Rabbi Yaier Lehrer
ylehrer@gmail.com
412-820-7000
April 18, 2025
Not every Jew loves Passover. From the food restrictions to the extraordinary effort it takes to prepare for the holiday, not to mention the expense, makes the holiday the most work intensive and restrictive of all the holidays. But I am not one of those people. This has always been one of my favorite holidays. And this past week I got a chance to share my feelings with people who have never observed the holiday at all.
I drove to a town almost an hour away from the city of Pittsburgh to a private Christian School to share the background of the holiday and specifically of the seder. The group that assembled was kindergarten through sixth grade and their school principal gave each of them a paper plate and a set of stickers for every step of the seder.
Each time we talked about one of the items on the plate, the students found the appropriate sticker and put it on their plate so that each of them would have a seder plate when they left. They had interesting questions and remained engaged throughout. But the best part for each of them was when they all tasted matzah for the first time and almost everyone actually liked it. More than one of the students told me they were going to ask their mothers to get some. They even liked the charred bits of shmura matzah.
This all reminded me of an incident a few years ago where our congregation was serving food at a Christian mission. The director asked me to write out the motzi/blessing over bread on the blackboard so that those present could recite it before eating bread. Those about to eat were clearly moved by the ability to recite these words. They didn’t know what the words meant, but they understood the meaning of what was happening. They understood the gratitude in the words, and the importance of showing gratitude for a meal that they had weekly at this mission that they would not otherwise have. the same real gratitude that is sometimes missing from some of our simplest blessings.
All of these people appreciated the obvious joy, beauty and deep meaning of Jewish rituals, those rituals that many Jews take for granted and do them by rote, sometimes without remembering the meaning that others doing it for the first time can easily appreciate. Perhaps if we performed our rituals and said our blessings as if we were doing them for the very first time, we could appreciate and love our rituals more. And when we appreciate them we will do them better, more often and with real joy and meaning.
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach
Rabbi Yaier Lehrer
Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation. Abraham Verghese