First Seder - March 25th - Plainview Jewish Center

ORBIT
Page 6
The Cantor’s Note:
Passover Family Values
Despite the myriad preparations, endless food-shopping, hours of cooking
and strict dietary regulations, Passover is a universally beloved holiday.
Elders, parents and children, family and friends, gather round the seder table
to retell the ancient story, sing the traditional songs, enjoy each other’s
company and, perhaps, feast too well on our favorite foods.
As is often the case, there is a Yiddish expression to fit the occasion: “Duhs
beste fun eser makos zaynen di kneydlakh,” The best of the ten plagues are
the matzoh balls.”
It is for all these reasons that I find Passover sedarim so therapeutic. Beyond the obvious sentimental
attraction, the seder gives us a microcosmic view of idealized Jewish family life. In a time when
family relationships are being eroded and buffeted from all sides, the seder restores their equilibrium,
shoring them up against society’s centrifugal forces. The seder’s emphasis on the role of children
does not make it childish or trivial, but rather, reinforces the respective roles of a Jewish parent and
child. We want our children to ask US the critical questions, to seek information from US, and look
to US for guidance, just as they need US to give answers, dialogue, example and order to their lives
- US, not surrogates, peers, media personalities, or the internet.
Rather than read the parable of the four sons literally as a story of four different children, it is more
realistic to believe that every child is in some way a composite of the four sons. The same child can
be at times loving and obedient or rebellious and aggravating, clever and perceptive or naive and
foolish, genuine and sincere, or deceitful. This is what makes parenting so challenging and so often
frustrating. We struggle to find the correct responses to these contradictions in our children as did
our ancestors in the Hagaddah, sometimes by imposing and sometimes by imploring, at times with
commendation and at times with firm discipline, at times with an explanation, and at other times as
a matter of authority.
The Hagaddah uses the expression “P’Tach Lo,” to “open up” to our children their intellectual and
moral potential, to make our own experiences more accessible to them, and by so doing, showing
that they and we do not exist in separate or parallel worlds.
The seder is truly a ritual which achieves this closeness between the generations. It is a communal
recitation of an ancient story, aspects of which recur in every age, and which affect each generation’s
life experiences in different ways and color their perspectives accordingly.
The seder night becomes a time to share the collective wisdom of two or three generations and
learn from each others’ insights. Perhaps this is the realization of the prophet Malachi’s vision chanted
on the Sabbath before Passover, “and He shall turn the heart of the parents to the children and the
heart of the children to their parents’.
Gerri and I wish a joyous Passover to our Plainview Jewish Center family,
Cantor Morris Wolk, D.Mus