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A year ago during this same week in the Jewish calendar, I was preparing to lead a Passover Seder at Columbia/Barnard Hillel. In nearly a decade as a rabbi, it was the first time that students told me they were hesitant to attend Seder. Who could blame them? There were messages everywhere telling Columbia and Barnard students to leave campus, that they were not safe. Calls and texts were coming to me at all hours expressing anxiety and fear.
Early on the afternoon of the Seder, I weaved through a protest’s drums and chants and megafones and masks and flags, finally over to the Hillel building, seeing a line of NYPD cars outside. As loud as it was on the street, it was quiet inside. Hundreds of Jewish students, many more than usual, had left for the holiday given the campus unrest. My colleagues and I started to set up for a Seder a small fraction of the size of campus Seders in the past. We chose a cozy space, placing blankets and pillows on the floor, colorful tapestries over coffee tables, twinkle lights and tea lights all around. The overhead lights were dimmed, and the candles glowed around each Seder plate. It was our effort to make something beautiful amidst the ugliness of what had been transpiring across our campus, our world, and on social media.
A student leader sat on the couch strumming his guitar so guests would enter to calm music that contrasted with what they experienced out on the street. Some students came from their dorm or apartment, others from the encampment in the center of campus. Several were nervous about participating in such an intimate Seder with students whose opinions on Israel differed from theirs. But here they were, elbow to elbow, knee to knee, for one of the most important nights of the Jewish year. As the sun started its descent, the Seder began. When it ended, there were hugs, thank yous, and tears of relief for an order that had been brought to the chaos.
There is a word for “order” in Hebrew: it is “Seder.”
In their pioneering piece Ritual and Its Consequences (2008), authors Seligman, Weller, Puett, and Simon wrote that ritual “involves the endless work of building, refining, and rebuilding webs of relationships in an otherwise fragmented world. The work of ritual ceaselessly builds a world that, for brief moments, creates pockets of order, pockets of joy, pockets of inspiration.”
The generations of rabbis who developed the Seder knew too well of living in a fragmented world, of needing to rebuild and refine. The Seder of today evolved over thousands of years, including in response to religious persecution, to inspire joy and bring order to our ancestors’ world of chaos. As we navigate the current iteration of a fragmented world - on a global scale and perhaps, though in a different way, on a personal one - the Jewish calendar pauses the chaos to give us a Seder, an order. In our tradition’s infinite wisdom, the Passover Seder’s rituals and songs and food and blessings and storytelling create order, create joy, and create inspiration.
Tomorrow night, when Shabbat leads us into Passover, I invite you to lean in (literally, we do recline as a sign of freedom during the Seder!) to the order that this ritual might provide. Though the chaos will not vanish, may the order, joy, and inspiration of this sacred yearly ritual accompany it and you through the holiday.
Shabbat shalom and Chag Sameach,
Rabbi Leah Fein
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