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IS THERE ROOM FOR US AT THE SEDER?

A WOMAN’S ROLE ON THIS MOST PIVOTAL OF NIGHTS

It happens every year. The hours spent cooking, cleaning,
and shopping are over; the house sparkles (more or less);
the kids are dressed in their best; the Seder table is
decked in all its finery. You open your Haggadah to the
first page, take a look at the simanei haseder on the
Seder plate, and feel your heart sink to your toes. In all
the hustle and bustle, you’ve neglected one important
aspect of life: your own internal Seder preparation. Now
here you are, at one of the key moments of the Jewish year,
and you feel totally at a loss – as if you’ve arrived in shul for
Kol Nidrei without having spared a thought for teshuva.

But how could it be otherwise? What Jewish housewife
worth her salt would have time before Pesach to spare for her
own inner world? How many of us have time to even learn the
parsha on a weekly basis, let alone review commentaries on
the Haggadah as our husbands and sons may be doing?
With the educational backgrounds and aspirations of women
today, we feel we are somehow lacking if we come to the
Seder without a bulging notebook or two of thoughts from
the Vilna Gaon and the Abarbanel. But who has time to sit
and prepare these thoughts once her high school and semi-
nary days have come to an end?

And then there are all the demands on our attention – the
children bickering over who sits where, the soup that’s threat-
ening to boil over, the teething baby who wants to be held all

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