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Introduction to the First Adoption Seder
(Revised)
Before we start, I
want to tell you a little about the order of the seder, which, by the
way, in Hebrew means "order." With its questions and four rounds of wine, the
seder is based on the Greek symposium.
With the first of our four
cups of wine or juice, we "set" our table, making this space and time holy.
We'll do that with blessings that we'll read together in English after the
leader recites
them first in Hebrew.
Before the second cup of wine
we pose four questions, the nature of which have varied over time and place for
two millennia. I answer them, from an adoptee's perspective, with a new telling
of the old story of the Exodus. What I've done is added stories, (or in Hebrew,
midrashim) to the original story in the Bible. Some of the midrashim come from
the Talmud, some come from the historian Josephus, and some are based on the
feelings that are companions to an adoption, a search for kin or a reunion with
birth family. These latter "adoption" midrashim I preface
always with the word "perhaps."
I have retold the story of
Moses in the literary form of the haggadah. A haggadah is the traditional
booklet for the celebration of Passover that recounts Moses' leading the Exodus
out of Egypt. Also contained in a haggadah are psalms, prayers, songs and
rituals. They all act like synapses that make the main story that much more
deeply felt.
I want to make a quick
aside here: midrashim have a very long tradition in Judaism, as a way to
elaborate on puns in a text, to give names to the unnamed or to explain
inconsistencies. To give you an example, it's said in the Bible that Moses
preferred to speak to Pharaoh and the Hebrews through an intermediary from his
birth family, his brother Aaron. The rabbis came up with a midrash that
explained Moses' reticence by saying that Moses was a stutterer. So later,
when we go around the table taking turns reading from this text, if you'd rather
not read aloud or if you stutter over a line, you should remember that you are
following in the tradition of Moses.
Then while we digest Moses'
story, we ingest it literally by eating the symbolic foods on our table. Over
the third cup of wine we will share the symbols of our own stories of adoption,
search, and reunion.
The biblical Moses was born a Hebrew, raised as
an Egyptian, and married into the tribe of Midianites. Thus he can serve as an
archetype for anyone who is trying to synthesize the two (or more) selves of a
variegated background. Different readers of the story of Moses will bring
different meanings to the words "Egyptian" and "Hebrew."
For people who rediscover spirituality as Moses
did, "Egyptian" may symbolize their secular side while "Hebrew" symbolizes their
religious side.
For people who emigrate as Moses did, "Egyptian"
may represent the people of their land of origin and "Hebrew" may represent the people
of their Promised Land.
For people who have an extended family of many
faiths, "Egyptian," "Midianite," and "Hebrew" may each mean family to them. (And
in this version of the Exodus story, not all the non-Jews are bad guys.)
But for people who were adopted like Moses and
like me, "Egyptian" means adoptive home and "Hebrew" means birth heritage.
For those of us who have
found something to celebrate at the end of our Search, we say part of a prayer
called Bareich before the fourth cup of wine. But for those who have not
yet found an end to their Search, or who have found a truth to mourn at
journey's end, we can only offer our company and acknowledge that pain. And we
can hold out a hope for the coming of the Prophet Elijah who is said by Judaism,
Christianity and Islam to be the harbinger of a perfect, messianic age.
I hope this evening leads us higher than
ourselves. I know that it could do the opposite by reducing the telling of one
of the greatest epics of the Bible, the emancipation of an entire people, to a
literary allusion, a mere psychological metaphor. The rabbis had a related
concern: that if the telling were not carefully wrought, it would lead to the
deification of Moses himself and detract from the message of monotheism. You can
see how they resolved this problem when you read traditional haggadot;
the name of Moses appears not even once, but the names of the Higher Power
appear many times.
I have knowingly accepted both these risks,
especially in the interpretations of the Ten Plagues and in the addition to the
haggadah of the Three Types of Leavetaking, in order to make the telling more
intuitively true for an individualistic audience. Only by relating the grand
event of the Exodus to the adoption, emigration and teshuvah of an
individual named Moses and to the individual who is our self, do I think we can
hear it more personally.
I believe that our Searches, our teachings and
our attempts to humanize adoption law can, in fact, lead us higher than
ourselves. They are what we call, in Hebrew, tikkun olam. Tikkun olam
means a repair of the broken parts of the world that brings us all a little
closer to a messianic age. May this be an evening of tikkun olam for you.
~Michele Kriegman, April 1995
I really welcome constructive feedback. If you'd like to get in
touch with me, please write to me at michelework@garden.net. (I have
deliberately NOT made this a link, in order to avoid receiving automated
spam through this site.)
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