I have been posting information about our Seder now for a number of years; for those interested they can look at one of the following links:
- https://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2012/04/01/this-years-passover-sedar/
- https://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2011/04/10/our-annual-passover-seder/
- https://www.ourownlittlecorner.com/2011/04/11/our-passover-seder-quotes/
This year our focus is to look at the choice for freedom that was made in the Exodus story and to consider some of the reasons people might have to support a change to freedom or to resist it.
The Haggadah we use is called A Different Night, http://www.amazon.com/Different-Night-Family-Participation-Haggadah/dp/0966474007/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1363877819&sr=1-1&keywords=a+different+night+haggadah.
Below the jump I include the beginning of the instructions I wrote up to help me organize the evening as well as the quotes we will be using this year. Those who have looked at my previous entries much that is repeated and a bit that is new. The instructions explain how we approach going through the Haggadah.
Seder Introduction
This is the 15th year we have held a Seder in this house. Each year I joke about whether our daughters and/or I have changed jobs during the preceding 12 months. Last year, I mentioned that they had but I had been in the same job for two years. This time, each of us changed jobs at least once and some more than once.
Last year we wrote: “In the world outside of our house and this Seder it has been a year of great change and disruption, much of which was in the name of freedom.”; This year there is the same sense of change and disruption, but the goals seem complicated and the results opaque. It is with that in mind that we start our annual exploration of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt and what it means to us.
Readings and songs in Hebrew are interwoven during the evening, but many of the readings will be in English. Each person will have a number and we will have shuffled cards with those numbers in a pile. When we come to an English passage we want read, we will pull a number from the pile and ask the person with that number to read the passage. Be alert, you never know when you’ll be up!
In addition, in our house, we have gotten into the habit of passing out cards with sayings that tie at least a little bit to the broad Passover themes of freedom and often to this year’s specific theme(s). When you first read a passage, you will also be asked to read your card and if you want are encouraged to discuss what it might mean in the context of the Passover event and this year’s theme.
When a person is asked to read a passage, they should:
(a) Introduce themselves and if possible tell us something we may not know about them or what they have done over the last year (a bit harder for those who have been here many years)
(b) Read their quote & comment on it if they want; is it related to our theme for this year and if so how, do you agree with it or not and why
(c) Read the entry they are to read
In past years we have discussed among other topics:
- Risks that have to be taken to achieve freedom
- How current events reflected striving for freedom
- The importance of asking questions about freedom (the ‘why’ of Passover)
- The transition from slavery to freedom, what did it mean and what did it require
- How the concept of time impacts how understanding of Passover
- The role of women in the Passover story
This year we will focus on the uncertainties of striving for freedom and explore some of the reasons why people do so or do not do so.
We first read a passage from a Dvar by Rabbi Ellen Weinberg Dreyfus, rabbi of B’Nai Yehuda Beth Sholom, a Reform congregation in Homewood, Illinois, in 2012:
“If we were to try to summarize the purpose of the Seder ritual in one sentence, we could find that sentence in the Haggadah itself:
“Bechol dor vador, chayav adam lir’ot et atzmo k’ilu hu yatza miMitzrayim—In every generation, each of us must see ourselves as if we, ourselves, went out from Egypt.”
The foods we eat and dip, the prayers we say and sing, the telling of the story—all these are designed to enable us to relive the experience of the Exodus.
It is not a story of some other people long ago; it is OUR story. We were there. We were slaves, who tasted bitterness and wept salty tears and made mortar for bricks and baked flat bread. And we were liberated, with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with signs and wonders. We, ourselves, experienced these things and, each year, we re-enact them out of our primal memory. We raise our cups and remember both our oppression and our freedom—together.”
Our time with our friends and family, both those who have come here many years and those here for the first time, is special. We are lucky to share this evening each year we can.
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And now for the quotes:
Eric Hoffer, 1902-1983, American social writer
In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
Helen Keller, 1880-1968, American author, political activist
The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.
Frederick Douglass, 1818-1895, American social reformer, orator, writer
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning.
Edward Abbey, 1927-1989, American author and essayist.
Freedom begins between the ears.
Andre Gide, 1869-1951, French author, Nobel Prize literature winner.
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Wayne Gretsky, 1961-, Canadian hockey player.
You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.
Amelia Earhart, 1897 – 1937, American aviator and author
The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.
Trina Paulus, Hope for the Flowers, a novel for adults and others (including caterpillars who can read, American author, advocate for organic farming
“How does one become a butterfly?” she asked pensively.
“You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.”
Louis Carroll, pseudonym for English author Charles Dodgson, 1832-1898, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
“Thinking again?” the duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp little chin. “I have a right to think,” said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to feel a little worried. “Just about as much right,” said the Duchess, “as pigs have to fly.”
Rosellen Brown, 1939-, American author, wrote Before and After
A slave is one who waits for someone else to free him.
Mignon Mclaughlin, 1913-1983, American journalist and author
Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
Charles Kettering, 1876-1958, American inventor, engineer, businessman
If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832, German writer, artist, biologist, physicist
Everybody wants to be somebody, nobody wants to grow.
James Gordon, American psychiatrist
It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t.
It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not.
King Whitney Jr., civil rights activist
Gilda Radner, American actress
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.
Beryl Markham, British-born Kenyan aviatrix, adventurer, and racehorse trainer (1902-86)
“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”
Auguste de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, French symbolist writer (1838-89)
“Uncertainty is a quality to be cherished, therefore – if not for it, who would dare to undertake anything?”
Brodi Ashton, American, young adult writer (Everneath novels)
“Heroes are made by the paths they choose, not the powers they are graced with.”
Kami Garcia, American author (Beautiful Creatures novels)
“We don’t get to choose what is true. We only get to choose what we do about it.”
Denis Waitley, American author
“There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them”
“We don’t get to choose what is true. We only get to choose what we do about it.”
James Gordon, American Psychiatrist, Director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine
“It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t. It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not.”
Charles Du Bos, 1882-1935, French literature critic
“The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”
Marilyn Ferguson, 1938-2008, new age philosopher, author of The Aquarian Conspiracy
It’s not so much that we’re afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it’s that place in between that we fear . . . . It’s like being between trapezes. It’s Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There’s nothing to hold on to.
Alan Cohen American author of Chicken Soup for the Soul
It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.