joeyknuccione wrote:If I'm not derailing the thread, I'd like to know what Seder means to the rhetorical you, the individual.
There's not much of a thread to derail yet, lol!
Seriously, that's a great question. Two of the quotations we read at my Seder sum up the meaning of Passover for me.
(I guess I should define my terms: Passover--Pesach in Hebrew--is the spring festival in which Jews celebrate the Exodus from Egypt. The Seder is the special dinner Jews have on the first night of Passover, which reenacts that Exodus: the idea of the Seder is to make each participant feel as if she, personally, has come out of Egypt. Meanwhile, many Jews, especially those outside of Israel, also make a second night Seder.)
Ok, back to those two quotations. The first one is from Martin Luther King Jr. We use it to open our Seder:
Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom. There is something deep within the very soul of man that reaches out for Canaan. Men cannot be satisfied with Egypt.
That sums up the whole point of Passover--we move from slavery to freedom. (In the Torah, God identifies himself with this movement: "I am HaShem your God, who brought you out of Egypt.") At our Seder, we ask everyone at the table two questions: What are you freed from? What are you freed for?
The other quotation comes from Herman Wouk's
This Is My God, a book that serves as an excellent introduction to Judaism in general and Modern Orthodoxy in particular. In this passage, he talks about why Jews give up chametz (all sorts of leavening) during Pesach. Only matzah (aka matzo) bread is allowed:
Herman Wouk wrote:The bread of freedom is a hard bread. The contrast between bread and matzo possibly points the contrast between the lush Nile civilization that the Jews left behind them on the first Passover and the gray rubbled desert in which they came into their identity. The Bible tells how they complained to Moses that they could not forget the meat, the cucumbers, the onions that their tasmakers had fed them on the ramparts of Rameses. The whiplash from time to time had been unpleasant, of course. But that memory had faded rapidly as the scars healed in the dry desert air. The memory of their lost security remained.
Economists knows that, contrary to the popular impression, slaves do not work hard . . . Take away a man's rights in himself, and he becomes dull and sluggish, wily and evasive, a master of the arts of avoiding responsibility and expending little energy. The whip is no answer to this universal human reaction. There is no answer to it . . . the slave's life is a dog's life, degraded, but not wearying and--for a broken spirit--not unpleasant.
The generation of Jews that Moses led into the desert collapsed into despair and panic over and over in moments of crisis. Broken by slavery, they could not shake free of improvidence, cowardice and idol worship. All the men who had been slaves in Egypt had to die in the desert, and a new generation had to take up their arms and their religion before the Jews could cross the Jordan.
Leavening, then, would represent in this image the corruption of slave life. But the symbol has ramifications. The rabbis called the passions of man "the yeast in the dough." Leaven is a strange and pervasive substance. It is alive; it is immortal; it is impalpably everywhere in the air; it ferments grain into bread, and grapes into wine, it is the sour whitish paradigm of life itself. For one week in springtime, in the time of seeding and growth, when the Jews celebrate their independence, they cut all trace of leavening from their lives. No one has ever wholly accounted for this vibrant symbol. That it has had power over the imagination of Israel through all time, everyone knows.
It always amazes me that, according to the Torah, a generation of Jews died in the desert because they could not rise to the challenges of freedom; they were too broken from slavery. But that's part of Passover: acknowledging that liberty doesn't come easy or, in the words of a right-leaning bumper sticker, "Freedom ain't free." I'm not very right wing, but I heartily agree with that sentiment.
If you can rise to the challenge of freedom--and I think that's an ongoing process for most of us--then the challenge is to put that freedom to good use; to use it to help heal the world. And that, to me, is what the Seder is all about.
