Passover

The Seder, step by step

Fifteen stages, in a fixed order, worked out roughly two thousand years ago. What each one is doing, and how to lead an evening for people who have never done this.

Before anything else: the table

In the middle sits the Seder plate. Under it, or beside it, three whole matzot separated by cloth. The arrangement of the plate differs between communities; the one used in Chabad follows the Arizal, with the six items in a particular geometry on top of the covered matzot:

• Zeroa — a roasted shank bone or chicken neck, for the Passover offering. Not eaten.
• Beitzah — a roasted egg, for the festival offering, and, by long association, for mourning the Temple.
• Maror — bitter herbs. Romaine lettuce, horseradish, or both.
• Charoset — a paste of apple, nuts and wine, the colour and texture of mortar.
• Karpas — a vegetable for dipping. Chabad custom uses raw onion; potato is extremely common elsewhere.
• Chazeret — a second portion of bitter herbs, for the sandwich later.

Also on the table: salt water, a wine cup for each person, a large cup for Elijah, and a cushion or pillow on each chair. You lean to the left when drinking the four cups and eating the matzah, korech and afikoman — because reclining is how free people ate in the Roman world, and the entire evening is an argument that you are one.

The fifteen steps

1. Kadesh

Kiddush over the first cup, with shehecheyanu on the first night. Everyone drinks, reclining left. This is the moment the evening starts and it is worth pausing on: nobody has explained anything yet, and already there is wine.

2. Urchatz

Hands are washed as for bread — but with no blessing, because no bread is coming yet. Practice varies on whether everyone washes or only the leader; do what the household does.

The point of a wash that leads nowhere is to make somebody ask why. That is the mechanism of the whole first hour.

3. Karpas

A small piece of vegetable — less than an olive’s volume — dipped in salt water, with the blessing over produce of the earth. Salt water for tears; the dipping, again, so that children ask.

Practical note for hosts: this is the last food until well over an hour from now. Be generous with it, and put out olives, celery and vegetables for the children.

4. Yachatz

The middle of the three matzot is broken in two. The smaller piece goes back between the other two. The larger becomes the afikoman, is wrapped, and is put aside for the end of the meal.

Broken bread, not whole: the Haggadah is about to call it lechem oni, the bread of poverty. The best half is being saved for later, which is what people who have very little do.

5. Maggid — the telling

This is the Seder. Everything before it is setup and everything after it is dinner. In sequence:

• Ha Lachma Anya — the matzah is lifted and the door is figuratively opened: let all who are hungry come and eat.
• Mah Nishtanah — the four questions, asked by the youngest who can. Not a quiz. It is the formal request that gives the leader permission to answer.
• Avadim Hayinu — we were slaves. The answer starts here and is required to start with the bad part before it gets to the good part.
• The four sons — wise, wicked, simple, and the one who does not know how to ask. Four different children get four different answers, which is the Haggadah’s advice on how to run the evening.
• The story itself, told as a line-by-line expansion of four verses from Deuteronomy rather than as a narrative from Exodus. This surprises people. The Haggadah is a commentary, not a retelling.
• The ten plagues — a drop of wine is removed from the cup at each one. A full cup is joy; you do not get to have a full cup while reciting somebody else’s suffering.
• Dayenu — fifteen stages, each of which would have been enough. Everybody knows the tune whether or not they know the words.
• Rabban Gamliel’s three — anybody who has not said Pesach, matzah and maror has not discharged the obligation. So they are named, and the matzah and maror are pointed at.
• The first half of Hallel, then the second cup.

The obligation, stated in the Haggadah itself: in every generation a person must see themselves as though they personally came out of Egypt. Not as though they are commemorating an event. As though they were there.

6. Rachtzah

Wash again, this time with the blessing, because bread is now coming. Do not talk between washing and eating.

7 & 8. Motzi and Matzah

Two blessings, said while holding the matzot: the ordinary blessing over bread, and then the specific one al achilat matzah. Then a measured amount of matzah is eaten, from the top matzah and the broken middle one, reclining. This is the only biblical obligation to eat anything all evening.

9. Maror

A measured amount of bitter herbs, dipped in charoset and shaken off, with a blessing. Eaten without reclining — you do not eat the food of slavery in the posture of a free person.

10. Korech

Matzah and maror together, in a sandwich, the way Hillel is recorded as having eaten them when the Temple stood. Reclining. No blessing; a short paragraph is said instead explaining what is being copied.

11. Shulchan Orech

Dinner. Many begin with the egg from the Seder plate dipped in salt water. Chabad custom — and a number of other communities — avoids roasted meat at the Seder meal, so that nothing resembles the Passover offering being brought outside the Temple.

One thing a guest may notice at a Chabad table: no matzah balls, no matzah brei, no matzah touching liquid at all. That is gebrokts, and Chabad custom avoids it for the first seven days. It is a custom, it is not expected of you, and nobody is scoring anybody.

12. Tzafun

The afikoman is retrieved — usually after a negotiation with a child — and a measured amount is eaten, reclining, before midnight. Nothing is eaten after it, so that the taste of matzah is what stays. Drinking is limited from here too.

13. Barech

Grace after meals, then the third cup. Elijah’s cup is filled and the front door is opened. Shefoch chamatcha is said — a hard passage, asking that God pour out wrath on those who destroyed us — and the door being open while it is said is the point. It is said in the open, not muttered.

14. Hallel

The rest of Hallel, then Hallel HaGadol and Nishmat, then the fourth cup with its closing blessing. By now it is late and the singing has usually improved.

15. Nirtzah

Chasal siddur Pesach — the Seder is complete, in accordance with its law. Then “Next year in Jerusalem.” Then, in most homes, the songs: Echad Mi Yodea, Chad Gadya, and however long anyone wants to keep going.

On the second night, the counting of the Omer begins after nightfall — forty-nine days from here to Shavuot.

Running one for people who have never been

A first Seder for a guest is either the reason they come back to Jewish life or the reason they decide it is not for them, and the difference is almost entirely about hosting rather than about knowledge.

• Say at the start what is going to happen. “Four cups of wine, a lot of talking, dinner in about ninety minutes, finished around eleven.” People relax enormously when they know the shape.
• Everybody gets a Haggadah with English on the facing page. Matching editions, so page numbers work.
• Give everyone something to read. Short paragraphs, in English, going round the table. Guests who read a line are participants; guests who watch are an audience.
• Ask the questions out loud. Why is there a bone on the plate? Why did we wash and not eat? A Seder where the leader asks is a Seder where guests will risk asking.
• Cut commentary, not story. If it is running long, drop the layers of interpretation. Do not drop Avadim Hayinu, the plagues, or Rabban Gamliel’s three.
• Feed people early. Generous karpas, vegetables on the table, and children fed something before it starts.
• Have grape juice out and offer it without ceremony, so that nobody has to explain themselves.
• Let the children run it as much as they will. The afikoman hunt, the plagues with plastic frogs, the questions. The Haggadah is explicit that the evening is engineered around them.
• Do not fix people’s Hebrew. Ever. Not once.

If you would rather come to ours

Our community Seder is free, and it is built for exactly this — run in Hebrew and English, with Haggadot on the table and someone explaining as it goes. If you are on your own, or new to the area, or have simply never done this, that is the normal reason people come and not an unusual one.

Before any of it, the kitchen: preparing your home for Passover.

Questions people ask

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