Shofar Nisan/Iyar 5772
Jewish Family Congregation www.jewishfamilycongregation.org
April 2012
From the Rabbi’s Desk What kind of Passover seder did you grow up with? In my family, my mother’s father always led the seder, using a small haggadah (not the Maxwell House edition!) with intense illustrations and very awkward English translations of the traditional Hebrew text. But that didn’t matter much, since my grandfather and my two uncles read the whole thing in Hebrew anyway, from start to finish. The men sat at one end of the table and raced through the Hebrew in a mumble, while the women sat at the other end and chatted amongst themselves. The kids were in the middle, and we participated only in those parts of the seder for which we had been primed: the Four Questions, the ritual foods, and some of the songs.
With the emphasis on what we ate for those special days, Pesakh became a festival about extra work, not about liberation from slavery! And the dreary haggadah we used did not help. Today there are literally hundreds of different haggadot available, written in accessible English (or the language of your choice!) with commentaries that enrich the seder experience enormously.
It was not till I was in rabbinical school that I learned that the haggadah itself was never meant to be a text read from cover to cover as my grandfather used to do. The rabbis who created the haggadah were developing rituals and practices to replace the focus on the Passover sacriAs we got older, and as we learned more at Hebrew school, we kids introduced some new songs to the family fice, which had been the essence of Pesakh until the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. They created practice. We also changed how we sang the Four Questions, but the seder remained the same until my grandfa- the seder plate with its ceremonial foods, the rituals of eating matzah and bitter herbs and other foods, the asking ther died, when I was a teenager. Then my father took over running the seder, and we switched to reading a lot of Four Questions and also the many midrashic commentaries on the Exodus story, which became the content of of the text in English, from those same little haggadot. the traditional haggadah. More people could participate in the seder because the language was our vernacular, but the meaning of the hag- What got lost in that process was a complete retelling of gadah was lost amongst the Thees and Thines and Thous. the Passover story. It is simply not part of the traditional haggadah. So, in participating in a seder that focuses on I loved the seder because it was a family gathering, the food was great, and the singing was enthusiastic and joy- reading every word in the traditional haggadah, we are directed away from the meaning of Pesakh, the theme of ful. What I did not love was the huge task of preparing for the event, which meant a very thorough spring house liberation from slavery which has resonated so clearly with cleaning, the schlepping upstairs of the Pesakh dishes and other groups seeking their own liberation. the packing away of all the usual dishes, pots and pans Learning that the haggadah was intended as a work in proand utensils, only to reverse the whole procedure eight gress liberated me from the sense of obligation to read days later. (Continued on page 2) From the Rabbi’s Desk What’s Happening/March Service Schedule April Oneg Hosts President’s Message JFC Sisterhood Invite Kids Ask the Rabbi Early Childhood Center The Religious School Recent Donations to JFC
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