This spring I had the pleasure of attending 2 seders. The first one, on the first night of Passover was a small intimate one and the second night’s seder was a large, noisy one.
The small seder on Saturday night was held out in the suburbs of Stockholm and my only responsibility was to pick up and deliver the gefilte fish that had been pre-ordered. There were 6 of us there, gathered around a lovingly set table in the middle of a small living room. The oldest other guest at this dinner was a friend who had recently turned 40. I felt so honored that these young people had wished to share their seder with me. It was the first time for Ben (who did an excellent job) to lead a seder and the Haggadah we used was a relatively simple one, all in English. This of course was perfect for me – since for me, the Passover story is best told in my mother tongue – with bits of transliterated Hebrew thrown in. Because it was a Saturday we started late, after sundown at 9pm. The food, cooked by Ellen was delicious and the conversation during the evening was lively, with me adding, my old lady feminist and Reform Jew opinions, when I felt they were needed. Afterwards, all the guests were driven home through a quiet and dark Stockholm, landing me back at my apartment around 2.30 in the morning.
The first night of Passover
Twelve hours later, by 2pm in the afternoon, Håkan had deposited me and Bevin in Skarpneck for the next Seder.
This Seder was the annual Seder that I lead for my group of Jewish/American/Swedish friends or J.A.P.S. for short (Jewish American Parents in Stockholm). We have been gathering for over 25 years to celebrate Jewish holidays together and this is my Jewish family here in Stockholm. We celebrated Passover together for the first time in 1998.
This year, we were 26 people, of whom 6 of them were small children and a 3 month old baby. When we first started out so long ago, all our kids were small children. Now some of those “kids” are having kids of their own. It fills my heart that these young people still want to join us to celebrate, bringing their own children with them.
Bevin and I arrived loaded down with stuff for the seder: 8 haggadahs, boxes of matzah, a seder plate, a silver goblet, 1 Elijah cup, 2 matzah covers, candlesticks w candles. And of course food: Chicken soup & matzah balls and charoses, and the ritual foods for the 3 seder plates – parsley, horseradish, 3 roasted eggs, 3 lamb shank bones. Everyone else brings the rest of the food: raw veggies to munch with hummus or chopped liver, hard boiled eggs, lamb, roasted potatoes & parsnips, kugels, salads and a bunch of wonderful desserts including a real sponge cake. I haven’t had a real Passover sponge cake in a zillion years!!! Thank you Berta!
Finally after all the tables and chairs were in place and decorated and everyone had arrived, we sat down to tell the story of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt and to remind ourselves how important freedom is for everyone.
As every year, I have something to say before we start the seder. Here is what I said this year.
Passover Speech 2025
I want to start off by saying welcome to everyone. We made it! We are here – gathered together! Pheewww…
Every year I like to start our seder by making a small speech. Maybe that’s very vain of me – to think that I might have something important to say, but that’s the way it is. And every year, when I sit down at the computer, trying to write something, the words take a while to come.
Every year… That is probably one of the most important and yet invisible, themes of Passover. Every year we gather. Every year we tell the story. Every year we go through the same rituals of eating parsley, and charoses and matzah. And every year we talk about Freedom – to live our lives as we wish to, free from constraint.
As some of you might know, the past couple of months have been difficult for me – causing me to question my ability as a leader, as someone who can be in charge of doing things, of getting things done. For this reason, I have been giving some thought to Moses. To Moses and the idea of leadership. Moses is the invisible guest at our seder table. Moses is the person who got the whole ball rolling and yet he is the one person we do not name at our Seder. We talk about Jacob moving his clan to Egypt. We mention that Joseph became a great lord there. But Moses…nobody mentions him, at least not in the Haggadah. Its like we are not supposed to be grateful to him for what he did.
Over the last 3000 years there has been some commentary written about why he’s not mentioned in the Haggadah.
So let me name a few of those ideas:
First, maybe we don’t mention Moses, in order to emphasize that it was God that was the big kahuna.
Or maybe we don’t mention him because Moses was a humble kind of guy and didn’t want to folks to make a big fuss about him (because remember…he was present at the very first seder a year after the exodus and for a whole lot more of them while the Jews wandered in the desert for 40 years).
Or even maybe because the part that Moses played in the story was just the physical action part which took place 3000 years ago and the Seder we do today is more about the spiritual, idea of freedom, of setting oneself free.
Whatever the reason is…we still don’t mention him.
So what was Moses? Who was he?
To start with, he was a man born into one culture (race, tribe, family, clan, folk, minority or whatever you want to call it) that of the Israelite slaves, and yet he grew up and was raised within another one. He was an outsider – a favored part of Pharoah’s family but yet always knowing he was not truly family. And when he escaped Egypt and went to Midian, he married the high Priest Jethro’s daughter, Zipporah and lived there a long time with her, tending sheep. But he wasn’t a Midianite, he was still an outsider.
We also know that he had a strong sense of justice and a violent temper – He killed an Egyptian that he saw unfairly beating a Jewish slave. This was the reason he had to flee Egypt.
And he must have been humble – when the burning bush that was God told him to return to Egypt and free his people, Moses asked in his most Woody Allen voice, “Why me? I am no one and I don’t speak well”. He felt inadequate to that job but God convinced him that together with his brother Aaron’s help he could do what God commanded him to do. Like so many of us, he rose to meet the situation he was handed.
So why am I thinking this year about the invisible man at the Seder table?
I think the story of Moses as an outsider who was able to make a new home for himself in all the places that he lived is an apt story for us J.A.P.S. in general. Like Moses…Risa, Janet, David, Barbara, Marina, Sam & Rebecca, Naomi & Matt and myself, have all left our families and our countries to make a home in a foreign land. We have raised our children in this strange new place and they have grown up to call it home. This is something that Jews have been good at doing for over 2000 years.
Moses’s anger also comes to mind when I think back to some of our previous Pesach seders and how I allowed the stress and my own crankiness to get the better of me and how others have had to drag me off to a corner to cool down. I guess I’m happy I didn’t murder anybody.
And finally, I am thinking of Moses, the leader, and I ponder what does it mean to be a leader when your task is done.
In 1997, when I placed an ad in the American Woman’s Club magazine, looking for Jewish mothers to help me celebrate the Jewish holidays together, I had no idea that 28 years later we would still be sitting down together to celebrate the Passover holiday. Some of the faces around the table have changed, some have moved away and new faces and families have joined us, but, as a group we are still here and with a new generation of small bubbelas at our table.
When I placed that ad, I wanted for me and my son, Bevin, to be part of a group, a family. Granted, I have been the one bullying everyone to do what I wanted of them – when to meet, what to eat, who brings what, and how we celebrate. I feel like, just as Moses led his very unruly group of Israelites into freedom, I have led the J.A.P.S. into being Jews, celebrating our Jewishness together. I don’t know how long I can continue doing this. Eventually others will have to start to take over the tasks and I am beginning to feel like that possibility will happen. Sooner or later, we pass the torch to someone else.
I can’t say how Moses must have felt by the time he sheparded his Israelites to the edge of the promised land, but I can say that I feel proud of the work I have done to get my J.A.P.S. this far and I am sooo very glad that I have you all here, my created family, here in this foreign land to celebrate with me.
So…now that we have gotten Moses out of the way, lets start this seder like every year, by lighting the holiday lights.
J.A.P.S. Passover Seder 2025
