Rabbi David Wolpe suggests the first of the Four Questions might be read more literally, and possibly more meaningfully, as: “Why is this night any different?”
[W]e should wonder about slavery and freedom every night of our lives.
We should always sit down at the table with the question of redemption in our thoughts and our hearts, for we always live in an unredeemed world. . . .
Passover rituals express the potency of faith in small acts. The grief of ages is in an herb, slavery in an unleavened bread, and redemption in an untouched cup of wine.
“Let my people go” is only half the sentence. Do you know the other half? Watch this three-minute video before your seder — worth watching in its entirety.
Paul Greenberg suggests in “The Search: We Leave Egypt Tonight” that this night is different because it reminds us the future can be different:
It is not history that gives Passover its warrant. Quite the opposite: What makes tonight so full of promise and burden, like freedom itself, is that it breaks through history. It disrupts the everydayness.
Why is this night different from all other nights? Not because we are set free, but because we may realize we are set free.
Nor is it the celebration of freedom that fills this night with awe but what follows: the plunge into the Wilderness. That is, the search. And tonight it begins anew.
Michael Tolkin writes in “Faith and Proof” that the story comes from a book that is beyond history — “written over a thousand years by a thousand writers . . . proposing a model society of frail humans who need justice, sacrifice, joy, rest and atonement . . . . a collection of voices [that] is a hint of the sound of God.” It does not matter whether it is all literally true:
If Abraham did not send Hagar and Ishmael into the desert, but we imagined it; if we had not been slaves but imagined it; if we had not been 600,000 strong at Sinai, but imagined it; if God did not let us cross into the land until a generation had died in the wilderness, but we imagined it; if David did not have Uriah killed so he could marry Bathsheba, but we imagined it; if we imagined the need for a land to create a light for the world . . . if all the contradiction and paradox were not dictated on Sinai in 40 days, but heard by us over those thousand years, and our errors written down and not denied or blamed on someone else — then the book is all the miracle anyone should ask for . . .
Adria Popkin, former pastry chef, largely non-observant, writes about her seder the year her grandfather died:
Abraham Solomon Goldman who, as I used to laugh to myself, possessed the most Jewish name in America, was appropriately and devoutly religious. He prayed every morning and walked to temple every Saturday for the Sabbath. . . .
Through his guidance, I learned to see the importance of tradition, the significance of retelling and remembering the Passover lore . . . . So I decided that a year after his death, at our Passover dinner we would remember the story of my grandfather. . . .
As I kneaded the matzo meal into a sticky paste to make dumplings for our soup, I remembered ancestral slaves turning mortar into the bricks that made the Pyramids.
I served sweet potato gnocchi with roasted red pepper sauce — the color of fire and strength.
Grilled asparagus and radicchio represented spring, the season of freedom and renewal.
Dessert was a creme caramel, my own Manna Flan — because it tasted so sweet you could pretend it fell from heaven. I filled the food with my grandfather’s faith . . . .
We all took turns reading the Passover story. We sang some Hebrew songs and we raised our glasses of wine to my grandfather and toasted, "L’Chaim," to his life.
My own father, the agnostic scientist, winked and said, "Delicious."
We sanctified life and legend with my supper. That night religion revealed itself as a background setting to the story of my life and a place setting at my table. My family felt connected to something bigger, back to a time even before my grandfather, back to a very old history and powerful beliefs. . . .
That seder was the finest meal I have ever prepared: It was a eulogy and a commencement all in one dish — seasoned with nostalgia and savored like hope.
Adria’s recipe for Manna Flan is here.
Rachel Barenblatt got involved a decade ago with the Williams College Feminist Seder, which led to developing her own haggadah (pictured above):
Every year, a group of college students crafted a new haggadah. We had wonderful conversations and arguments about the purpose of the seder, the purpose of feminism, how Judaism and feminism intersect. We wrote some terrific variations on familiar prayers and songs. We learned from each other, and sometimes surprised ourselves.
[T]he process was priceless: it taught me how deeply fulfilling engaging with Judaism can be, and how much more "mine" the holidays feel when I study them, learn about them, and reshape my observance with my own two hands. . . .
[E]very year I develop a new Velveteen Rabbi’s Haggadah for Pesach, which I use to lead seder . . . . My haggadah collects poems and prayers from a variety of sources, along with readings I wrote myself. Some of it is traditional; some of it is not.
It is a beautiful haggadah — worth using or supplementing your own. It has some nice poetry and commentary you won’t find in other haggadahs, such as this poem of Marge Piercy’s:
Tonight we dip the egg in salt
water like bowls of tears.
Elijah comes with the fierce
early spring bringing prophecy
that cracks open the head
swollen with importance.
Every day there is more work
to do and stronger light.
Tonight we should wonder about slavery and freedom, realize we have been let go for a purpose, consider that we are set free to begin anew, recognize the miracle of the book we are reading, remember the stories of our grandparents, and their grandparents, and their grandparents, who got us to where we are, thank God for what has been done for us and acknowledge our consequent debt, and pass the message on to our children as a priceless heritage, for reasons described in greater length here.