As You Like It: Passover in a Box

I’ve seen Passover for Dummies and how-to books on how to approach the Passover holiday. But this is the first time I’ve ever seen a “Seder in a box.” According to Lisa Wangsness’ Boston Globe article on Tuesday, March 29, JewishBoston.com is offering its first do-it-yourself Seder kit to Boston residents this month. (A Seder is the festive Passover meal where everyone tells the story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt.)

“Seder in a Box” includes just about everything but the food and the guests: a Seder plate, a basic Haggadah, a leader’s guide, recipes, a shopping list, instructions for setting the table, and a matzo cover. Oh, and some green plastic frogs, representing one of the 10 plagues.

“We wanted to take the guesswork out of it for people who have never done it before,” said David Levy, the editor of JewishBoston.com.

At first Levy said the website’s advisory board of people in their 20s and 30s debated whether to host a big Seder for their peers in the Boston area. They wound up deciding it would be better to help people learn to do it themselves.

“There’s not the pressure of what someone else thinks a Passover Seder should be,” Levy said.

I hate to say it, but I agree with Levy about Passover pressure. I’ve experienced two kinds. The first occurs when you invite non-Jewish friends to your Seder. You want them to have fun and enjoy themselves yet learn something of your heritage without coming off as a total nut-job who throws green plastic frogs around or wears sunglasses to represent the plague of darkness — things I am not ashamed to say our family has done in the past and continues to do to our great enjoyment!

The second kind is when you invite your parents over when all they have experienced is a traditional Seder and there you are with those green frogs again. Oy! It’s enough to make a woman give up. And just imagine what would happen if you invited both to your Seder at the same time.

There you are, desperate for everyone to understand what is going on, so you read your Haggadah (the book of the Exodus story) in English to the disapproving glare of your more traditional guests who want to know why the Hebrew has disappeared from Passover. And because you remember how you used to fall asleep during parts of the Seder, you skip certain parts, even as your traditional guests want to follow the dictum of reading every word. Ever heard of a rock and a hard place? Here you’re between a matzo ball and a brisket.

Then there’s the issue of the wine. According to tradition the only permissible wine is Manischewitz Concord Grape, a wine so sweet that you could feed it to a hummingbird. Manischewitz is part of our Seder — I can’t imagine not pursing my lips at that first incredibly sweet sip — but we also serve other wines for those who prefer their libations a bit more tart.

But back to our box Seder. Who would use such a thing?

Wangsness writes, Sara Greene and her husband are hosting a Passover Seder for the first time at their home next month.

She is writing her dissertation, he is a medical resident, they are the parents of a 7-month-old infant, and the holiday begins on a weeknight. When she saw the link on a friend’s Facebook page, she did not hesitate: She ordered a “Seder in a Box.’’

“We’re having all these people over, and I haven’t done it before,” she said. “The Seder plate has a lot of things on it. You have to kind of remember to get all the different aspects of it.”

Yes indeed, that Seder plate has so many things on it — six in fact. But the things that it needs to hold are written on the plate itself. Surely a medical resident and a PhD candidate can figure it out. And it’s not as if the plate requires eye-of-newt and toe-of-frog (there go the frogs again, we’ve got a theme going here); it’s basically simple around-the-house stuff, like salt water, parsley and an egg. How difficult can that be?

However, our family puts one item on our Seder plate that would make a traditionalist shudder — an orange. The reason for its presence is an article that I read years ago, which stated that women were adding oranges to their Seder plates to challenge an old dictum of the rabbis that a woman leading a Seder is like an orange on a Seder plate — she doesn’t belong. That orange is my bit of rebellion. Then again, we’ve been doing it for so long that it has become a tradition in our family.

Part of me understands when Rabbi Michele Lenke of Temple Beth Shalom relates that she had someone in her office who had never hosted a Seder and was fretting about how to do it properly: “People have so many memories of different Seders, and I think they so desperately want to do it right,” she said.

But what they don’t understand is that, while the Haggadah gives us the script for the “right” Seder, the important part of the celebration is the group of people that is sitting around the table, retelling the Passover story, passing on old traditions and starting new ones. And most of all, celebrating not only freedom and rebirth, but family and friendship.

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Posted by Joan Florek Schottenfeld on Apr 14 2011. Filed under As You Like It, Featured Content, Opinion. Both comments and pings are currently closed.