Seder in the time of intergenerational strife
The Passover Seder offers an opportunity for parents and children struggling to talk about Israel and Jewish identity. Start with these four questions.
This essay was published in Haaretz:
As families across the Jewish world prepare to sit together at the Passover Seder, I keep thinking about a moment I witnessed at synagogue last year. Just after the rabbi began his sermon assailing young people’s ignorance on Israel and antisemitism, a woman in her late twenties stood up from the pews and stepped quietly outside the sanctuary. The scene captured the painful and widening inter-generational rift since Hamas’s October 7 attack, and Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza.
Many young Jews wouldn’t have entered that synagogue service to begin with. Some of them, including many raised in deeply committed Jewish families, at Jewish camp, day schools, and campus Hillels, are struggling to reconcile their Jewish identities with the devastation wrought by the Jewish state upon the people of Gaza.
Some have adopted disruption and protest as levers to push communal decision makers away from a zero-sum view of Jewish safety. Others have opted to remain quietly within their communities despite their discomfort. Still others have seceded from Jewish life altogether, unwilling to sacrifice their humanistic and liberal values on the altar of Israeli ultranationalism or allow claims of antisemitism to be used as a pretext for creeping American illiberalism.
At the other end of the generational expanse, many institutional and thought leaders are not impressed. Authors and philanthropists, clergy and CEOs are bewildered and heartbroken – and angry. They wonder how young adults, products of a robust and loving Jewish education, could be so blasé regarding Israel’s security threats. They see betrayal, an eagerness to gain approval from the “woke” masses. They have even described some as disloyal enemies.
This isn’t the first time Jewish generations have sat down to Seder harboring painful disagreements. In fact, the Seder, the most ancient of Jewish family rituals, seems to predict precisely our 21st century conundrum. At the end of a long night, we open the door for Elijah, representing God’s pledge – as told by Malachi – to send the prophet before the end of days to “turn the hearts of parents to children and the hearts of children to their parents.”
Had we moderns thought that our intergenerational infighting was exceptional, here come the ancients, beckoning to us from the fifth century B.C.E., reminding us that parents and children have never seen the world the same way. So hardwired are successive generations to disagree that their reconciliation is the final step before redemption.
The tradition asks: “When will parents and children understand one another?” And it answers: “When the Messiah comes.”
But the predictability of conflict doesn’t make it any easier. More than a few of my friends, some now with children of their own, have decided it’s best to simply not talk to their parents about Israel or Jewish life. They opt, understandably, for a sort of voluntary estrangement, a verbal cold peace.
Others are taking another approach. In January, IKAR, the non-denominational Jewish community in Los Angeles, recorded a podcast conversation between Melissa Balaban, the synagogue’s CEO, and her daughter Emma Wergeles about their trip together to the Occupied West Bank, where Israel has further restricted freedom of movement for Palestinians since October 7. The discussion revealed how two people could come away from the same stimuli, the same difficult images, and the same exchanges with Palestinians with different interpretations.
But both parent and child listened to the other and explained their perspectives with candor and respect, exploring the moral quandaries of Jewish power, vulnerability and responsibility. The conversation is a rare artifact, made possible because both were granted the assumption that they shared core values.
This assumption has also facilitated similar conversations with my own mom, a rabbi and teacher, whose Zionism was framed by Israel’s unlikely victory in the 1967 war and the movement to free Soviet Jewry. In Jerusalem after college, she sheltered from Iraq’s scud missiles, then watched the collapse of the Oslo Accords and the terror of the Second Intifada.
But as long as I have been politically conscious, I have grappled with a very different Jewish state – one that has lurched ever-rightward, sabotaging the prospect of a two-state solution and leaving a trail of Palestinian suffering in its wake.
My mom and I don’t paper over these differences. Just as she and her peers call on us to identify with a more vulnerable Israel, I want them to feel the moral earthquake so many of my peers feel, roused by a war that has been the deadliest ever for journalists, wiped out entire Palestinian bloodlines, and rendered more child amputees than anywhere else in the world.
These conversations aren’t just about dialogue for its own sake; for us, they’re about insisting that our leaders steer the communal machinery in a new direction, toward engaging with the full humanity of Palestinians, and moving Israel off the path of cyclical violence and endless occupation. We believe that until our community reorients, Jews will fail to protect our bodies, our conscience, and our tradition.
And yet, in the meantime, Jews cannot suspend our peoplehood. Are we really going to wait until the end of days to sit with one another? Creating a container for our conflicts, bitter and righteous as they may be, doesn’t require us to abandon our positions. After all, even Passover’s Four Children, each of whom represents a fiercely divergent way of experiencing the world, are all at the table.
Perhaps this is where we begin the Seder in this season of strain: by fulfilling the prophecy early, and turning to ask each other about the images that move us, the possibilities that frighten us, the values we can’t stand to see discarded or ignored. So here are four new questions for us to contemplate together on Seder night:
How do you measure the safety of the Jewish people, and what has most shaped that understanding?
When you think of Jewish power – once the dream of a powerless people, now embodied in a state, a military, and relative security in the West – what do you see, what do you fear, and what do you believe it should look like?
What moral responsibilities do you think Jews have because of our history? And what does it mean to heed the oft-repeated biblical commandment, so salient during Passover: do not oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt?
What do you hope the Jewish people will be a century from now, when our descendants sit down at the Seder table, and what do you most fear we might become?
Within the tradition’s greatest storytelling ritual we can examine the moral demands tugging at the Jewish people, rotating our conceptions of power and responsibility a few degrees, considering our safety and our fears from angles we haven’t before. In every other year, the Seder is a space of discussion, where younger people ask questions of their elders. This year it can also be a platform for righteous interrogation, and a step toward freedom, equality and redemption.