Kesher Talk

Pesach countdown - Day 4. Jews can have mixed feelings about Christian seders. I personally am torn between gratification and pride that others find our symbols and structures useful, and dismay when they are thoughtlessly used (I am not suggesting that all, or even most, Christian seders do that). (I really feel for Native Americans, who for the past 30 years have had to watch hordes of young New Age seekers build sweat lodges and perform smudge purifications without having any kind of grounding or education in the culture behind the rituals.) Of course, it is possible to borrow ritual from another culture with care and sensitivity.

Last year, on the anniversary of 9-11, I pointed to several essays on how Jewish ritual - including the Passover seder - could be useful in commemorating that horrible event. One writer said:

. . . . In part because of the prohibition against idol worship, Judaism has a distinctly modern attitude to memorials. Objects do not represent the past; rather, they are used to conduct passage to it. In my view, the most successful memorial ever constructed is the Passover meal. At the seder, for example, the physical items on the seder plate are conduits to experiences and ideas thousands of years old. With the Passover ritual we root the present into the past. For eight days we change our routines and do not eat bread.

Every year, the ritual items for the seder plate have to be made anew. These symbolic objects — the shank bone, the matzah — cannot be preserved or inherited. The seder is itself a conversation, scheduled annually to “refresh” the present by pulling depth from the past. Dynamic questions without fixed answers make these conversations iterative; in some cases, the record of important conversations becomes a permanent part of the seder.

That's about the best description of what we do that I've ever read.

posted by Judith @ 4/12/2003 10:40:12 PM