“Our Chabad friends and our friends over at Koach have their own traditions when they gather for Pesach here on campus, but for those of us who come to Judaism from the Reform movement, or the Reconstructionist traditions, or are just beginning a spiritual journey in Judaism and feel the need for a more open and, dare I say it, personal experience of the Passover celebration and ritual, you have come to the right place! We want to thank Tamar and Rochelle, and David Grodstein—where are you, David? I haven’t seen you … yes! Shalom, David! Happy Pesach!—all of you, your hard work is so much appreciated by us all. Now, it’s a part of the Seder tradition to welcome the stranger to our table, and to link our story to the larger story we all share. When one suffers, everyone suffers. When one of us is still enslaved, no one is really free. That’s the big moral of the Seder. Of course, we’re Jewish, so we specialize in disagreeing about what things really mean. My mother, for example, used to say, this is what it boils down to: They hated us. They tried to kill us. We’re still here. Now let’s eat!”
Mark, on Lewyn’s right, exploded in laughter. Lewyn turned to look at him, a little mystified. It hadn’t seemed that funny to him. His own family Seders had been rather joyless, with everyone dressed in uncomfortable “nice” clothes and the table set with special, breakable stuff. There had been long recitations separating the hungry children （he, at least, was always hungry） from the good smells in the kitchen, which would only be served by a uniformed maid once the many speeches and questions and dripping of wine and holding up of green parsley had been completed. His father and his uncle Bruce Krieger, his aunt Debbie’s husband, had recited in Hebrew, from memory, while he and Sally and Harrison （and, it was reassuring to note, his Krieger cousins, who actually had been bar mitzvahed） all stumbled along with the phonetic version, printed beneath the Hebrew in their matching booklets. （This reminded Lewyn of the tiny possibility that his sister might actually be here, in this room with so many other Jews of Cornell, and he looked around warily, but there was no Sally to be seen.）
The rabbi, holding her mic delicately between two figures, now said kiddush and things began to move along briskly: the karpas, the middle matzo, the storytelling, the explanation of the Seder plate （that orange, it turned out, had to do with the inclusion of all sexualities and genders, a notion that made one of Lewyn’s frat boy guests look vaguely ill）， the drip, drip of sickly sweet red wine from their fingertips to their paper plates. Mark nearly gagged when he bit into the maror, and Jonas laughed at him.
The “youngest child” was the rabbi’s little boy, who spoke with a lisp that made most of the girls in the room say “Awww” in such unison it might have been rehearsed. The four sons were performed by four students, one on an electric keyboard, as a peppy vaudeville number.
What does the Seder mean?
What does the Seder mean to you?
What is this?
Um … what?
（It was supposed to be clever, but it wasn’t. Not every musical Jewish boy was Stephen Sondheim.）
Then, finally, it was time to eat. Out from the kitchen they brought trays with bowls of soup, and Lewyn had the indelible experience of watching his guests confront their first matzo balls.
“Oh, I know what this is,” said Jonas. “This is that balls thing. But what’s it made of?”
Lewyn explained, pointing to the matzo, still on the table.
“Right,” said the Virginian. “The crackers.”
“The point is that they aren’t crackers,” Lewyn said.
“These balls are made of crackers?”
“And soda water,” said one of the blue-sweatshirted girls. She was leaning forward, between him and Jonas, with a heavy bowl of Israeli salad. “Makes them fluffy.”
“So … wait, they are made of crackers?” said the boy on Mark’s other side.