A Recipe for Telling the Passover Story

By STEPHEN HAZAN ARNOFF

Jewish traditions and obsessions about holiday food notwithstanding, the Passover haggadah suggests that we should devote as much time to cooking up our own version of the Exodus tale as we do to slaving over the stove. For the better part of two millennia, the recipe of the haggadah—literally “the story” in the Hebrew—has balanced both physical and spiritual components of the Passover celebration.

Yes, the haggadah prescribes a gastronomical map for retracing our ancient ancestors’ struggle from servitude to freedom. Matzo (unleavened bread), maror (bitter herbs), the lamb shank, charoset, a hard-boiled egg, and even the recent addition of an orange are among the seder-plate signs and symbols that have fed Jewish memory for generations. But the haggadah also calls for a mode of rigor and passion far beyond dishing out elbows at the local kosher butcher shop. Anyone keen on participating in a seder is expected to take responsibility for innovative, fully engaged exploration of the Passover story, as well. The haggadah says:

Even if all of us were wise and knowing sages in full command of Torah learning, it would still be a religious obligation upon us to tell of the going out of Egypt. And the more a person expands upon the story of the going out of Egypt the more it is praised.

Whether you are a master scholar immersed in Jewish tradition throughout the year or a curious (or perhaps reluctant) visitor to Jewish text and tradition for the first time, the haggadah expects you to dig into the Passover conversation with personal conviction, saying, “In every generation every person is obligated to see him or herself as if he or she had personally gone out of Egypt.”

The haggadah teaches not only that “you are what you eat,” but also that “you are what you tell.”

Before returning to live in Jerusalem this summer, my family and I spent the past half decade of seders saying “Next Year in Jerusalem” in the gracious home of Rabbi Arthur and Kathy Green. The Greens’ recipe for telling the Passover story mixes traditional Jewish study with an enlightened view of what it means to “expand” upon the obligation to tell the tale as if we had all “personally gone out of Egypt.” One of the two seder nights—not necessarily in chronological order—focuses on a dynamic array of traditional commentaries, songs, interpretations, and reflections based on the structure provided by the haggadah. The other of the two seder nights is also based on the traditional structure of the haggadah, yet the personal stories and questions of the people in the room are placed at the center of the seder table as well.

Over the years, people have used the lens of the haggadah to link the Passover narrative to the servitude impressed upon all of us by economic injustice, the plague of famine and disease in much of the Third World, the struggles of Israelis and Palestinians in their contemporary knots of oppression, and in wordless modes when we entered waves of table-banging niggunim (wordless melodies) in memory of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea.

Since this is my first Passover in Israel in a long time—and since the luxury of a second seder does not exist in Israel—I have been thinking a lot about how to weave personal and contemporary questions and experiences into the patterns of the traditional haggadah text during my family’s one and only seder this year.

Israeli author Haim Sabato’s Adjusting Sights will be one of the literary side-dishes served in our Passover conversation. A riveting account of a young Israeli soldier’s experience of death and survival in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Adjusting Sights brings both style and content appropriate to spark new discussions at the seder table. In weaving traditional liturgy as well as biblical and rabbinic sources with a modern Jewish narrative, the book is a kind of haggadah in and of itself. Adjusting Sights, as a fusion of personal and ancestral stories, offers many new points of contact for bridging the complexities of the Jewish people seeking peace and meaning today amidst the echoes of its ancient stories. Recalling the price of his own survival of war, the narrator says:

It was true, I thought. Sometimes God had mercy on the undeserving and shone His light on them. That mercy and that light stayed with you forever. They were a debt that you had to repay. There was no getting around it. I thought of the vow I had made while dodging bullets in the wadi. I knew the world would never be the same.

The Passover seder reenacts a moment of transformation as well, an opportunity to change and be changed by the unavoidable challenge of the Jewish narrative every year.

The telling of the Passover haggadah can contain an endless variety of stories within it—religious and secular, male and female, gay and straight, Jewish and non-Jewish, traditional and liberal, right and left, and young and old. The seder invites diversity—just as the recipe for a seder menu calls for sweet charoset and bitter herbs, rich wine of celebration and earthy matzo—the bread of affliction. The meaningful and even unexpected reflections of each person’s story are legitimate, necessary additions to the tale. The recipe for the Passover story should be as diverse as the food we eat and take at least as long to prepare. When it emerges from careful planning and real inspiration, the satisfaction, reflection, and joy of the Passover meal can last all year long.