50.0°,
Overcast Empowering the powerless this Passover
Passover is primarily celebrated at home in the evening with an elaborate scripted festive ritual meal called a Seder. Over the course of the Seder, participants young and old eat symbolic foods and recall and seek to re-experience God’s deliverance of our ancestors from slavery to freedom in ancient Egypt.
One part of the festivities involves the afikoman, a piece of matzah broken off near the beginning of the evening and eaten by participants for dessert after the meal. In many homes, the afikoman is hidden before the end of the meal so that the children can search for it and the Seder leader can ransom it back from them. The children, who are aware that the Seder cannot be completed without the afikoman, are permitted — and often even encouraged — to exploit their hold over the proceedings to extort a promise of a present.
This widespread tradition is really quite surprising. It seems to encourage children to exploit a sacred religious ritual for personal gain! How can we account for it? One classic explanation is that the afikoman serves as an educational tool providing an incentive for the children to stay awake and pay attention during the Seder. The price that is “extorted” is really just a reward for their involvement.
I think there is also something else at play. Perhaps the Passover custom of encouraging children to bargain with their parents serves to dramatize the empowerment of the powerless, the core experience that Passover celebrates. At a critical moment in the Seder, we yield control over the progress of the evening to our children and, in so doing, give those who are the least powerful among us a taste of the heady experience of control and freedom. We help them to fulfill the rabbinic dictum: “In every generation each person should feel as thought he or she personally went forth from Egypt.”
Seen in this light, the drama of the afikoman reminds us that our obligation to empower the powerless necessarily entails giving up a certain amount of comfort and control over our own lives. As we enter into playful negotiations with our children and teach them the responsible use of freedom, we are also being reminded that our obligation to address the inequalities in contemporary may require that we sacrifice some of our own comfort, power and control in order to achieve justice.
Warmflash is the spiritual leader of the Hewlett-East Rockaway Jewish Centre.
