Adapted from ‘Seder Talk: The Conversational Haggada’
“After a good dinner, one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.”
—Oscar Wilde
On the night of the Seder, everyone is a king. Everyone is a free person. Thus, everyone is entitled to experience freedom deeply. For the poor, the problem standing between himself and the re-enactment of freedom this night is only what money can buy. We use tzedaka to make sure that this obstacle does not stand in the way.
As an illustration of this equalizing power, we turn to Emma Lazarus (1849-1887). Her family had settled in the United States in America’s colonial days. She wrote a poem whose lines would be immortalized in bronze on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, placed there in 1903. She donated the sonnet to an auction to raise funds for the statue’s pedestal and was herself an advocate for immigrant rights. “The New Colossus” compares the Statue of Liberty to the ancient Colossus of Rhodes, the largest statue in the ancient world, built to celebrate the Greek victory over Cyprus and once considered among the Seven Wonders of the World. “The New Colossus” commemorated something else, not the collapse of the strong under the more powerful, but the welcoming of the weak and the vulnerable into the sheltering arms of freedom.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
It is as if Lazarus herself had invited us through her golden door and into her dining room to participate at the family seder. And she points to the feeling that the inviter must create for the invited to feel welcome. The poem offers us an embrace; but for some, having guests is an obligation, preceded by a chilly offer that alienates even as it includes. Lazarus’s lamp, like Abraham’s position at the threshold of his tent, represents ways to seek out the stranger rather than reactively attend to his needs when he appears. The lowlier the tempest-tost immigrant, the more home matters, Lazarus suggests. The most vulnerable often become aware of their alienation only after they have been welcomed somewhere. The intake of kindness makes them aware of how truly hungry they were for warmth, for any crumb of kindness. A friend shared with me that she invited a family with a handicapped son for a Shabbat meal, and the woman broke into tears—she was so grateful. She told the hostess that such offers of company came so infrequently that they precipitated joyful weeping.
Hospitality is measured not by what we are served, but by how we are served, by whether we feel that someone is doing something for us rather than to us. New York restaurant entrepreneur Danny Meyer writes in “Setting the Table” that he looks for warmth, enthusiasm, good listening skills and excellent follow-up in employee hires and evaluates his employees accordingly. Strong interactive skills and emotional intelligence are critical in terms of the atmosphere he tries to create in every eating venue. He aims for what he calls legendary hospitality, the kind of service that makes people remember and talk. He also makes an important distinction between hospitality and service:
“Understanding the distinction between service and hospitality has been at the foundation of our success. Service is the technical delivery of a product. Hospitality is how the delivery of that product makes its recipient feel. Service is a monologue—we decide how we want to do things, and set our own standards for service. Hospitality, on the other hand, is a dialogue. To be on a guest’s side requires listening to that person with every sense, and following up with a thoughtful, gracious response. It takes both great service and great hospitality to rise to the top.”
You might read this and think it’s good advice for a business but not really for a private home. There is truth to this. Yet, when people make hospitality their business, best practices surface. Imagine that every time we invited guests we aimed for legendary hospitality. Imagine that we set that standard for our institutions, our schools, synagogues, community centers. And think about the messages we could take away and apply in our own homes. We are not yet close enough to that goal.
These hosting behaviors can not only change and deepen our relationships with others, they also model the kind of behavior we should expect in families. In “How to Run a Traditional Jewish Household,” Blu Greenberg writes that:
“Hachnasat orchim [welcoming guests] is a wonderful mitzva for children: a) it is a concrete model from which to learn the art of sharing; b) children have an opportunity to become acquainted with all different kinds of people, including non-Jews; c) it reminds them, periodically, that they are not the center of the universe.”
That reminder needs to be made more than periodically to help children acknowledge and embrace others.
By spilling over the Passover tradition of an open table of physical and spiritual nourishment beyond the seder night, we honor the message of the holiday and its lessons for our behavior yearlong. Our mandate, having experienced alienation as strangers in a strange land, is to welcome others with a warm embrace, and to remember that we did not learn the art of hospitality from hostility. We learned it from the very first Jews—Abraham and Sarah—who taught us by example the way that strangers become friends and friends become angels.
Adapted with permission from Erica Brown’s “Seder Talk: The Conversational Haggada” (Maggid Books, 2015). “Seder Talk” is available online and at your local Jewish bookstore.
By Dr. Erica Brown
