Personal, it is not. National, it is.

IN CONVERSATION with a friend who is no longer observant, he made the point that he feels seder night is a canned Jewish ritual. For him, it doesn’t hold meaning. There is nothing personal about the stories; seder night is not about a meaningful experience or personal story of redemption a particular family can relate to. Rather, it is a scripted booklet written by the Rabbis, penned long ago. Out of touch.

Then, he said, there’’s that “kol dichfin” hospitality citation inaugurating the seder, in Aramaic, the lingua franca of the time, so as to assure it is understood by all, that anyone and everyone is invited, when in reality, that is not the case at all. And if one received a knock at the door by some random stranger, the last thing one would do is let them in.

Plus, the whole Ma Nishtana theme bothered him. He felt it was contrived. It’’s one thing to encourage questioning from children —— that is a good pedagogical idea. Quite another to have a set of contrived questions pre-written, which children memorize. And this, touted in the name of encouraging children to question. It bothered him. In his words, “the seder felt phony.”

I countered that I thought the Haggadah the Rabbis had designed was brilliant. Here we are thousands of years later, still talking about the Exodus, a night when we start a dialogue with the next generation about the meaning of our Jewishness and becoming a people; and not just that, but remarkably, Passover is the most observed Jewish holiday. It is a night of passing Our Story of the Jewish People down to the next generation.

This tradition of “in every generation one must see himself as though he departed from Egypt” was alive and well. Even though when the Passover of Temple times was no longer able to be observed ritually, the Rabbis found a way to re-invent Passover and keep it relevant for us.

As thousands of Jews around the world sat down to their seders each year, we were united in something special about this mysterious night.

THE TRUTH was, though, that my friend made some good points. The Haggadah, the Seder, is all about an event that happened thousands of years ago. In all honesty, can we really relate to it? It would be more personal and relevant to talk about personal redemptions, or even more recent national redemptions.

And that Ma Nishtana, he’’s right. It is rigged.

He got me thinking, and I started reading.

Turns out, regarding “Ma Nishtana” — what has become the cornerstone of children’’s educational symbol on seder night, was originally written as a last resort. It is not the original intention of the Rabbis that it be a universal song of four set questions, the way it has become.

The Talmud records that a second goblet of wine should be poured. Why? As a way of catalyzing the conversation of our people and passing it on to the next generation, as a way of reaching out to the child at the seder by arousing his or her curiosity in the hope that the child will notice the unusual goblet added to the typical kiddush goblet. The second cup should be the trigger in helping the child notice something different was taking place. If however, the child is unresponsive to this new added stimulus, and is not provoked to inquire about it, Rashi teaches that the father should teach his child the Ma Nishtana. So it seems that authentic curiosity and questioning is the pedagogical goal of the seder for children, not memorizing pre-set questions.

Believe me, I live for the children’s pleasure of reciting the Ma Nishtana with pride for the first or second time. It is so sweetly precious.

But the original rabbinic goal, it seems, was to cultivate individual questions from the children, not to have them come prepared.

More important, when it comes to the classic questions of the Ma Nishtana formula, as Elie Wiesel puts it: “And then there is my own anguish: What can we do so as not to forget the question?”

When it comes to the general story of the Exodus from Egypt, it’s true, we really can’t relate personally. Yet, each year it comes alive for us over again; each year we remember and in our small way re-experience the idea of the redemption. It’s imprinted on our collective consciousness and identity as a people. Personal, it’s not. But national, it is.

And that, it seems, was the goal of the seder.

UPON EXAMINING the narratives in the Bible when the Israelites celebrate Pesach, each example is relevant to that particular time. Not counting the actual Exodus story, each celebration thereafter is tinged by contemporaneous circumstances. For example, the concern of a group of people unable to celebrate Pesach in the right time due to impurity, thus introducing “Pesach Shenim” the opportunity to offer the Pascal sacrifice a month later. Then, led by Joshua, when the Israelites enter the Land of Israel, the Pesach celebration is linked with circumcision. Later, when it is re-enacted by Chizkiyahu and Yoshiyahu, Pesach is correlated with repentance and the art of preparation. In the times of Ezra, it is celebrated with a sense of return from exile, of reconnecting to the land, as a theme of the holiday.

In each Biblical instance, Pesach is associated with a particular historical context.

Come the Rabbis post-Biblically and neutralize the story, creating a generic formula for remembering the Exodus from Egypt.

Indeed, it’’s not personal. Yet, year in year out, it is passed on.

Perhaps therein lies its wisdom.

If the narrative of the Haggadah, or the celebration of the redemptive exodus of Pesach were contingent upon or connected to the personal, to that which is currently relevant, perhaps, in an ironic twist, that is precisely when it would become irrelevant.

For what is relevant for one generation, is not necessarily so for another.

So the Rabbis created a blueprint. The fleshing out of what is relevant is up to each generation. But the structure of the way to remember the Exodus remains, and is one and the same for us all.

IN OUR generation, we will grapple with how to ensure the memory of the Holocaust is passed on to the next generation, and to future generations. It is the charge of our time.

In our generation, we don’t need a formulaic way to remember the Holocaust. Survivors walk among us; their mere existence or tattooed arms are experience enough to connect and relate us to the harrowing, indescribable tragedy. Their very own eyewitness stories of horror and heroism are shared with us from their very lips. Remembering the Holocaust is a natural act and identity for our generation.

Again, from Elie Weisel: “More than any generation before, my contemporaries have known not only a paroxysm of evil, but also the generalization of a promise; not only the Kingdom of Night, but also the rebirth of a dream . . .”

But what about future generations? The ones who won’’t know a Bubbie or a Zadie who endured the Holocaust? There is the danger of the memory of the Holocaust fading when it is no longer personal or relevant, just like the Pesach observances in various periods of Biblical history that were interwoven with the personal experiences of their time.

This, perhaps, was the struggle of the Rabbis. Finding a way to keep alive and keep bringing through the generations the story of the exile in and Exodus from Egypt, the foundational birth story of our people.

So while in Biblical times, each Pesach celebration was particularly relevant to a set of generational circumstances of the time, the Rabbis came along and developed for us an experiential night that is not particularly personal, yet because of that has stood the test of time.

EACH YEAR, and each generation, for one night, if only an echo of an echo of that night long ago, we try to remember, try to find empathy within ourselves. For one night, we try to transport ourselves to another time and place.

If only artificially in its structure.

But hopefully, somehow within ourselves, authentically, too.

Elie Weisel expresses it best: “The seder is, above all, a story. Our story. It belongs to all of us. In New York and Paris, Casablanca and Jerusalem, wherever Jews are Jews, we perform the same rituals tonight. We invoke the same images, eat the same matzot, and together welcome our illustrious visitor, the prophet Elijah.”

Throughout the centuries, the seder has come to embrace styles and practices of various traditions. Certain Oriental communities open the evening with a dramatic rendering of the story: A man enters dressed as a wanderer, carrying a bag upon his shoulders. Someone at the table — a child, perhaps, asks him where he comes from.

“From the land of Egypt,” he replies.

“Where are you going?”

“To the land of my ancestors,” he says.

They all exclaim, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

He is invited to sit down, and only then do they begin the narrative.

“Let us start together.”

To all of you, my dear readers — and the entire House of Israel, I wish a joyous Pesach.

Copyright © 2016 by the Intermountain Jewish News