A seder for all ages

My first Passover seder was in a small row home in South Philadelphia, when I was 23 or 24 years old. A friend of a friend was hosting, and I went along excited for dinner and curious about the ritual. I left on a different path than I’d traveled on before, one that would lead to my conversion almost a decade later and my own Passover seder with my Jewish family.

Leading a seder feels like a rite of passage in many ways, a passing of the baton from generation to generation. Last year, for the first time, my wife led the seder at her extended family’s Passover celebration. In front of a packed room, she read from the children’s haggadah used to keep the seder at a length tolerable for the youngest members of the family. She spoke of her great uncle who led seders when she was growing up; they were much more formal affairs than what we now experience. And what she didn’t talk about, but I knew, was the miracle of our own Jewish family, a two-mom family with a toddler, not just accepted at the table, but celebrated.

Having toddlers at the seder table is a very different experience from my first seder all those years ago. My first seder used a haggadah from Berkeley, California, and the mood was philosophical and introspective. We discussed what we had been enslaved to the year before, what we had done to get free. I don’t even know how many bottles of wine we consumed, but I left feeling a deep connection to these people I had only just met, knowing what their trials and triumphs had been the year before.

Now we are experimenting each year with our own seder at my house. We invite family as well as friends, our neighbor in his twenties, and our parents in their seventies. We have a kid's table that shifts each year as the children grow, and new children are added to the mix. Attention spans expand and shrink and not just for the kids!

Some years I’ve made two harosets, so a guest who can’t have nuts can still participate in every aspect of the seder. Some years I’ve made my own chicken broth for the matzah ball soup and some years I have not. We have used inherited haggadot that are fine but not great, and last year we began making our own family haggadah to reflect on the things we care about and love about Passover.

Every year we discuss what it takes to be free, and every year we experience new things that we must free ourselves from. The story of Passover remains the same, but we, and the world, shifts around it and so does our understanding. Some years we think about how the plagues were not enough to change Pharoh’s heart, and we wonder, what is enough to change someone's heart? As antisemitism rises and the world speeds up, we take time to reflect on what it means to keep an ancient tradition alive and what we most want to pass down to our children.

It is a real gift to have children at the table every year. Some years it’s all we can do to keep them from spilling the wine everywhere, and some years they are reading the questions in their clear high voices. At our table, every year, they are surrounded by people who love them, who care for them, who wish for them and who prepare them. Every year we tell them the story of brutality and survival, hoping they will never experience it. Every year we tell them the story of dancing and singing at the edge of the sea, hoping that this is how, regardless of what comes their way, they spend their lives.

SARAH GREENLEAF (sgreenleaf@jewishallianceri.org) is the digital marketing manager for the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island and writes for Jewish Rhode Island.