Passover Seder #2, or the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Dinner Night

OK, so you tell pretty quickly from our soul food kitchen menu that I’m a bad Jew: shrimp, crab, mussels, spare ribs, cuban sandwiches, lobster mac ‘n’ cheese. You get the idea. In my defense, I would channel my maternal grandmother Jenny Lewitt Stein, who, despite keeping a kosher kitchen, loved eating fried shrimp at William’s Seafood in Savannah, “God,” she said, “never meant us not to eat shrimp with pajamas.” In short, our soul food menu is not meant to be deliberately iconoclastic, a perverse non-kosher rap on the nose in the heart of Jewish life. Nope. More like a paean to really good food. That’s all.

So too I would frame this discussion on the demerits of what outside of Israel is known as “second seder.” It’s a really bad idea from a culinary (and sociological and familial harmony) perspective. Let’s assume for the moment that the food on the table during Seder #1 is nothing short of brilliant — and I mean brilliant. Which it isn’t by the way. Do I really want to eat exactly the same menu the following night as well, often with the same family members regurgitating the same topics of conversation? It’s like a Jewish version of the film “Groundhog Day,” or our own existential riff on “Waiting for Godot.” You show me a person who really looks forward to Seder #2 and I’ll show you someone who is bucking to make clinical history for re-writing what true OCD looks like (and I’m on that spectrum btw).

If we can’t do away with Seder #2 altogether, can’t we at least change the menu? Shake it up a bit? Make us think a little bit more critically about notions of slavery and freedom? While we’re at it, could we perhaps tweak the narrative a bit as well? Maybe Pharaoh is less mechanistic and goes more with adaptive learning as his ruling MO? Maybe Moses undergoes a crisis of confidence and thinks “fuck this, I don’t need this shit.” It’s all about introducing some “what ifs” into the narrative, is all that I’m saying. Perhaps a good place to start is asking what if the fare at the Seder table were radically reconsidered.