Two Sedarim
2026-Apr-04, Saturday 21:01![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
This year, because ![[instagram.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/profile_icons/instagram.png)
britshlez wasn't hosting her usual seder, and because sashagee didn't want us to host a seder what with everything that had happened in the last month, so I signed up for some of the household sedarim that Mishkan members were offering. One was on the south side in Hyde Park, and initially I was the only one going but when Mishkan got back to me and said that the organizers preferred that families attend, I signed up Laila too. The second one was just me.
First Seder:
I had never met the hostess or most of the people there, and Laila had also never met anyone there. The hostess had a five-year-old daughter and told me that she was excited to meet Laila, but in the end, Laila spent most of the seder just sitting on my lap and burying her head in my neck whenever anyone asked her a question, including when the hostess was trying to engage her. The other kids were mostly much more raucous--probably one reason Laila was a bit nervous--and the hostess would occasionally ask some questions about how the seder worked, which was the kids' cues to all yell over each other in the hope of getting candy. That really got Laila's attention.
I had to wrangle Laila near the end, when she wandered off to go find toys to play with, so I didn't get to talk that much to the other adults. But I did have a nice time. Laila even ate the karpas dipped in salt water! Now sure, she ate a ton of the potato chips too--apparently in Russia they used potatoes traditionally as the karpas--but she ate the parsley and I'm proud of her for that. I've never had to worry about her being a picky eater.
Second Seder:
This was a grown-ups only seder, and so it was a big more disorganized because there were no kids and therefore they wouldn't lever into that disorganization and shatter everything into pieces. The hostess had written up her own hagaddah...and we ended up skipping around three-quarters of it because we started late, people were getting hungry, and we wanted to get to dinner. There was more discussion this time, about what freedom means to me and more about our lives--it actually turned out there was another person there who had had infantile spasms as a children, so she was very happy to hear that Laila had come through without permanent damage. She also kept kosher and was similarly disappointed when a bunch of people had not read the hostess's email and brought dessert with butter in it.
These was not like the old sedarim I hosted, where we'd start at five and talk for so long that we wouldn't eat until ten. People at the first seder actually talked about how much they missed those old discussion-focused sedarim, and I miss them too. But it's going to be a while before we can do those again--the social expectations that let adults hold the sedarim the way they wanted to and the kids just had to deal with it are fading in modern America. So we have potato chips and quiz sessions.
I don't want to turn this into a big post about tradition (maybe that should be its own post?), so I'll cut it off there. Because we were rushed in both sedarim, we skipped some parts I really liked. We didn't do the plagues. We didn't sing Ḥad Gadya at either seder and didn't do the third or fourth cups of wine. But I had a lovely time at both sedarim. Hopefully next year I'll be able to host (in Jerusalem) but I'm glad these were there for me this year.
britshlez wasn't hosting her usual seder, and because sashagee didn't want us to host a seder what with everything that had happened in the last month, so I signed up for some of the household sedarim that Mishkan members were offering. One was on the south side in Hyde Park, and initially I was the only one going but when Mishkan got back to me and said that the organizers preferred that families attend, I signed up Laila too. The second one was just me.First Seder:
I had never met the hostess or most of the people there, and Laila had also never met anyone there. The hostess had a five-year-old daughter and told me that she was excited to meet Laila, but in the end, Laila spent most of the seder just sitting on my lap and burying her head in my neck whenever anyone asked her a question, including when the hostess was trying to engage her. The other kids were mostly much more raucous--probably one reason Laila was a bit nervous--and the hostess would occasionally ask some questions about how the seder worked, which was the kids' cues to all yell over each other in the hope of getting candy. That really got Laila's attention.
I had to wrangle Laila near the end, when she wandered off to go find toys to play with, so I didn't get to talk that much to the other adults. But I did have a nice time. Laila even ate the karpas dipped in salt water! Now sure, she ate a ton of the potato chips too--apparently in Russia they used potatoes traditionally as the karpas--but she ate the parsley and I'm proud of her for that. I've never had to worry about her being a picky eater.
Second Seder:
This was a grown-ups only seder, and so it was a big more disorganized because there were no kids and therefore they wouldn't lever into that disorganization and shatter everything into pieces. The hostess had written up her own hagaddah...and we ended up skipping around three-quarters of it because we started late, people were getting hungry, and we wanted to get to dinner. There was more discussion this time, about what freedom means to me and more about our lives--it actually turned out there was another person there who had had infantile spasms as a children, so she was very happy to hear that Laila had come through without permanent damage. She also kept kosher and was similarly disappointed when a bunch of people had not read the hostess's email and brought dessert with butter in it.
These was not like the old sedarim I hosted, where we'd start at five and talk for so long that we wouldn't eat until ten. People at the first seder actually talked about how much they missed those old discussion-focused sedarim, and I miss them too. But it's going to be a while before we can do those again--the social expectations that let adults hold the sedarim the way they wanted to and the kids just had to deal with it are fading in modern America. So we have potato chips and quiz sessions.
I don't want to turn this into a big post about tradition (maybe that should be its own post?), so I'll cut it off there. Because we were rushed in both sedarim, we skipped some parts I really liked. We didn't do the plagues. We didn't sing Ḥad Gadya at either seder and didn't do the third or fourth cups of wine. But I had a lovely time at both sedarim. Hopefully next year I'll be able to host (in Jerusalem) but I'm glad these were there for me this year.
