Why is This Night Different From All Other Nights?

by Micah Sachs

  According to the UJF demographic study, 64 percent of San Diego’s Jews have attended Passover seders, which is more than the number who belong to synagogues, more than the number who give to Jewish causes, more than the number who light Shabbat candles or read Jewish newspapers. This Passover, the Jewish Journal asks Four Questions: Why do unaffiliated Jews celebrate Passover? What makes Passover so special? What does Passover have that other holidays don’t? And what can we learn from Passover?

 Why is this night different from other nights? Why is this night when we remember 400 years of slavery, when we eat cardboardy bread, this night when we wait hours to eat, the most popular Jewish ritual of the year?

  According to last year’s demographic study by the United Jewish Federation, 64 percent of Jews in San Diego have attended Passover seders. That’s three times the number of Jews who are members of synagogues, three times the number that light Shabbat candles, 20 percent more than those who fasted on Yom Kippur and six times the number that keep kosher. It’s more than those who attended a Jewish cultural event, visited a Jewish website, visited a Jewish museum or (gasp!) read a Jewish publication. It is more than the number of Jews who have gone to Israel, more than the number who have given to Jewish causes, more than twice as many as the number who have given to the United Jewish Federation.

 Because the number is so high, it clearly includes intermarried Jews, children who are receiving no Jewish education and even households with children who aren’t being raised Jewish at all! It is eerily the exact same percentage of Jews in San Diego who say being Jewish is “very important” to them. Indeed, the only Jewish ritual that scores higher participation – or even comes close – is lighting the Chanukah menorah (68 percent), and that holiday comes with the promise of gifts and owes much of its success to the ubiquity of Christmas.

  So what is it? Why, as the youngest son asks, is this night different from all other nights?

  Why do unaffiliated Jews celebrate Passover?

  Lisa Maller of Carlsbad is like many young single Jews. Twenty-four, she is a newcomer to San Diego, having recently moved here from Los Angeles. She is not a member of a synagogue and is only vaguely aware of a Jewish community in San Diego (although she wants to become more involved). Nonetheless, Passover is a ritual she cherishes.

  “I celebrate this every year with my family,” she says. “We all gather around the table, read, eat, laugh and it’s just kind of a nice time to get together with family…. I enjoy feeling the warmth of Jewish tradition.”

  Risa and David Baron, of Normal Heights, are like many young Jewish couples. They are also San Diego transplants, having moved here from New York where they had many Jewish friends. But here, few of their friends are Jewish and they aren’t members of a synagogue, although they are searching for a synagogue to join. They celebrate Passover every year with their children, David’s parents, David’s sister and her kids.

  “The kids are really kind of young to read the Haggadah and stuff, so we just kind of sang songs last time,” says Risa.

  But studies show that even those who have little interest in connecting with the organized Jewish community still celebrate Passover. Says Susie Harris, “When I was 11 years old, I told my parents I could not stand religion as a business and did not want to have any part of it,” she says. “This is how I raised my children. We celebrate our being Jews by making seder and observing the traditions of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah as a family.”

  All across the country, the numbers show that Passover remains widely celebrated, while traditional markers of Jewish identity are in decline. According to the 2000-2001 National Jewish Population Study, 67 percent of America’s Jews hold or attend Passover seders. By point of comparison, less than half of America’s Jews belong to synagogues and only a third have visited Israel.

  Time and again, when discussing the appeal of the seder, unaffiliated Jews return to one word: family.
Ruth Fredman Cernea is an anthropologist who wrote the book The Passover Seder: An Anthropological Perspective on Jewish Culture and the former national director for research and publications for Hillel, The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life.

  “I knew one person who had an argument with his parents about interfaith dating, and he said I really don’t care about any of these rituals and the response from his father was, ‘Okay, then, don’t come to the seder, if it doesn’t matter to you,’” Cernea recalls, “at which point, his response was, ‘You mean you’re going to cut me off from family?’”

  Cernea likens having a place to go for seder as having a “surrogate home.” Local evidence bears this out: come springtime, says Rachel Zagursky, UJF’s outreach coordinator, she is deluged with requests to match unaffiliated Jews with families holding seders. Passover is also the holiday, says Cheryl Bruser, director of Pathways to Judaism, San Diego’s program for interfaith couples and families, that interfaith families most celebrate. “I think for the Jewish partner, they have very fond memories of Passover seders at a relative’s home,” she says. “For some of them, that might be the only ‘Jewish thing’ they did in their homes growing up.”

  But “family” is only part of the equation. What is it about Passover that so attracts families to Passover in the first place?

  Which brings us to our next question…
What makes Passover so special?

  In an age of niche religious marketing – think singles services, Tot Shabbats, synagogues focused on 12-step recovery – Pesach offers something for everyone.

  For the family elders, there is the strong pull of tradition and the chance to play the role of patriarch. For the youngest, there are the four questions. For the kids in general, there’s the fun of the hunt for the afikoman. For the intellectuals, there are rabbinic minutiae about the numbers of fingers on God’s hand. For the liberals, there are plentiful variations on the Exodus story replacing women, blacks or low-paid workers for the enslaved Jews. For the conservatives, there is the triumph of good over evil. For the Zionist, there is the dramatic departure for Israel. For the young single person, there is the comfort of family tradition during a time in life mostly spent escaping one’s roots.

  It engages all five of our senses: sight (the often lovingly illustrated Haggadahs, the ornate seder plate), smell (the pungent horseradish, the potent Manischewitz), sound (the singing of Dayenu and the Four Questions), touch (the washing of the hands) and taste (well, duh).

  For everyone at the table, there is the strong participatory aspect: the rotating readings, the passing of the matzot, the washing of the hands.

  The Seder is malleable. It can be private enough to accommodate gay couples or crazy embittered aunts. But it can also be turned into a large-scale public ritual of understanding between blacks and Jews.
The story the Seder tells is both depressing and hopeful. Depressing, because it speaks of 400 years of slavery; depressing, because it speaks of the mass slaughter of Egyptian children. Hopeful because it speaks of the chance of redemption, of being saved from oppression; hopeful, because it speaks of the possibility that God will make his presence known on earth, if we are just insistent enough.
Because it offers both so much sadness and so much hope, so many of our modern travails can be read into it: the Holocaust, Israel, struggles for social justice. It is thus constantly contemporary but always timeless.

  “It’s the story of hope, the story of people stuck some place for so long that’s all they can see,” says David Arnow, author of the new book Creating Lively Passover Seders. “I think to some extent we’ve all had moments where we see the future like that, where we feel stuck. There’s something about Passover that says you can move forward.”

  But all that being said, why does Passover sustain where other similar rituals, where other private family rituals full of tastes and smells, sights and sounds, don’t connect? Which brings us to our next question…
What does Passover have that the rest of Judaism doesn’t?

  Passover has always been central in Jewish life. The difference now is that while Passover has retained its predominance, other historical hallmarks of Jewish religious involvement – keeping kosher, going to synagogue, fasting on Yom Kippur – have fallen by the way side.

  That’s because no holiday is a better match for the mindset of the modern Jew than Passover. In their seminal book The Jew Within, sociologists Arnold Eizen and Steven Cohen paint a portrait of the modern Jew that is in sharp contrast to their parents and grandparents.

   For most of the Jews interviewed by Eizen and Cohen, Judaism is never a fixed entity. Nearly every respondent defines their religious lives as a journey, adding or discarding rituals or attitudes as their life progresses. They are distrustful of organized religion to the extent it represents a fixed ideology. Theirs is a made-to-order Judaism, one that is mostly shaped in their minds and their homes, not in the Torah or synagogues.
 
 The Passover seder is the perfect fit for this form of modern Jewish individualism. It takes place in the home, among family, which is the defining locus of modern Jews’ identity.

  In this era of declining level of Jewish education, the home provides an important comfort zone for Jewish involvement. Unlike in synagogue, there is little fear that you will be judged if you mess up.

  Even more importantly, Passover comes with a how-to guide. The Haggadah serves as a sort of “Passover for Dummies” guide for those large portions of the Jewish population who don’t know much Jewishly. Everything is explained inside: the how, the who, the when and the why. All you have to do is cook and arrange the seder plate. Shabbat, Sukkot, Purim, Chanukah – none of these holidays come with this kind of instruction manual. “The idea of a very prescribed order is something people can wrap their head around: I can follow step one, two, three,” says Kay. “I think that’s what makes it so accessible.”

  But at the same time, the home environment allows for experimentation. You can make the seder as long or short as you want, as formal or casual as you want. “The Passover seder is a uniquely flexible ritual,” says Esty Pastor, a San Diego-based Jewish educator. “How the details are handled – from which Haggadot are selected to whether new ritual objects are added to the seder table – is as reflective as a mirror of the religious and political beliefs of the participants.”
 
  The rabbis who wrote the Mishnah, which laid out the seder ritual some 1,800 years ago, even commanded all who take part in the seder to make a midrash, or commentary, on the Passover story. The enormous number of themed Haggadot (Amazon.com lists 260 books with “Haggadah” in the title) through the ages is a testament to this tradition. From its very genesis, the Passover seder was intended to be a flexible ritual. Says Arnow, “It’s not like you see people saying let’s update the [Purim] Megillah or let’s have another blessing for Chanukah.”

  The richness and density of the Passover ritual is a key to its appeal. Unlike Chanukah, which involves about 15 minutes (at most) of ritual, the Haggadah provides hours of ritual if you want it. But unlike the Yizkor service during Yom Kippur, you can modify its length to the demands of your audience – it’s interactive Judaism.

  Meanwhile other holidays are in decline, victimized by their traditional reliance on the synagogue. While Passover has nothing on Purim for sheer drunken exuberance, Purim remains a relatively minor holiday for American Jews because the central ritual – the reading of the Megillah – takes place at the synagogue. Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur all rely on the synagogue.

  But Passover’s success is also a sign of how alienated from Judaism most Jews are. It is the perfect holiday for the reluctant Jew. Because it takes place in the home, the holiday does not require any kind of public demonstration of Jewish identity, the way walking to synagogue during the High Holidays might. Because it takes place at night, it doesn’t require adults to miss work or children to miss school. The only commitment Passover really requires – at its minimum – is preparing the objects for the seder plate and cooking a larger dinner than normal.

  Those holidays that require greater levels of commitment – think Tisha B’ Av with its mandatory fasting or Shavuot with its all-night study session – find themselves discarded by Jews who can’t be inconvenienced. Sukkot is nearly as family-oriented as Passover, but its central ritual – building an open-roof booth in your yard and sleeping in it for eight nights – requires a lot more work than preparing a Passover seder.
 
But beyond all the sociological and anthropological reasons, Passover endures because of the power of its message: simply put, seemingly insurmountable obstacles to freedom can be overcome. “It isn’t just it takes place at night and it involves kids,” says Arnow. “It’s a story that resonates and meets human needs in a profound way.”

  Think of the message of other Jewish holidays: Yom Kippur says that we must deprive ourselves to atone for our sins; Shavuot commemorates the giving of a Law that most modern Jews don’t take literally; Sukkot is about wandering in the desert; Tisha B’Av commemorates the destruction of the Temple. Other holidays, like Rosh Hashanah and Simchat Torah, mark points of celebration on the Jewish calendar – which only means something to those Jews who find value in the Jewish calendar. Of all the Jewish holidays, only Purim and Chanukah offer messages as positive as Passover. But what Purim offers in celebratory spirit, it lacks in private ritual. And while Chanukah offers home-based ritual, it doesn’t offer nearly the depth of ritual that Passover seders include. Only Passover unites ritual and message in such a comprehensive and compelling way.

  “There is unbelievable genius in this holiday to get all these ingredients in there,” says Arnow. “It’s like the perfect recipe.”

  What can we learn from Passover?
Brian Gaines is the founding executive director of Joshua Venture, a San Francisco-based non-profit that funds innovative Jewish programs run by Jewish leaders. But he hasn’t always been so involved in the Jewish community. Passover, he says, was his stepping stone. “For me, the themes of the Passover are what… brought me back to the Jewish community when I wasn’t involved Jewishly.”

  Because Passover has that kind of potential for increasing Jewish involvement, Jewish family educators see Passover as “prime time,” according to Dr. Ron Wolfson, vice president and dean of the Fingerhut School of Education at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles and director of the Whizin Center for a Jewish Future. The emerging field of Jewish family education works from the premise that parents and family members are the best educators children can have.

  “I’ve been working for 20 years on transforming the Passover seder from a boring, dry, everybody-goes-around-the-table-reads-a-passage-from-the-Haggadah kind of experience to something more engaging and exciting,” says Wolfson. “There really has been a transformation of seder in the last 25 years. For unaffiliated Jews, this is terrific. Instead of coming to a seder that is quite off-putting and uninvolving, it is an opportunity to excite people to the joys of being Jewish.”

  “A lot of families keep an empty chair for Elijah,” Wolfson continues. “I’d like to see that empty chair used for a friend, for a neighbor, for a stranger, for an unaffiliated Jew who needs a personal invitation to connect with the Jewish community.”

  Those on the forefront of Jewish family education and outreach even see ways in which Passover can be a template for other holidays. Sixteenth century Kabbalist rabbis in Safed, Israel, recognized the genius of an ordered meal and created the Tu B’Shevat seder. In the last 20 or so years, the Tu B’Shevat seder has helped turn what is technically a rather minor holiday into one of the more widely celebrated holidays on the Jewish calendar.

  At the Frankel Center for Jewish Family Education in Jerusalem, Etti Serok has created a Yom Ha’atzmaut Haggadah to provide families with a set of instructions to celebrate the Israeli Independence Day.
But perhaps the most powerful lesson of Passover’s enduring success has less to do with the ritual itself than with the people who celebrate it. Sociologists speculate that the reason Passover is so successful among the majority of Jews is because it casts the widest possible net; it of course speaks to the committed Jew, but it is also accessible to the reluctant Jew, the private Jew, the secular Jew, the Jewish dabbler.

  These Jews are far more likely to get their Jewish education somewhere other than a Jewish institution; their primary influences are family, friends and lovers.

  Wolfson, who has been at the forefront of Jewish family education for two decades, sees Passover as an “evangelical” opportunity for increased Jewish involvement. “I think the Jewish community needs to be much more aggressive about reaching out to friends and family and engaging them to be part of Jewish life,” he says.

  Perhaps the next frontier that Passover points to is something that casts an even wider net than Jewish family education, something that looks not only at family members but at the friends and lovers of unaffiliated Jews. If they can be better educated for those “prime” moments of Jewish transmission – like Passover – we will have thousands of human bridges between Jewish alienation and Jewish connection.

  The festival of liberation can then become a celebration of modern liberation – of unaffiliated Jews passing from the spiritual desert of alienation to the Sinai of Jewish involvement, where a group of wanderers are transformed into a community. Well, one can hope. And Passover’s all about hope, isn’t it?


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