If you’ve been following this blog, you know that we recently had a great event to help alumni and friends of Parenting Through a Jewish Lens prepare for Passover. The afternoon included two short (and inspiring!) classes for parents – one on making the seder meaningful for our kids, led by Rabbi Julie Zupan, and the other on making the seder meaningful for adults, led by Rabbi Natan Margalit.
I have been reflecting on the session with Natan, and
what it meant to me as a parent and individual. Natan began our session with a
question that really struck me – he asked the group if they had ever been to a
seder that was truly meaningful to them, as adults. Less than half the room raised
their hands. His assertion, which received a lot of knowing looks, was that as
parents we spend a lot of time thinking about how to make holidays and
traditions meaningful and fun for our kids, and not very much time thinking
about how to make them meaningful for ourselves. Moreover, as we learned as
PTJL participants, helping our kids find meaning and connection is dependent not
just on how we teach but on how we are – on how our kids perceive our own
connection to Judaism. Natan’s Passover class was about nurturing this
connection.
Luckily for me, I was able to raise my hand to Natan’s
question, as I have been to not just one, but to many seders that have been
meaningful to me as an adult. One reason for this is a tradition that we
started with my mother’s family of having two very different seders – a
traditional seder on the first night of Passover, and a more modern
interpretation of a seder on the second night. Each year someone would find a
new Hagaddah to use on the second night, usually aligned with a political theme
(feminism, the labor movement, etc) or an expression of the seder (the
puppet-based “We Tell It To Our Children” is a family
favorite). Doing these two seders allowed us to deepen our connection to the
holiday – reminding us that the story is both ancient and contemporary, that the
seder is to be experienced both collectively and individually, and that Passover
reminds us not just of our connections to the Jewish people but of our
connections to humanity as well.
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As the busy mother of two young children, however, it is
easy to fall into the trap of forgetting the grown-ups, and myself, in the
seders. While I might decorate the table with plastic figurines of the plagues
for the kids to play with, I am hard-pressed to make time to find a new Hagaddah
every year. But Natan’s class and my memories have me thinking – perhaps we
don’t need a whole new seder to get us thinking. Instead, we can look for
moments, maybe even just one, that we can add to help us find new meaning. It
doesn’t even need to take much time. Put an orange (or a tomato)
on your seder plate for the first time. When you raise each cup of wine, take
a moment to tie it to a modern social justice issue. There are plenty of
resources online, in print, and elsewhere to get you started in picking
something. Below are a few ideas from Natan and me:
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