Pesach for the Rest of Us Making the Passover Seder Your Own

Chapter 1: What Kind of Book Is This and Who Is It For? Pesach is a very important holiday for me. Every year, I lead a seder with a haggadah I have been working on for twenty years. Mostly the same people come from Boston, from New Jersey, from Arlington, Massachusetts, from two miles away, and from a quarter of a milewe all gather gradually in my small Cape Cod house. Over the years, a couple and their children moved to Chile; some people tried it and it was not their kind of seder. One young woman grew up and now brings her husband. Children have been born and joined the seder. But basically we're pretty much the same core group year after year. Like many Jews, Pesach is my favorite holiday and the one where I find the strongest personal meaning. I came to studying it earlier than Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, perhaps because it is preeminently a holiday to share with family and friends. In this little book, I will make my way through the ritual one item and one practice at a time. I am looking for a significant contemporary interpretation, rather than an emphasis on what is strictly "correct" or traditional. I want to encourage you to fashion your own seder in a way that speaks honestly and powerfully to you and your circle, whoever they arefamily, friends, an organization. I often provide a historical perspective to help you choose or create a ritual that works for you. Much of what we may have been brought up with in modern Judaism in siddurs, in customary rituals of brit or bar or bat mitzvah, in holiday services or activities, was invented, worked out, haggled over, revised over many generations. You can borrow or create or combine to make a seder that works for your own groupwhether family or friends or community. Try out new things every year. Keep the parts most people love or respond to and remember. Work on the parts that seem to put people to sleep. The book is not aimed at the Orthodox, but rather at providing an entrance for secular and religious Jews with a modern slant into a more satisfying and meaningful way to celebrate our most common celebration, the one that just about every Jew partakes in, often twice with first and second night seders. Increasingly in recent years, Jews are putting together our own haggadahs or searching out material from other haggadahs to incorporate into our own ritual. There are literally thousands of haggadahs. Many of us remember seders of our childhood where the haggadah was read mostly or entirely in Hebrew as fast as possible, usually by the patriarch of the family or some older man assuming that role. It had the emotional content of the directions for installing a DVD recorder. For many of us, that something has "always" been done a certain way does not mean that is how we want to do it or the way with the most meaningful content or spiritual resonance. Furthermore, Judaism is always changing. The way we celebrate Shabbat, the various parts of the services for Friday night and Saturday morning, the expectations concerning the holiday services, every piece of what "always" has been or what is "supposed to be" was started sometime in our history and kept because it worked for people. Other usages were gradually altered or dropped. The traditional haggadah has been evolving over centuries and adding some passages while dismissing others. A commonly repeated statistic is that 90 percent of American Jewsno matter whether they are bagels and lox Jews or religious in some fashion or just in search of some sort of spiritualityattend at least one seder every Passover. That seder may be the only Jewish ritual a person engages in all year long and therefore the one experience that can confirm and give meaning to that person's Jewish identity. I am attempting to make elements of the haPiercy, Marge is the author of 'Pesach for the Rest of Us Making the Passover Seder Your Own', published 2007 under ISBN 9780805242423 and ISBN 0805242422.