her husband serve as local representatives of Chabad Lubavitch, the Hasidic Jewish movement. On Passover, she and her husband, Rabbi Itchel Krasnjansky, put on”very traditional”Seders for as many as 150 of Honolulu’s small Jewish community as well as Jewish travelers who find themselves in Hawaii for the holiday.”People show up in shorts right from the beach. It’s a mix of colors and nationalities,”she said.


In the midst of the chaos that sometimes engulfs such large affairs, Krasnjansky takes a moment to engage in a deeply personal Passover custom during the saying of the Four Questions _ rhetorical questions that lead to an explanation of the holiday and which are traditionally asked by the youngest person at the table who can read.”Growing up, I noticed that my father would always say the (Four Questions) quietly to himself as the children at the table did it,”Krasnjansky said.”So at our Seders, I listen to the children say the (questions) and when they are all done, I say them to myself like by father did.”It’s a touching moment for me because, here in Honolulu, which is hardly a Jewish city, I am connected to my past,”she said.”And isn’t connecting to our Jewish past what Passover is about?”

MJP END RIFKIN

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