The Most Important Questions

By Wendy Moses
Emory University

You are five years old, the youngest in your family. You sing the Four Questions at your family’s Passover seder. You don’t care, because your face is beaming with excitement of showing off to all of the company. Of course, you also wonder why the backwards book has no pictures.

You are ten years old. You sing the Four Questions at your family’s Passover seder. Your voice quivers with nervousness, now that you are old enough to understand that the company may criticize your Hebrew or lack-of-singing skills. And you want to know why you have to help your mom wash the china as she keeps reminding you how much trouble you’ll be in if you break a dish.

You are fifteen years old. You sing the Four Questions at your family’s Passover seder. The words run together as you mumble them, resentful that you – a grown-up teenager now – still have to sing them in front of company. And why are you still sitting at the seder table at midnight? You have better ways to spend your time!

You are twenty years old. You don’t want to sing the Four Questions.

Not because you care about impressing others, not because you’re nervous, and not because you think you are too good to recite them. You don’t want to sing the Four Questions because you don’t really know what they – or the rest of the seder – mean.

Could it be that Mah Nishtanah is really one question with four answers?

Is there a reason we don’t recite a blessing when washing our hands? Did you ever wonder why Ha Lachma Anya is written in Aramaic? Should we know why there are three pieces of matzah? Everyone knows you need a middle piece for the Afikomen, but five pieces still provide a middle cracker.

Perhaps the length of the seder has always puzzled you most. In fact, a person is only required to explain the following three things to fulfill the duties of the seder: the Pesah lamb, matzah, and maror. Seder participants must understand that the Pesah lamb recalls the blood marking doorposts of Jewish homes and the trepidation of the night of the slaying of the first born, that the matzah represents the dawn when the Hebrews rushed out of Egypt with no time for their dough to rise and that the maror embodies the bitterness of being enslaved. But if you knew that all you really had to do at a seder was explain these three things, how meaningful would those five minutes truly be, and how much could they honestly fill your soul with the feeling of being brought out of Egypt by God?

Questioning Judaism is an essential part of strengthening religion and one’s individual faith. It is an inherent part of being Jewish. So when staff and students at Emory University in Atlanta, GA decided to let students design their own sedarim, and let students decide from among them which to attend, I was ecstatic. Finally, this was a chance to craft a seder in which the company would be more than idle participants – they would be active contributors. A friend and I worked together to design our ideal seder. We met with Jewish Life staff members and a local rabbi, browsing through four different haggadot and compiling our own haggadah from them and we actually sat down and wrestled with these questions ourselves. Many questions we learned the answers to, and many of those answers prompted more questions.

The haggadah reads: "In every generation one is obligated to see oneself as one who personally went out from Egypt. Just as it says: ‘You shall tell your child on that very day: ‘It’s because of this that God did for me when I went out from Egypt’’" (Ex. 13:8). But what does it mean to you to have the obligation to feel like you personally left Egypt? My friend and I had no answer for this. So, like many of the other questions and trivia we incorporated into the seder, we asked this one after the above paragraph was read.

A hand appeared in the air. Then another one, fingers twitching as if to say, "I have something extra-important for everyone to hear." Then another hand frantically jumping in the air as if screaming, "You absolutely have to hear what I think!" It was incredible. These students chose to come to a seder that was advertised as one that would be intellectually stimulating and lively. And it was!

When we brought the combination of knowledge and energy to the table, they served it right back at us. When the night ended with the vibrant singing of Birkat HaMazon, the Blessings After the Meal, students took a few seconds to let us know that they actually enjoyed the seder, that they learned a new fact or gained a new perspective, and that they appreciated the effort we put into making it something different. It was a night different from all other nights.

In addition to our seder, two students organized a politically-oriented seder, tying the theme of freedom to the current situation in world politics. Two other students created an extremely abbreviated version of a chocolate seder for those wanting something short and sweet – pun intended. For the students who attended, it was exactly what they wanted. It was a seder that connected them to their faith.

We took what we liked about past sedarim and what we didn’t like about them, and we compromised in order to create a truly fulfilling seder. We took those ideas and approached our advisors and a rabbi to help us add depth. We took our organizational skills and thoroughly reviewed, edited, and rethought the haggadah until it exactly fit our purpose. We engaged our creativity to add flavor and spontaneity. Then we engaged our company so that the Passover seder truly became a celebration they could walk away from feeling like they got exactly what they needed to restore a little extra faith into the holiday. And in case you still wish the long, backwards book had pictures – our haggadah was illustrated.

[Posted 2/20/04]