I assume there are “family plans”? …
My parents had a Catholic Haggadah back in the 1960s. We did an adaptation of the seder year after year—but always on Holy Thursday, to keep it tied to Easter. We were told the Last Supper was a seder, so let’s do like Jesus. There was the shankbone, which was the only occasion we ever had lamb (just as St. Patrick’s Day was the only day of the year my father would tolerate my mother’s boiled corned beef). My mom made a quite passable haroset, our “bitter herbs” were plain parsley, our Haggadah was somehow Christianized. The first time I ever drank wine was at the Holy Thursday seder a month before my First Communion. I was 7.
Nowadays the cry would be cultural appropriation. But in those days—post-Holocaust and immediately post-Vatican II—Catholics were making a big push to get right with Jews, and Catholic-adapted seders were one such approach.
My synagogue charges dues to a family. There are different fees by age, i think. And if course there are discounts for those who can’t afford the dues.
As Jews are traditionally forbidden from handling or carrying money on the Sabbath, and from writing on the Sabbath, it’s basically impossible to fund a synagogue on donations when people show up.
i guess that is also the rationale behind the “no (donations) basket going around” in synagogue
Right. We are literally breaking biblical law if we put money into a donation basket. So we don’t do that.
The first time I saw a donation basket at a church service i thought it was really tacky. I didn’t realize at the time that was their principal funding method. $75 for a seder including a good meal sounds fine to me.
Anyhow, as promised, here’s a description of my family seder. This year, my BIL hosted. In my family, the secret is a time to pull out all the stops and serve really good food. He did a dish my father cooked for passover a couple of times, chicken marbella. With asparagus, hollandaise sauce, and fennel salad. I brought desert, a lemon angel pie and a chocolate oblivion truffle torte. My son brought some matzo crack he’d been given (that’s the usual name for matzo covered with toffee and chocolate, and sprinkled with nuts.) We had a good red wine, Manischewitz, and Kedem grape juice. Kedem is the best grape juice, and the Welch’s passover grape juice (it’s labeled kosher for passover) is better than what they sell the rest of the year. I have no idea why. My sister’s charoset includes chopped prunes and wine as well as apples and walnuts, and is delicious. For bitter herbs we used thinly sliced fresh horseradish root. The more you chew, the hotter it is. Parsley for fresh herbs to dip. Overcooked hard boiled eggs because i used a bad recipe. (And rarely boil eggs.)
Oh, yeah, the service. We use a Haggadah published by the Reform Jewish group in 1975. I don’t love it, and I’m actually planning to write my own for next year, but it will be based heavily on this text.
Ours is also mostly English, with a few standard prayers in Hebrew. We, too, have transliterations and translations. The text has stage directions (“leader” and “group”, mostly.) We take turns reading the leader’s part, going around the table. And everyone reads the “group” part.
It starts with some text about why we are doing this. Then we light the holiday candles and drink the first of four glasses of wine. (Grape juice counts as wine for ritual purposes.)
Then we dip the karpas, then share the middle matzo, and eat Mardi with maror, and with maror and haroset. I tried to get the dog to read the four questions, but she declined, so my sister, youngest of 4, who got stuck reading the four questions for years, made my younger son read them. He used a fake whiney childlike voice to do so. We read the four children part together, although in other years we’ve given the parts to individuals.
Then there’s a bit of history/Bible. A cup raised but not drink from. And we get to the plagues. The text leading up to the transitional part felt especially relevant this year:
Each drop off wine we pour is hope and prayer
That people will cast out the plagues that threaten everyone
Everywhere they are found, begging in our own hearts
- The making of war
- The teaching of hate and violence
- Despoliation of the earth
- Perversion of justice and of government
- Fomenting of vice and crime
- Neglect of human needs
- Oppression of nations and peoples
- Corruption of culture
- Subjugation of science, learning, and human discourse
- The erosion of freedoms
This book was published in 1975…
Then we poured our ten drops of wine for the traditional ten plagues, sang parts of dayenu, and discussed the ritual objects on the seder plate. Our plate includes a shank bone. I keep it in the freezer, as we don’t eat lamb shanks very often. Also discussed are matzo and maror. When i update the text, I’ll add the ritual orange.
Some representative stuff about not oppressing strangers, and about rejoicing in the ending of slavery. Then the second glad of wine.
Then there’s the highlight of the evening, the meal. And the desserts. And finally, the hunt for the afikomen. The prize this year was a passover basket (hey, it was even blue and white) featuring a lot of kosher for passover sweets and an enormous chocolate bunny. (Hey, Lindt chocolate is delicious, and they are seasonally available.)
We have a very abbreviated traditional grace after the meal. (It’s called something like “benching” in yiddish) The third glass of wine, and the invitation to Elijah. I’ve always wondered why we invite him in after the meal, that seems wrong.
Then we chant (in English) who knows one. We do this as a competition, with each person trying to get through it without drawing a breath. Then we chant “an only kid” together. Then we drink the fourth cup of wine.
When i was a kid, we used a Haggadah printed around WWII, when American Jews were extremely grateful to be in America. And at the end, in addition to Jewish songs, it included a lot of American patriotic anthems, and we usually sang some of those, too. I consider this a family custom, so we still end with “America the Beautiful”, which is one of my favorites, and eat to sing.
One of my sister’s roommates back in the day used to make matzo brei, and I really liked it. Only way I like matzoh other than spread with butter.
We get one of the Israeli brands, which taste a lot better. My preference is Aviv, but i couldn’t find it this year. We got yehuda this year, which tastes a little burnt, but at least it tastes like over toasted wheat, and not like paste.
I haven’t made it in years. I’ll have to look for that brand when all the passover displays in the market are up. Missed it this year.
Mmm, leftover chicken marbella for lunch. 
Halacha matters to many branches of Judaism and many Jews. Reform and Reconstructionist aren’t big fans of unexamined halacha.
Do be aware that Judaism is good about providing certain exceptions for the sake of life. I worked at an orthodox school and one Saturday parked my car a few blocks away. I hadn’t pulled my emergency brake far enough and when I got out, the car started to roll. I stopped it with my foot, but then couldn’t move. Two of mu high schoolers walked by and I asked them to pull the brake. They wouldn’t, saying it would violate the Sabbath. Eventually, a passerby pulled the brake for me. On Monday, I asked the head rabbi of the school about this and he said the boys had misinterpreted and that getting stuck like that was a threat that overrode the prohibition on work. (He didn’t point out that in his opinion, I shouldn’t have been driving on the sabbath.) He had a talk with the boys to clarify this. Similarly, those who are pregnant or ill don’t have to fast on fast days, or if, say, you have a med that needs to be taken with food or water, you may do so (though everyone I’ve known who is religious/culturally observant who’s done this eats or drinks privately and at a minimum).
As long as we’re telling Seder stories: the group of households I do seder with have been doing it for 30 years, since before my time. We have our own Haggadah (hit me up for a copy if you like 
), almost all in English. It’s a pretty loose translation, and includes a lot of nontraditional material, but we do hit all 15 elements of the traditional seder in one way or another. It’s vegetarian, and potluck, but the host is a gourmet cook and always makes an amazing main course. Last year he made a Gazan speciality, this year it was Iranian. We use the beet on the seder plate, as well as the orange for LGBT+ and the olive for peace in the Middle East. This year our hosts added some wrinkles in honor of April Fool’s Day, initially giving us sugar water instead of salt water to dip the parsley in.
When I first started going to this seder, nobody had kids. This was the first time in about 20 years nobody under 13 was present. We didn’t have a “kid’s table”, and the teens participated in the adult conversation. It was a great seder, insofar as the reading of the text led into a real conversation about our personal and collective need for liberation.
It went about four hours, and we were well into the second half before dinner was served. Fortunately, we break with tradition by having appetizers available from the start!
Olive oil and sea salt works well too. Or chocolate, or hummus, or anything that disguises the essential matzoness! 
For what it’s worth, consider chips and salsa…
The other day I made an offhand comment on a Jewish subreddit that, based on my understanding of the rules, flour tortillas should count as matzah for Passover purposes. You would think I’d pulled a pin out of a grenade.
It would have been a Passover gathering, but not a seder in the modern sense. The seder as it exists today is a product of the post-Temple rabbinic era and Jeezy Boy and his pals would have celebrated very differently - there would have been a roast lamb from the sacrificial offering, for one, and the “Hillel sandwich” would have been more like a shawarma wrap than the charoset and maror on a cracker that gets used today.
Yes, Jesus died before the destruction of the second Temple. So everyone would have traveled to Jerusalem, and the head of every household would have sacrificed a lamb at the Temple. And then taken it back to wherever his household was camping out, where they would have roasted the lamb and eaten it, finishing all of it that night.
The amount of blood must have been massive, from all those sacrifices. I wonder how the priests managed the mess: the blood, the offal, maybe a portion went to the priests, just managing the crowds must have been a major undertaking. An awful lot of people were required to bring a sacrifice all on the same day.
The streets of Jerusalem would have been packed with all the pilgrims. There would have been smoke everywhere, from roasting all those animals. There were probably wandering vendors selling matzo (which may have been a soft flatbread, not the crackers we eat today) and probably also selling live lambs to take to the Temple, and bitter herbs and fresh herbs, and haroset and oil and wine and whatever else was popular to eat during the passover pilgrimage. The whole city must have been a total zoo.
Every time I see a drawing of the priests in the Temple, their robes are snow white and the place is spotless. After I read Leviticus last year with its litany of sacrifices and descriptions of pouring blood over the altar, I imagine the real place looked more like something out of an Evil Dead movie.
And it says they were supposed to splash the blood around. It must have looked like a charnel house. Only with worse sanitation.
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[quote=“puzzlegal, post:27, topic:1028989”]
Goddam Trump
The brand i bought is also Israeli, so I don’t think this was about Trump, or tariffs, or the war. Just what the local shops chose to sell.
And their “bitter herb” would not have been horseradish.
Although quite mild in taste, lettuce was far and away the most popular bitter herb on the seder plate for generations. The more pungent horseradish became associated with Passover only in Central and Eastern Europe, where the holiday often comes at a time when leafy greens are out of season.