Life after the Seders

As we prepared to celebrate this week of Passover most of us focused on the Seders. There is good reason to- the Seder tells the story of Passover, it is the Mitzvah of retelling the Exodus story, and it is that special evening that we get to sit around the Seder table enjoying family and friends. Even in homes in which very few of the holidays are observed, most families get together for this great evening of Jewish storytelling. While not everyone may hold both Seders, Passover is a special time to embrace the lessons of hope and freedom that emerge from 4000 years of Jewish history. I remind you, however, that Passover does not end with the Seder; in fact it is only the beginning.

The fact is that there is life after the Seder! It is in fact the quintessential essence of Jewish life- taking in the spirit of the Jewish past to animate the Jewish present. A Jew without history is an orphan. Like a child without parents, we would have no idea of where we came from, how we got here, or, most importantly, why we are here. While the Haggadah does much to help us understand our pedigree, it is the rest of Passover that ties up our “loose ends.” For an entire week we taste the bread of affliction, we eat the bread of slaves, and we celebrate the birth of our nation.  Then at the end of Passover we get one final chance to see the panorama of our people unfold both in terms of our life as a people and our lives as individuals.

Today tracing the history of one’s family has become the new kind of “scrap- booking.” People spend hours on ancestry websites trying to discover small pieces of unknown family history. The reasons for this “craze” may be many but I believe one is more important than the others- we long to know who we are- the only way we can truly understand that is by knowing from where and from whom we have come. Passover is our ancestry website. We log on using the Haggadah, we share what we have learned during the Seder, and, at last, we personalize the lesson on the eighth day of Passover by observing Yizkor. Yizkor then serves as our own personal ancestry lesson. We remember who made us who we are. We reconnect with where we came from. We realize we share a history and fate with all those who join in the recitation of Yizkor.