How to Recline

 

The Shabbat before Pesaḥ is called the Great (or Big) Shabbat, Shabbat ha-Gadol. Various explanations of this name have been offered, but the most likely one is that it reflects the practice of rabbis to speak at greater length in synagogue on this Shabbat, explaining how to prepare one’s house for the festival as well as all the do’s and don’ts that pertain to the first night itself. In this spirit, I thought it might be worthwhile to mention—this week and next—a few tips about the reading of the haggadah booklet on that first night.

 

The very existence of this booklet points to what is the central purpose of the seder, namely, the duty to tell one’s children about the exodus from Egypt. Presumably, this commandment could be fulfilled in a sentence or two, but over the years a (fairly) fixed text has developed, along with a number of ritual acts that accompany its reading.

 

Which brings me to my first tip. It’s not always easy to keep little children interested and involved in what’s going on, and it’s particularly hard for them to sit at the table for an extended period. But actually, doing so is not a requirement of the seder, in fact, you could make quite the opposite case.

 

As is well known, the seder itself is partially modeled on the ancient Greco-Roman banquet, whereby people used to lie on special couches as they ate and/or drank. We still have a remnant of this practice in “reclining” at the seder table—which nowadays seems mostly to consist of sticking a cushion or pillow on people’s armrests or chair-backs. This isn’t exactly reclining, but what else can we do? We don’t have those special Greco-Roman couches anymore, and we certainly couldn’t have everyone reclining on the floor around the dinner table. How could you even see the seder plate or do all the other things that are required?

 

But you probably have another table in your house that’s much closer to the ground: that coffee table in the living room. The custom I grew up with (and I know we were hardly alone) was to seat everyone around the coffee table: grownups sat on cushions on the living room floor or else sat on the couch or living room chairs—either way more closely approximating real “reclining”—while the kids stretched out on pillows, mattresses, or whatever else would fit.

 

This, in my experience, is a great way to do the first part of the seder—everything right up to the shulḥan arukh, the actual meal, when everyone moves from the coffee table to the dinner table. It certainly adds to the feeling of specialness of the evening and arouses the interest of even a very young child, which, after all, is what this evening is all about. True, if you have a large family and/or many guests, this may not be altogether practical, especially in a small-sized living room. But for many families, it is altogether workable and a great help in carrying out the evening’s central mitzvah. The actual telling-about-the-exodus, that is, reading the haggadah itself, is thus mostly done reclining around the coffee table.

 

As for how the haggadah is read, the custom in some communities is to have one person read through the whole text nonstop. If you’re reading this in English, this is probably not your custom, and to my mind, this is all to the good. It’s perfectly fine to have different people read different parts of the haggadah as well as to take time to ask questions about the text itself.

 

But do you really know the right answers? I hope to offer a few further tips on that topic next week.

 

Shabbat shalom!