Lewyn frowned. Each Chinet Seder plate did indeed have an orange in addition to the usual suspects.
“Haven’t the faintest idea,” he admitted.
“So this is like a program?” said Jonas. He was turning through the stapled pages.
“Oh, you read it backwards,” Lewyn told him.
All five of them turned to him.
“Just … how it’s done.”
And he turned over his own to demonstrate. On the back of the pages, handwritten in black Sharpie, were the words: “Welcome to our Coalition for Mutual Respect Seder!”
Jesus Christ, he thought, before he could stop himself.
To his right, Mark was already laughing.
“Don’t,” Lewyn heard Jonas hiss at him, but he was laughing, too.
Well, he hadn’t promised them a rose garden. What had he promised them?
“Welcome, welcome,” said a woman at the far end of the room. She had a cordless microphone, and spoke, initially, in Hebrew, the only words of which Lewyn recognized were Shalom and Pesach. Then her mic went out and someone brought her a new one. “Such a lovely boy,” said the re-amplified rabbi, patting this boy’s yarmulke with a tiny hand. “Electrical engineer! Single!” The room laughed.
“Our Chabad friends and our friends over at Koach have their own traditions when they gather for Pesach here on campus, but for those of us who come to Judaism from the Reform movement, or the Reconstructionist traditions, or are just beginning a spiritual journey in Judaism and feel the need for a more open and, dare I say it, personal experience of the Passover celebration and ritual, you have come to the right place! We want to thank Tamar and Rochelle, and David Grodstein—where are you, David? I haven’t seen you … yes! Shalom, David! Happy Pesach!—all of you, your hard work is so much appreciated by us all. Now, it’s a part of the Seder tradition to welcome the stranger to our table, and to link our story to the larger story we all share. When one suffers, everyone suffers. When one of us is still enslaved, no one is really free. That’s the big moral of the Seder. Of course, we’re Jewish, so we specialize in disagreeing about what things really mean. My mother, for example, used to say, this is what it boils down to: They hated us. They tried to kill us. We’re still here. Now let’s eat!”
Mark, on Lewyn’s right, exploded in laughter. Lewyn turned to look at him, a little mystified. It hadn’t seemed that funny to him. His own family Seders had been rather joyless, with everyone dressed in uncomfortable “nice” clothes and the table set with special, breakable stuff. There had been long recitations separating the hungry children (he, at least, was always hungry) from the good smells in the kitchen, which would only be served by a uniformed maid once the many speeches and questions and dripping of wine and holding up of green parsley had been completed. His father and his uncle Bruce Krieger, his aunt Debbie’s husband, had recited in Hebrew, from memory, while he and Sally and Harrison (and, it was reassuring to note, his Krieger cousins, who actually had been bar mitzvahed) all stumbled along with the phonetic version, printed beneath the Hebrew in their matching booklets. (This reminded Lewyn of the tiny possibility that his sister might actually be here, in this room with so many other Jews of Cornell, and he looked around warily, but there was no Sally to be seen.)
The rabbi, holding her mic delicately between two figures, now said kiddush and things began to move along briskly: the karpas, the middle matzo, the storytelling, the explanation of the Seder plate (that orange, it turned out, had to do with the inclusion of all sexualities and genders, a notion that made one of Lewyn’s frat boy guests look vaguely ill), the drip, drip of sickly sweet red wine from their fingertips to their paper plates. Mark nearly gagged when he bit into the maror, and Jonas laughed at him.
The “youngest child” was the rabbi’s little boy, who spoke with a lisp that made most of the girls in the room say “Awww” in such unison it might have been rehearsed. The four sons were performed by four students, one on an electric keyboard, as a peppy vaudeville number.
What does the Seder mean?
What does the Seder mean to you?
What is this?
Um … what?
(It was supposed to be clever, but it wasn’t. Not every musical Jewish boy was Stephen Sondheim.)
Then, finally, it was time to eat. Out from the kitchen they brought trays with bowls of soup, and Lewyn had the indelible experience of watching his guests confront their first matzo balls.
“Oh, I know what this is,” said Jonas. “This is that balls thing. But what’s it made of?”
Lewyn explained, pointing to the matzo, still on the table.
“Right,” said the Virginian. “The crackers.”
“The point is that they aren’t crackers,” Lewyn said.
“These balls are made of crackers?”
“And soda water,” said one of the blue-sweatshirted girls. She was leaning forward, between him and Jonas, with a heavy bowl of Israeli salad. “Makes them fluffy.”
“So … wait, they are made of crackers?” said the boy on Mark’s other side.
The girl drew back and looked at him, then at their little group, her gaze deliberately rounding the table from one blond head to the next, and finally to Lewyn, on which it lingered.
“First Seder?” She grinned, as if she didn’t know the answer.
“I got permission,” was all he could think to say.
“And I gave it, if you’re who I think you are. Six people, no vegetarian, no gluten-free. Right?”
“I’m gluten-free, actually,” said O’Something, and Mark said, “Dude, you should have told Lewyn!” But the girl was already off to the next table with the salad bowl in her other hand. She was short, with wildly curling dark hair. Lewyn stared after her.
The boys fell upon the food: brisket after the soup, and asparagus, and potato kugel. Mark put charoset on his meat. Jonas took a bit of matzo, made a face, and asked if there were any dinner rolls instead.
“No rolls,” said Lewyn. “No bread.”
“Maybe in the kitchen?” said Mark.
“No, no.” Lewyn was shaking his head. “You can’t bring bread in here.”
“Why not?” said Jonas.
Lewyn’s head hurt. It was like having to explain gravity.
Then the rabbi switched on her mic and the lost afikomen was invoked.
For the next ten minutes, the room erupted in childlike glee, as roughly half of its occupants leapt to their feet and tore around the building’s ground floor. Lewyn, who seemed incapable of motion, listened to the sounds they made, the yelped encouragement as curtains were pulled aside, books displaced along the bookshelves. Then, a jolt of victorious laughter from the other side of the doorway as a knot of ZBT brothers returned, bearing their prize. This they presented to the rabbi, with a promise that the ransom would be donated to the Jewish Peace Fellowship, so she should feel free to double it. The negotiation continued for a few good-natured minutes, with a circle of cheerleading onlookers.
“I don’t get this,” said Mark.
“Wait,” said Sawyer. “Are they doing a deal or something?”
“Technically it’s a ransom.”
The girl in the blue sweatshirt was back. Lewyn looked up into her face. She was laughing through her disapproval.
“Didn’t you prep these guys?” She stood between Jonas and Mark. She was so little, she barely rose above their very blond heads. “Never mind, we’re all strangers in a strange land. All away from home, so we try to make it fun. Witness the stampede of regressed adults crawling under the tables. You didn’t want to try?”
“I didn’t realize,” said the Virginian, with what looked like real regret. “But you know, I’d have felt bad if I’d been the one who found it.”
The girl raised an eyebrow. “Non-Jewish guilt,” she said. “How refreshing.”
“Is it over now?” Mark asked, and the girl shook her little head.
“No. There’s a bit more. You should stay if you can.”