Passover - Its all about the Seder

He should receive a Nobel Prize, a medal of honor, or perhaps more fitting, an Oscar! Who am I referring to? None other than the man or woman who created the grandest and most brilliant ritual in the Jewish religion...the Passover seder.

The key to the Passover seder, held in Israel on the first night of Passover and in the rest of the world on the first and second nights, is to reenact what our ancestors went through. The script for the seder, the haggada (literally, the ‘telling' of the exodus from Egypt) reminds us that "in every generation a person must see himself as if he personally came out of Egypt."

The Passover seder has a benchmark of success...if you reenact the exodus from Egypt in your living room (anywhere from Jerusalem to Chicago to Timbuktu) in such a way that you feel like you were enslaved and now you are free, then the seder has been successful. To do that, you need to step outside of yourself and feel the pain of our ancestors who were forced to do back breaking work for Pharaoh and his Egyptian taskmasters. Reciting the famous phrase, "in every generation..." is not enough, and that is why the seder ritual helps us to reenact an event which had the Israelites moving from slavery to freedom.

No two seders are alike. While the core text of the haggada is virtually the same, each haggada emphasizes something different, And each seder leader focuses on something different. I've led quite a few seders in my life, each time a bit differently, depending on the sources I've consulted, the questions my children have asked, and the events taking place around the world.

While the core text of the haggada is always the same, the commentaries do change. Each haggada reminds us to teach our children; each haggada exhorts us to feel as if we personally were enslaved in Egypt; each haggada reminds us about the plagues and each haggada convincingly teaches us that God rescued us with a strong hand and outstretched arm. The haggada is based on a number of biblical verses, but there is also text with stage directions telling us what to dip when etc that first appears in the Mishnah, codified by Rabbi Judah the Prince in the year 210 of the common era. In the Mishnah tractate called Pesachim (Passover), Rabbi Judah the Prince simply yet brilliantly created a liturgy and set of instructions that are followed almost literally 2000 years later.

And so the Oscar for Most Everlasting Screenplay goes to Rabbi Judah the Prince! Whenever I visit Beit Shearim, where he is buried, or Tzippori, where he edited the mishnah I thank Rabbi Judah, who not only guided me, but apparently left enough room for me and millions of others to reenact the exodus in such a way that we never forget and never want to stop reenacting.