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 By David Arnow, PhD
The Mishnah understood that breathing life into Judaism’s central story required more than rereading the eternally fixed account of the Exodus. In fact, it conceived of a radically different Seder—one that carefully balanced elements that would be fixed and those that would change from family to family, from year to year.
Fixed elements—four cups of wine, dipping, reclining, specific blessings, and so forth—would bind us together as a people, whenever and wherever we lived. But the early architects of the Seder realized that requiring each Seder to be a clone of the next would not be the best way to ensure that we’d successfully pass our central story down one generation to the next. So along with fixed rituals, they left room for creativity, especially when it came to telling the story.
The Mishnah’s instructions reflect two central principles. First, telling the story
of the Exodus must be geared to the level of understanding of the younger generation—
and I would broaden that to include the interests of adult participants as well. Second, we are not to read a straightforward account of the story, say from the Book of Exodus. Rather, we are to tell the story through the process of expounding—drasha, literally “drawing out meaning,” or making midrash—on a short passage about the Passover story in the Book of Deuteronomy. That midrash was to change as the level of children’s understanding increased. And notice the Mishnah’s approach to children’s questions. Rather than reciting prescribed questions, the Mishnah envisioned children asking their own questions, prompted, if none occurred to them, by their father. We are to make the story meaningful to those gathered around the table through an interactive, creative process.
The Mishnah implies that no two Seders should be exactly the same!
Rather than “slavishly” reading a prescribed text, the Mishnah encourages us to take liberties, using its example as a core and a guide. Back in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan, the great critic of culture and the media, famously observed that “the medium is the message.” Egypt was about productivity, not creativity. In the creativity we bring to telling the Passover story, we taste freedom and celebrate it. We experience ourselves as free, independent creators, the very antithesis of our ancestors mired in the mind-numbing pits of slavery. In so doing, we renew the divine sparks within, which mark us each as images of God, the paradigmatic free creator.
The above excerpt, “The Medium Is the Message,” by David Arnow, PhD, is from Creating Lively Passover Seders, 2nd Edition: A Sourcebook of Engaging Tales, Texts & Activities. © 2011 by David Arnow, PhD. Permission granted by Jewish Lights Publishing, P.O. Box 237, Woodstock, VT 05091; www.jewishlights.com.
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David Arnow, PhD, is author of Creating Lively Passover Seders, 2nd Edition: A Sourcebook of Engaging Tales, Texts & Activities and coeditor of the award-winning two-volume My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries, with Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, PhD (both Jewish Lights). He is a psychologist by training, and is widely recognized for his innovative work to make the Passover Seder a truly exciting encounter each year with Judaism’s most central ideas. He has been deeply involved with many organizations in the American Jewish community and Israel and is a respected lecturer, writer, and scholar of the Passover Haggadah.
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