First Seder since Oct. 7 comes in hostile, beautiful world
Every year, one of the highlights of my family’s Passover Seder is when we all whip one another with green onions. It’s a custom that originated in the historical Jewish communities of Persia and Afghanistan, and it’s fun — a gentle way to remind ourselves of the lashes from ancient persecution. Until fairly recently I had never experienced it as anything other than a playful diversion.
But last spring something changed. As usual, we armed ourselves with scallions, and when it was time I cheerfully told my boys, 5 and 8, that they could hit each other. Like the other adults, our 8-year-old was alive to the ritualized aspect, and he gently flicked that scallion at our 5-year-old. His little brother, though, eyes full of mischief, reared back, whacked him as hard as he could and laughed. And then our 8-year-old cried.
I have thought about this episode more than once over the past year. My children probably don’t remember it. But for me, it looms large. And, in a fashion that feels almost mythic, it represents so many archetypal aspects of a Jewish childhood, or perhaps any childhood: the jokes that are not entirely jokes, the rigors of brotherhood, the specter of violence that is present even in our most precious and comforting stories.
The Seder is my favorite moment of the Jewish year. Part philosophical symposium, part feast, part story slam, part singalong, the Seder, at its best, is thrillingly evocative, a conversation that is haunted by the past and illuminated by the promise of a future.
For all of its complexity — the frightening narrative, the strange hermeneutics, the nagging hunger — it is also the most child-centered event on the Jewish calendar and, for this reason, it is arguably the most important. Nearly every aspect of the Seder, as conceived by the ancient rabbis, is meant to arouse children’s curiosity and stimulate inquiry — the silly songs, the ritual foods (yes, kids, you must eat the horseradish), the hidden matzoh, the tradition that compels the youngest child to ask the scripted questions.
All of this is meant to keep the kids awake and engaged and, in turn, to offer the grown-ups in their lives an opportunity to tell the most important Jewish story, the one that will simultaneously liberate and ensnare them and, in the end, let them know who they are.
They are slaves, but one day they will be free. They are safe, but one day they won’t be, and then they will be again.
More profound than scallions — and more urgent as we prepare for the first Seder in the long shadow of Oct. 7 — is one of the core statements in the Haggadah, the book used as an aid in telling the story of the Exodus: “This is the promise — not only once did they arise to destroy us, rather in every generation they rise to destroy us. But the Holy One Blessed Be He will save us from their hands.”
I spend a lot of time worrying about how to help my children make sense of — and find their place in — a world that is complicated and often hostile. The world is not only hostile, of course. It is also beautiful and sometimes very kind. But for Jews it is hostile to us enough of the time that its hostility has become, over the past few millennia, a structural aspect of how we move through our lives and how we talk to our children.
In confronting this, I am beset by dueling impulses. On the one hand I never want my children to be frightened. But when I think about sharing our most cherished stories with them, I (like my ancient colleagues who created the Haggadah) find myself telling them that we are hunted, perhaps not at every time and every place, but ultimately for all time and in all places. I tell them this because they will learn it one way or another and because, all else being equal, I’d rather they hear it from me.
Jews, of course, are not the only parents in the world who must parent through difficult situations and who must find a way to teach their children about a world that is often allied against them. But we have been doing it for a while — for so long, in fact, that it has become an integral part of even our most joyful rituals.