Ben Buckman.net

This year for the Passover holiday, I flew down to Florida to celebrate the seders with my grandparents and cousins. Passover is an occasion of conflicting ideas for me, and I hadn't been to a seder in a few years. My relatives subscribe to Reform Judaism; I'm areligious with memories of many seders in my Orthodox upbringing.

So we began the first seder yesterday with a heartwarming mix of symbolism, nostalgia, and family togetherness. The haggada we were using was conventional and traditional (i.e. boring); its translation in Olde English style, without any stories or commentary beyond the basic text and instructions for following it. We drank bad Manischewitz wine (a branding coup if there ever was one, the way that became The Jewish Wine yet is so awful). The food was delicious of course. But (regarding the meal, which comes later in the seder), I'm getting ahead of myself.

We got to the tale of the Four Sons, a parable about the way the Passover story should be explained to people (literally sons, or children) with different backgrounds. One is wise (chacham), one simple (tam), one "unable to ask," and one wicked (rasha). The haggada we were using had a very generous translation, however, calling the latter the "contrary son." "What is all this to you?" the contrary son asks - to you and not to him - and the recommended response is similarly exclusionary: tell him that God took you out of Egypt, not him, because he would have been left behind. Et cetera.

So I looked around the table, and thought for a little while, and asked the obvious question. "What is all this to you?" I asked my relatives. "Here we are, none of us believers in this wrathful God the haggada speaks of, reciting from a book written thousands of years ago, poorly translated from a language we don't speak (with text that has changed over that time yet we pretend it hasn't), telling a story of slaves and miracles that bear little resemblance to the historical record. What is this to all of you?"

At first the question was misunderstood. Shhhh, don't ruin the evening, "the kids are still in the indoctrination phase," stop complaining. No, you're missing my point, I said. This question is central to the seder. The wicked/contrary son is a character in the book! The purpose of this holiday is to ask questions and tell stories. Is it not important then, to figure out why we're doing this? Maybe there is no "right" answer, but asking the question and discussing it is surely appropriate at this time.

In the end the answers were good, as good as possible in that crowd. (By that I mean, in an Orthodox crowd in Israel, everyone literally believes every word of the story and understands the language it's told in, so the occasion makes more immediate sense. Not so here.) My grandmother answered by singing "Tradition, Tradition" from Fiddler on the Roof. Her grandparents did a seder, she does a seder, she hopes her grandchildren will do seders. Others answered with similar notions of nostalgia and history. (The songs certainly make me feel nostalgic.) My grandfather's answer was the best, though: we do this to bring the family together. Random celebrations aren't sufficient, he explained; you need set dates, with structured rituals, to keep these family gatherings alive year after year, and give them larger meaning.

And therein lies the intellectual conundrum. We need mythology to maintain community, and continuity. Out of mythology we glean moral lessons and frameworks for life. Not complete frameworks necessarily, because none is; not clear lessons (see Akeda), perhaps, because morality is complex; yet intellectually, I appreciate the value of mythology. But mythology, to be passed on with true conviction, has to be believed, and mythology by definition is not true. I studied Greek and Roman mythology, and perhaps learned some life lessons from them, but I wouldn't recite ancient Greek texts on ancient Greek holidays the way I'd go to a seder. The Jewish mythologies are what I grew up with; they're "mine" even if they're silly and wrong; I'm stuck with them, yet understand the value lost in abandoning them.

So we partake in this event in which we celebrate the sadistic numerology of plagues (10? No, 50! No, 200!), and symbolize ritual animal sacrifice, and thank God for "giving us" the Egyptian's treasures (i.e. we stole it on the way out), and praise God for drowning the Egyptians in the sea. And we read about Rabbis pontificating over pointless questions, as Talmudic Rabbis did, answering their own questions with Biblical verses pulled out of their hats, one as good an answer to the question as a totally different one with the opposite lesson. And we sing "Next year in Jerusalem" to snickers because everyone at the table likes Boca Raton just fine. And we insist that no paragraph [that we said in our childhood seders] be skipped (but the ones we don't remember or understand, fuggetaboutem).

What's the "better" alternative? To actually believe it all, to believe God is compassionate and vengeful at the same time; to believe it all happened as the book tells, that there's actually an Elijah the Prophet (even if he doesn't show up at our door like Santa Claus), to live in Jerusalem (or have immiment plans to move there)... that works for some people, of course. It's certainly simpler that way, without all these pesky "wicked" questions getting in the way of blind faith. But that doesn't work for me, or most people I know. It would make just as much sense (and be a lot more humorous) to celebrate the wonders of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, family and tradition aside. So what is all this to us?

This is a conundrum that extends beyond Passover, of course. Last night was merely a good opportunity to raise the question. The answer was as satisfying or unsatisfying as ever, and will probably always be so.