My Family's Hilarious Rendition of a Passover Seder

My family is not very religious and our annual Passover Seder makes that pretty clear. Our usual approach toward the Jewish holidays is to disregard most of the typical praying and services and "boring stuff" and just skip right to the food. In fact, my family sees nearly all of the Jewish holidays as an excuse to eat. A lot. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Personally I've never felt compelled to be a more observant Jew. However, Passover is the one holiday that gets my family feeling a bit guilty, I suppose, for not being the "good Jews" we ought to. Passover is a pretty big deal after all.

So yes, my family does attempt a Passover Seder every year. It's always...interesting. We all gather in my grandparent's apartment which is definitely large enough to accommodate everyone comfortably but is shaped in such a way that two separate tables are needed to seat everyone. Our Haggadahs are a packet of 12 pages stapled together that have been photocopied, consisting of all the parts deemed important by my grandfather. None of us know the real prayers for the eggs or the bitter herbs or anything else on the Seder plate, so my grandpa just goes, "baruch atah adonai Elohienu Meleh Ha-Olom l'had'lik neir shel EGGS!" The paragraphs we are supposed to read together sound ridiculous because everyone reads at different speeds. During the song Dayenu, my uncle interjects a comment about a passage that was read 3 minutes earlier: "if God left us stranded in the desert, that certainly would not have been sufficient!" Nobody minds the interruption because most of us don't know the words anyway and all of us have awful singing voices.

By the end of the Seder we are starving, though honestly the entire thing never takes longer than 30 minutes. I always see passover as a race against ourselves, a challenge to beat the "fastest seder ever" record we set last year. To me, we always seem to. Every year is more chaotic than the last. My uncle's voices get louder, their comments more ubsurdly hilarious. My baby cousins grow up, my older cousins get even older, but passover is always passover. Sometimes not everyone shows up, but people always seem happy when they do.


There's quite a story that goes along with Passover, by the way, but that's not what this blog post is about. Instead, watch this clip from the Dreamworks animated film "The Prince of Egypt." Or you could read the Bible which admittedly is a lot more accurate. But this is more fun, and more musical.

Obviously I really just wanted to put this clip in.

Happy Passover to those who celebrate, Happy Easter to those who celebrate that, and Happy whatever! to those who are celebrating whatever else there is to celebrate.