You Can’t Pick Your Family

Introduction

The Seder night is one of the rituals most widely observed by Israeli Jews. Diverse statistical studies have found that between 90 and 96 percent of Israeli Jews participate in a Seder every year and that more than 85 percent of respondents report that it is meaningful for them. ² Why is it so popular in Israel? Why is it so obvious that everyone attends a Seder, so the only question people ask is “where are you for the Seder?” and never “if” you are attending a Seder or even “how” you are celebrating it. And why does a family gathering on a holiday require an Orthodox ritual, which even secular families adhere to?

In this article, I propose a cultural and historical analysis of the Seder night in popular Hebrew/Israeli culture of the twentieth century. I will assert that the centrality of the Seder night in this culture reveals a unique Jewish Israeli version of familism as a political metaphor, which sees one’s affiliation with the entire Jewish people as membership in an extended family and serves the function of socialization to national affiliation by means of the family ritual. The analysis links the family setting of the celebration with its ostensibly religious content in order to shed light on modern Jewish nationalism as “familial nationalism.”

The article presents a historical and ethnographic analysis of the Israeli Seder, with the focus on two questions: who celebrates (the forum that convenes)? How do they celebrate (the content of the ritual performed at this gathering)? The ethnographic sources used for this study are drawn from candid media references that reveal how the Seder has been celebrated from the 1920s until the present, as well as from popular culture. Two previous ethnographic studies by anthropologists Shlomo Deshen and Ram Fruman are also cited. ³ But before, some conceptual and historical remarks about familism and Jewish families are in order.

The term “familism” is used here to indicate a form of social organization that assigns a significant role to the family in the construction of individual and group identity, while prioritizing the well-being of the family over the interests and needs of its individual members, as well as those of groups broader than the family. In familial societies, the family is the most important thing in a person’s life—more important than work, friends, politics, religion, and leisure time and recreation, whose nature is determined largely by family considerations. ⁴ Although familial societies in the modern world tend to evince a respectful attitude toward religion, ⁵ it is important to note that “familism” does not necessarily entail the unquestioning acceptance of what are generally called “family values.” This is because the structure and function of the family are likely to take on significantly different forms in different historical contexts and familial societies. ⁶ For our purpose, I want to point out the dearth of discussion of the cultural role of the extended family in familial societies, which is a product of its lack of legal status. Perhaps it is also due to the widespread image, long since refuted, of a connection between the rise of the nuclear family in the Industrial Age and the breakdown of the extended family as a source of emotional and financial support. ⁷

Scholars have long recognized Israel as “a family-based society,” ⁸ due to its high marriage and fertility rates and low rates of breakups and illegitimacy relative to most Western countries. ⁹ The family in Israel is “strong, central, and more stable than in most industrialized societies” ¹⁰ —despite noteworthy changes that are taking place in family roles and in the internal structure of Israeli families, which are as diverse as Israeli society as a whole. ¹¹ But unlike other cases in which familism has been found to be more prominent among ethnic minorities than in the larger setting of civic identity, ¹² the Israeli nation-state conducts a policy of “political familism [that] stems from the predominant republican perception of citizenship in Israel.” ¹³ In practice, however, Israeli policies on matters like abortion, maternity leave, and child allowances fall in the middle of the Western spectrum in terms of prioritizing the institution of the family over the rights of the individual and the needs of society. ¹⁴

What follows hereafter is a discussion of familism not as government policy but rather, in the words of Susser and Liebman, in “the sense that Israeli society is an extended family animated by the principle that each person is his brother’s keeper”; ¹⁵ that is, as cultural structuration that is involved in daily life, the social structure, and Israeli identity. The perception of Israeli society as an extended family will be analyzed here as a central theme in the political imagination of Israeli Jews, as expressed, for example, in family rituals like the Seder. The emphasis will be on the extended family and its cultural function in modern Jewish Israeli identity.

From the historical perspective, Israeli culture is one of the many forms of Jewish culture that have existed throughout history. ¹⁶ Indeed, the role of the extended family and even the meaning of the word “family” have varied as a function of the historical context of Jewish cultures. In the Mediterranean Jewish society of the Middle Ages, a patrilocal pattern of residence was widespread, and the Hebrew word for “family” generally referred to the extended family, mainly on the father’s side and related to patrilineal descent. In practice, however, housing arrangements with the extended family—usually three generations—could include relatives on both sides, as well as the nuclear family. This was, inter alia, because endogamy was common in these regions as a possible if not exclusive mode of matchmaking, meaning that the mother’s relatives were often also the father’s. ¹⁷ Patrilocal residence continued to be widespread among Jews in Muslim countries into the modern age and the mass immigration to Israel in the twentieth century. ¹⁸ In the European Jewish Diaspora, by contrast, the extended family tended to play a less important role in Jewish life. This was due to the Jews’ mobility and geographic dispersion, from the Middle Ages until the late modern era, which generally led young couples to move away from their parents after their first years of marriage. ¹⁹ In both Diasporas, Jewishness was seen as a matter of origin: Jewish affiliation was perceived as membership in a group with a common origin, as portrayed in the biblical and rabbinic myths.

The Jews’ ongoing bourgeoisification during the Industrial Age further enhanced the prestige of the Jewish family, which was now assigned the task of protecting Jewish identity—a function previously reserved to the Jewish community that had now lost some of its authority. According to historian Marion Kaplan, “As Jewish religious tradition and identity blended with an urban, bourgeois, secular life-style, the family became a cornerstone of a more secular version of Judaism.” ²⁰ As part of this, Kaplan and historian Paula Hyman have shown that Jewish urbanization and the great migrations actually strengthened the extended family as a financial, emotional, and cultural resource that supported the nuclear family and the individual. ²¹ Moreover, the extended family continued to be the main metaphor in which Jewish identity was conceived of in the Western Diasporas, where many Jewish children were raised to be “suspicious and fearful of outsiders, trustful only of kin and perhaps of other Jews, who were often seen as extended kin.” ²²

This background is important for understanding the role of the extended family in Israeli society. As Hyman noted, “two identifiable entities” coexisted in the Jewish world in the twentieth century:

… the Jewish family of the West and the Israeli Jewish family. The former is characterized by late age at marriage, low fertility, and rising divorce rates; the latter, by relatively early marriage, lower rates of divorce, and higher fertility. Thus, the condition of living as a majority population in a modern but pronatalist society has preserved among Israeli Jews the trend, visible for several generations among Western Jews, toward smaller families and relatively late marriage. While Diaspora Jews as a whole are failing to reproduce their own numbers, Jews in Israel, whether Ashkenazi or Sephardi, religious or secular, display a higher birthrate than most residents of industrialized societies. ²³

The extended family also played an important role in the Zionist movement, which merged the modern cult of the family with a national and ethnic ideology. ²⁶ In the past, scholars tended to think that the early Zionists rebelled against the institution of the family; today, however, it has become clear that the Yishuv (as the Jewish society in Mandatory Palestine was known) was a familistic and even conservative society. As far as the family was concerned, Zionism was at most a “conservative revolution,” as defined by historian Lilach Rosenberg-Friedman, and saw the family as a social agent of the national ideology. ²⁷ The familial imagination was enlisted in the service of the Zionist claim that the Jews are a people, not a religion. Membership in the group was seen as a matter of shared genealogy—no less, and perhaps even more so, in “secular” Zionist circles than in religious ones. ²⁸ The genealogical concept of Jewish “secular” identity was adopted in a particularly pure form, for example, by Ahad Ha’Am, whom many considered to be the prophet of secular Zionism. When his daughter married a non-Jew, he severed contact with her for many years. ²⁹ Research on single Jewish women who lived in mixed urban centers in Mandatory Palestine and had casual or long-term romantic relationships with non-Jews provides another illustration of the power of familism in Yishuv society. These women were accused, both by the public at large and by members of the caretaking professions, of undermining the boundaries of the collective and threatening the unity of the imagined extended family, thereby threatening the entire Zionist project. ³⁰

Today, even those who reject Jewish lineage as a criterion for Jewish self-identity and citizenship in the Jewish nation-state, or who oppose the ethnic endogamy that constitutes the main formal marital structure in Israel, acknowledge that certain familial relationships, at least those created by marriage, are a de facto precondition for membership in the Jewish people. ³¹ The main controversy between religious and secular Israelis centers on the rabbinic principle that Jewish descent is exclusively matrilineal; but all see the Jewish people as an extended family, for better or for worse. Thus, Israeli Jewish culture and Diaspora Jewish culture in the West are similar in that both see intermarriage as a threat to their survival and wholeness. ³²

In the literature, various reasons have been proposed for the strength of the Israeli family. ³³ What follows will steer clear of the question of cause and deal instead with that of meaning: what does familism mean for Jews in Israel? How does it construct identity in Israel today, and how does it introduce values and norms in Israelis’ daily lives? I will address these questions by taking Passover as a methodological window on common views of the relationship between family and nationalism in Israeli society. My assumption is that the recent history of this holiday is emblematic of both change and continuity in the conception of the extended Jewish family.

The Family Passover in Jewish Societies of the Past

Holidays have inherent methodological power inasmuch as they are shared by broad sectors of society who celebrate it in what they see as the traditional manner. These celebrations endow ancient cultural practices with new meanings in new historical contexts (although what is considered “traditional” is not always a tradition in the historical sense). ³⁴ The holiday belongs at one and the same time to the spheres of the consumer culture, the family, the education system, and the state. Most important, for our purposes, is the connection that the holiday forges between the individual sphere and the broader public sphere. When an entire society takes a day off from work, or buys vast quantities of a specific consumer product before the holiday, or imposes restrictions on behavior in the public domain for the duration of the holiday, and so forth—it creates a social glue formed of shared cultural practices. ³⁵ Thus, the holiday establishes what Simmel called “festive sociability”—which is also felt in the daily life of society, beyond the boundaries in time and space of the holiday itself. ³⁶ In addition, the holiday responds quickly to economic, political, social, and cultural changes; researchers can use it as an effective historical indicator of such changes, provided they do so cautiously.

The Passover Seder is an ancient celebration that has been modified to suit the industrial and postindustrial era. According to Elizabeth Pleck, who has written about history of American holidays, preindustrial holidays that were appropriated by industrial societies were oriented toward all or most of the following: children, family, consumerism, and ethnic identity. ³⁷ In the case of Zionism, which, as noted, is a national ethnic movement, the fourth of these required an adaptation to the ideological and practical needs of nationalism, along with the particular ethnic traditions of Jewish subgroups, especially cuisine—the most prominent expression of ethnic identity in the era of “culinary Judaism.” ³⁸ The modern Seder night indeed has all four orientations. Subsequently, I will focus on the family and ethnic-national orientations, which together constitute contemporary Israeli familism.

Although the prebiblical roots of Passover are unclear, it is portrayed in the Bible as the central holiday of the Jewish people, commemorating, by means of the ritual of the Passover sacrifice, the birth of the nation through the Exodus from Egypt. ³⁹ For our purposes, it is important to note that the biblical Passover is a sacrificial meal that is eaten in the family setting—“a lamb to a family, a lamb to a household” (Exod. 12:3). After the destruction of the Temple (and perhaps even earlier), a substitute for the Temple ritual developed gradually, and the place of the sacrifice was taken by the retelling of the story of the Exodus as part of a ceremony held mainly within the home and the family. The main elements of the ceremony of what is called “Seder night” (though this name was coined later) and of the text recited then, called the “Passover Haggadah,” as we know them today, were put together by the late ancient and early medieval rabbis. They include consuming a meal in the style of the Roman aristocracy, at which foods with symbolic significance and four cups of wine are served, holding a discussion that includes asking ceremonial questions drawn up in advance, drinking wine, singing, and recounting the story of the Exodus from Egypt. ⁴⁰ Even though the ideal model presented by Talmudic sages describes a confraternity of males who expound the Torah, an analysis of the sources shows that even in their time it was mostly a family event. The innovative aspect of the formalization of the Seder was actually the institution of a form of Torah study within the family forum, including women and children. ⁴¹ This is reflected, for example, in the Talmudic discussion (still pertinent) of where a newlywed couple should celebrate the holiday in their first year of marriage—with his parents or her parents? ⁴²

Later in its annals, Seder night continued to be a distinctively family-based ritual conducted in the home and whose focus was a festive meal and the ceremonial retelling of the Exodus from Egypt. But different Jewish societies have defined the family in different ways. The Jews of Muslim countries, from Afghanistan to Morocco, at least those who lived in rural districts, usually assembled the extended family for the Seder night. At times, several extended families would get together in the home of one of them. ⁴³ Among Eastern Europe Jews in the modern era, by contrast, the celebration was generally limited to the nuclear family. ⁴⁴ So too, in the nineteenth century, among the increasingly bourgeois Jews of Central and Western Europe, the extended family did not always get together on Seder night, which was celebrated mainly within the nuclear family, sometimes with the addition of one generation (grandparents living in the house) and without other guests. ⁴⁵

In this context, it bears mention that in the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe before the onset of bourgeoisification, it was not customary to invite guests and members of the extended family for friendly social gatherings, and not even for a Sabbath or holiday meal. The custom that requires the celebrants to proclaim “all who are hungry come and eat” at the start of the Seder refers not to friends, but to the poor who cannot afford the required holiday provisions. The custom of inviting acquaintances and relatives for holidays and weekends began taking root in the bourgeois culture of Central and Western Europe in the nineteenth century. As the Jews of that era penetrated the bourgeoisie, the extended family—married siblings, nieces and nephews, and so forth—began to gather for holiday and Sabbath meals, and the Seder night was prominent among them. ⁴⁶ In accordance with the leisure-time customs of the bourgeoisie, friends, too, were invited. Such, for example, is the fictional Passover Seder that takes place toward the end of Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland (1902), in which some twenty family members and friends assemble around the table. ⁴⁷

Thus, the custom of celebrating the Passover with extended family began to spread among Western Jews. Because the Seder night is seen as the most familial Jewish celebration, it is celebrated widely among Western Jewry, which worships “the Jewish family” as the focus of Jewish life. In North American Jewish culture, Passover has been labeled “the giant of Jewish holidays,” rivaled only by Hanukkah as the central Jewish festival. ⁴⁸ Jacob Neusner has argued that the Seder is “the single most widely practiced rite of Judaism in North America”; ⁴⁹ 62 to 70 percent of American Jews, including many who define themselves as “non-denominational” or “Jews of no religion,” attend one. ⁵⁰

Indeed, many imaginative works produced in the Jewish Diaspora in the West include important scenes of extended families assembled on the Seder night, such as the movie Crimes & Misdemeanors (Woody Allen, 1991) ⁵¹ and books like Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys and Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question. ⁵² Both of these books use the Seder as the turning point of the plot, within an intensive discussion of the annoying Jewish familism and Jews’ double standards when it comes to people outside the kindred, that is, non-Jews.

The Seder Night in the Yishuv and in Israel

Despite the initial family orientation of the Seder night, many alternatives to the family gathering arose during the twentieth century in Mandatory Palestine and, later, in Israel. Some of them hailed from the West and were adopted by Jews there as well, while others were local developments.

One of the most prominent changes in the format of the Seder in the early twentieth century was the emergence of public celebrations. This began with commercial Seders at hotels and restaurants in the United States, as a solution for those who had the financial means to avoid the great burden of preparing for the holiday. ⁵³ After the First World War, this practice was implemented in Palestine as well. The social stratum that could afford this was, of course, thin at first, but it expanded over the course of the Mandate period. The commercialization of the Seder even reached the kibbutzim, which were flooded with urbanites who flocked to their Seders en masse, and frequently stayed for the entire holiday.

At the same time, noncommercial Seders were held throughout the Jewish world by ideological and cultural institutions. ⁵⁴ In Israel, they were organized by labor councils, local youth clubs and youth movements, and kibbutzim. The best known were those of the kibbutzim affiliated with the Labor movement. From the early 1930s, the Seder night became an arena for extremely diverse cultural programs on such kibbutzim, which composed new Passover Haggadahs and lavish artistic productions to replace the traditional ceremony. ⁵⁵ The most significant innovation in terms of the format was not so much the changes in the ceremony and the artistic media, as it was the removal of the Seder from the domain of the family to that of the kibbutz community. ⁵⁶

Labor councils, too, began to hold Seders during the 1930s for unmarried workers who missed the families they had left back home and were looking for company to share the celebration with. They continued this tradition even after the bachelors had established families of their own. ⁵⁷ Non-Jewish public leaders and diplomats occasionally attended these Seders. However, it should be noted that these cultural and educational public Seders did not always take place on the original date of the Seder night and were sometimes held on the intermediate days of the holiday. ⁵⁸ This was another point of similarity between Mandatory Palestine and the United States, where many “third Seders” (held on one of the intermediate days, after the two obligatory Seders with family) were organized as public events sponsored by various Jewish organizations. ⁵⁹ If held on the original date of the Seder night, these events did not deviate too much from the original text, with the exception of those on the kibbutzim.

Although the public Seders filled many columns in newspaper reports about the festival, the vast majority of Jews preferred to observe the Seder among family and conduct the ceremony as prescribed in the Orthodox Haggadah. Among immigrants to Palestine from Eastern Europe, who constituted an overwhelming majority of the Jewish population during the Mandate period, the noticeable change was the expansion of the company assembled around the table to extended family and friends, as can be gathered from incidental reports in newspapers. Every year, the city streets were filled with people walking to take part in holiday meals or coming home at the end of the Seder. ⁶⁰ An emotional report on the arrival of refugees from Europe before Passover describes the Seder night as the “time of the great gathering, the holiday for each man and his household, for the nuclear or extended family.” ⁶¹ Another item reports that a pioneer who was killed while on guard duty in 1938 had spent his last Seder night with his parents and “many guests and visitors.” ⁶² In those days, however, there does not seem to have been any absolute preference for spending the evening with family as opposed to friends, nor for the extended family as opposed to the nuclear family. This was probably because many of the immigrants had left their extended families behind in their home countries; it was their friends who constituted the support network characteristic of immigrant society. ⁶³

After the establishment of Israel, it continued to be clear that the Seder night was celebrated at home. Here is a description typical of the 1950s and 1960s:

This year, too, Tel Aviv celebrated the Seder night according to the tradition that has developed there. Family and friends gathered at the same table to observe the Passover ritual to the letter. And the most common sight on the first night of the festival was the thousands of people making their way through the city streets. They walked family by family, each carrying pots full of holiday dishes, fancy tableware, bottles of wine, or at least platters of cake for dessert. And at midnight, they made their way back home. ⁶⁴

What stands out here is the difference between the nature of the holiday as practiced by Western Jewry and by Jews in Palestine/Israel. In Israel, particularly after the establishment of the state, the holiday lasts for seven days, during which the entire economy is on partial vacation. Starting in the 1950s, a large variety of leisure and tourist activities have been available for people to sample. In the Western Diaspora, by contrast, the Seder is celebrated by an ethnic minority whose members must take off from work at their own expense and usually return to their jobs on the intermediate days. The holiday is scarcely felt in the public sphere, of course.

During the 1950s, many people began to see the public Seders, which were oriented toward education and culture, as overly artificial, institutionalized, and devoid of the pioneer spirit of years past. Their popularity declined during the 1960s; this applied to the kibbutz Seders as well. The only public Seders of note that remained were those held at hotels, which continued to offer diverse artistic and musical programs, such as hiring well-known cantors to conduct the ceremony and attract vacationers from Israel and abroad. In addition to these, there were public Seders for the indigent, new immigrants, and soldiers. ⁶⁶

In the 1960s, the extended family gained prominence as the main forum of the Seder night. In a slow process whose origins are unclear, it turned out that many young couples preferred to spend the Seder in their parents’ homes. The reasons for this were both practical—a way for young couples to avoid the exhausting preparations for the Seder—and cultural—most of the young couples born in Israel had drifted away from tradition and were not able to conduct the Seder ritual as prescribed by Jewish law. As noted by the daily Davar, in a paraphrase of the text of the Haggadah, “We are all wise, we are all intelligent, we all know the Torah—but only Grandfather knows how to hold the Seder properly.” ⁶⁷ The journalist interviewed several dozen young couples and discovered that the overwhelming majority were spending Passover at their parents’ home and saw the Seder night as an opportunity to bring the family together and “once again enjoy a warm family environment.” Only one young couple among those interviewed held the Seder in their home, because the husband came from a traditional family and knew how to conduct the ritual. However, there were still many who celebrated the Seder at kibbutzim and in guest houses.

This phenomenon can be attributed to changes that took place in Israeli society during the 1960s, when more and more adults were native-born, the second generation of immigrants from Europe, so that society no longer consisted predominantly of immigrants. The Seder continued to be essentially a family event—and it was now celebrated, by and large, with the extended family, and not with families of friends. This was especially true for immigrants from Muslim countries, who immigrated with their extended families in the 1950s and 1960s and kept up their support networks in Israel. They continued to observe the Seder in the extended-family format, just as they had done before immigrating. ⁶⁸

Another element that fostered the rise of the extended family as the forum for the Seder was the rise in ownership of private cars in the 1960s, representing a mode of transportation that enabled travel throughout the country. Israel’s small size meant that families could spend the Seder together without having to leave home more than a few hours in advance of the holiday—unlike the United States, for example, where people were forced to spend more time with their family.

And finally, as noted in the Davar article quoted previously, it has become clear that the second generation of immigration, raised with a weak connection to tradition, no longer possessed the textual and ritual literacy necessary to hold a Seder and had to rely on the skills of the previous generation. In subsequent decades, this development appeared to be common to those whose roots were in both European and Muslim countries. Despite the second generation's lack of religious literacy, their motivation to conduct the traditional ritual to the letter survived and perhaps even increased. This continues to be the case in Israeli culture today.

In other words, in the frequent case where the holiday is celebrated within the family, from the 1920s to the present, the ceremony hews closely to the Haggadah text. This is true even when, as is common, the religious laws of the holiday are not observed—for example, musical instruments are played, in violation of tradition. Alongside the declining ritual and textual literacy of Israeli Jews, the text of the Seder actually became more authoritative, as seen in an advertisement encouraging customers to buy a new and detailed edition of the traditional Haggadah, published by Schocken Press in the 1940s: “For every Jewish home […] where the feeling for tradition has not been lost.” ⁶⁹ Starting in the 1950s, the melting pot began to affect the Passover Haggadah. This was in part, thanks to the efforts of the Israel Defense Forces, which held public Seders for soldiers and distributed uniform Haggadahs to both soldiers and new immigrants living in transit camps. ⁷⁰

From the 1960s to the present, there have been no significant changes in the group that assembles for the Seder or in the format of the festivities. The Seder in Israel today tends to be a ritual yearly gathering of the extended family. This does not mean that everyone actually conducts this ritual or they do not get together on other festivals. Many extended families in Israel do assemble on other holidays and even every Friday night. Rosh Hashanah, in particular, is known as a holiday when families get together, with an emphasis on the folklore aspect of various foods. ⁷¹

Nonetheless, it is precisely Seder night that Israeli culture considers to be the ultimate “family holiday,” for better and for worse, with a ritual that is seen as archaic and inappropriate for modern life but that is nonetheless observed with relative strictness. Shlomo Deshen, in his ethnographic study of what he called the “secular” Seder, concluded: “Two things stand out in the celebration of the Seder by secular Israelis: the family aspect and the attempt to cope with the religious and traditional content of the event.” ⁷² Essentially, all Jewish Israeli families must cope with this—including the traditional and religious among them. Hence, I will now move from the historical description to the study of the meaning of the family gathering and the religious ritual, based on an examination of the various manifestations of the Seder in Israeli popular culture.

“What Do I Have in Common with these People?”

In the Industrial Age, as mentioned previously, holidays are identified mainly with the cult of the family. Indeed, this is a common theme in American popular culture, which generally sees holidays as opportunities for family gatherings, at which family tensions and secrets come up and are then resolved in accordance with the genre (comedy, drama, etc.). On the surface, Passover plays a similar role in Israeli culture.

An evening spent with family is no easy task for anyone in Western society, who, as comedian Adi Ashkenazi quips in her prime-time show about the Seder (quoted as the epigram of this article), has nothing in common with them except for the random fact of a shared family origin. Because the Seder is spent with the extended family, couples experience the added tension that is naturally present between their respective families, each with its own customs. In Israel, the gap between in-laws tends to come from ethnic differences in customs, foods, temperament, and patterns of communication within the family. These are greatly influenced by ethnic stereotypes that are more or less accurate, which Ashkenazi also discusses in her show. Even when these stereotypes are inaccurate, they are likely to cause additional friction of their own. And there is also, of course, the extra tension of hosting a large crowd, which has to do with “conspicuous consumption”—the types and value of presents brought by guests, what the hosts’ home looks like, and so forth. Ashkenazi concludes: “When you walk around the mall looking for a present, you begin to hate your hosts. Meanwhile, the hostess is standing in the kitchen, sweating over the pots and beginning to hate her guests.” ⁷³

As hinted in this remark, one of the things that Passover brings out is a particularly rigid division of labor along gender lines. Ashkenazi addresses this, too: “In all the preparations for the holiday, there is a clear division of labor between husband and wife. The wife is responsible for shopping, cooking, preparing the house, talking with the guests, setting the table, and reminding him to buy flowers; the husband is responsible for adding leaves to the table—and forgetting to buy flowers.”

The Seder reflects a more generally conservative division of roles, with the hospitality efforts falling mostly on the women, while one of the men in the family gets the job of conducting the ceremony. Deshen, who interviewed several dozen students about their Seders, found that only in one case was the Seder led by the mother, and then only because there was no man in the family. ⁷⁴ Ashkenazi notes, sarcastically, that the man who is supposed to run the Seder usually lacks deep familiarity with the tradition and the language of the text, but it is still clear to everyone that the Seder should be run by a man and that the role is passed on among the men of the family from generation to generation.

Other family tensions have to do with intergenerational matters: young singles around the Seder table are particularly vulnerable to uncomfortable questions posed by distant relatives about their career and marriage plans. ⁷⁵ In many cases, they find various pretexts for excusing themselves from the Seder, and sometimes come late or leave early to spend time with friends. ⁷⁶ But very few of them hold a “Seder among friends”—an act that Israeli culture would perceive as subversive. Most Israelis would seriously consider holding that kind of Seder only when relocating abroad. ⁷⁷ The satirical TV show Eretz Nehederet (a wonderful country) presented a skit about a Seder of this sort. It involved three bachelors who share an apartment in Tel Aviv and decide to hold a “Seder among friends” to celebrate the festival of freedom by insisting on freedom from the family meal and the irritating interrogations. Their sarcastic landlord tells them, “If I had a shekel for every time someone told me, ‘Let’s go make a Seder among friends,’ I’d have $400 today.” The idyll comes to an end when the family of one of the bachelors shows up and drags him off to the family Seder, while taunting him for his failures in his family and career. ⁷⁸

The family troubles that are expressed on Seder night in Israel are not always amusing. Shmuel Hasfari’s play Hametz describes an Israeli Seder that brings dark family secrets to the surface and ends in tragedy. The extended Israeli family depicted in the play is a metaphor for Israeli society and expresses the shattering of the Zionist dream. ⁷⁹

For the sake of balance, it is important to note that despite the extensive Israeli folklore about the travails of Seder night with the family, which can be seen as part of Western folklore about the extended family, many people are probably glad to have an opportunity to spend time with it. ⁸⁰ An interesting example appears in Required, Prompter, by Haggai Linik, a book about the disintegration of an Israeli family after the death of their oldest son in the army and written in a style that can hardly be described as sentimental. One of the only happy moments in the book is the Seder, which the father of the family decides to host at home, for the first time ever. He leads it himself “to bring a little joy into our lives after several years of Seders held at friends’ homes.” They invite the extended family, the father conducts the Seder and reads from the Haggadah “as he learned from his father,” and the youngest son sings “Ma Nishtanah” (a ritual song traditionally performed by the youngest children; explained subsequently). After the formal ceremony, during which they all drink too much wine, the family goes on to sing funny songs they remember from youth movements and elsewhere, to the accompaniment of an accordion. This is just about the only happy scene in this rather depressing book. ⁸¹

The Israeli movie Leilasedé (Shemi Zarhin, 1991) also depicts the Seder night as an outlet for relieving tensions that, in the end, unites the entire extended family. In this movie, the shared family celebration also includes having all the siblings, sisters- and brothers-in-law, great-grandmother, and grandchildren sleep over at Grandfather and Grandmother’s house—just as in American holiday movies (but not what actually happens at real Israeli Seders, where most of the guests go back home at the end of the evening). Their confinement in close quarters brings to the surface all the tensions and mixed feelings in the family relationships (and here, too—as is the norm in Israeli popular culture—there is a son who died in the army). Although everyone complains, the movie has a surrealistic ending in which the family and friends show one another their human and positive sides.

Of course, one cannot speak about the Israeli family without mentioning food, which is one of the most important reasons for the centrality of holidays in Western culture, in both Israel and the rest of the industrialized world. The traditional foods of Passover, which unite the entire family, are a recurring theme in all descriptions of the Israeli Seder. Interestingly, even Israelis who eat hametz (leavened bread, which Jewish law prohibits on Passover) to their heart’s content throughout the rest of the holiday almost never put it on their Seder table. Instead, they focus on the traditional holiday foods, and even the dessert is usually based on matzo meal. Ram Fruman explains that the dietary restrictions of the holiday amplify the symbolic meaning of the meal, whose culinary uniqueness makes it the flagship family meal of the year, more than any other holiday dinner. ⁸² Interestingly, it seems that the rising rate of marriages in which the spouses hail from different Jewish ethnic groups has created a sort of fusion cuisine for Passover. The daughter of a Mizrahi family (one with North African or Middle Eastern origins), for example, reports that since Ashkenazim joined her family, gefilte fish, and chopped liver, too, have appeared on her Seder table. ⁸³

If the uniqueness of the Seder was expressed only in the festive family meal that features delicacies of Israeli cuisine, both new and traditional, as part of the mingling of various ethnic traditions, it would be no different from any other holiday in the industrialized West, especially in the United States (e.g., Thanksgiving). This is, indeed, the format of Rosh Hashanah in Israel, where the meal consists largely of traditional dishes that are sometimes identified as having a symbolic meaning (“May we have a good and sweet year” over an apple dipped in honey, etc.), but without a ritual attached. In contrast, the social and family gathering on the Seder night also includes a lengthy ritual that is not easy to perform and to which we now direct our attention.

Why the Haggadah?

In the vast majority of Israeli families, the Seder ritual is conducted just as written and prescribed by the Haggadah, at least the part that precedes the meal. This is why Jewish Israelis display an intimate familiarity with the text of the Haggadah, having heard it read year after year since early childhood. Several dozen modern Hebrew expressions derive exclusively from the Haggadah. A study found that Hebrew speakers who had attended secular schools were no less familiar with these expressions and their meaning than their religiously educated counterparts. ⁸⁴ The press, too, makes frequent use of phrases from the Haggadah in headlines before and during the Passover holiday.

Deshen’s study highlights the significant discomfort that the text evokes for many Israelis. He concludes with what he calls a “thunderous question”: “Why do (“secular” Israelis) insist on continuing to relate to the traditional symbols of the holiday (even if in a diluted and secularized way) as a way to keep the family together?” ⁸⁵

The question of the ritual’s contribution to family cohesion also comes up indirectly in the movie Leilasedé, in which the ritual appears exclusively as a source of tension and arguments. The father requires everyone to show respect for the ceremony by wearing skullcaps, but the youngest son refuses, argues, and talks back. The movie portrays the ritual as a divisive issue that actually darkens the family atmosphere, given the absence of consensus about the role of religion in Israeli life. In a blunter and more conscious (and slightly more complex) manner, this is also the ritual’s function in Hasfari’s play Hametz, mentioned previously. ⁸⁶

The interesting point is that even among those who are most meticulous about observing the ritual, there seems to be little identification with the text itself, which consists mostly of ancient homilies, some more comprehensible than others, and most of them seemingly quite remote from the values of the average Israeli. But this, in fact, is what makes this excessive fastidiousness even more noticeable. An amusing advertising clip for a supermarket chain depicts the Israeli Seder in hip-hop style, with the character of Moses, played by a famous comedian who happens to be named Moses (Moshe), popping up from time to time and warning anyone looking for shortcuts to get through the ceremony faster: “That’s not what the law prescribes! Beware of Moses, don’t mess with him!” ⁸⁷ This is a regular point of conflict for many Israeli families.

It should be noted that most Israelis have not followed in the path of the many spiritual Jewish movements of the modern period that revised the rituals and texts to adapt them to all sorts of modern values. As early as the nineteenth century in Germany, there were attempts to write new Haggadahs that would adapt the story of the Exodus from Egypt to the story of the Jews’ exodus from the ghetto. ⁸⁸ In the 1920s, new Passover Haggadahs were written in Berlin, influenced by Buber’s philosophy of Gemeinschaft (small communities); they emphasized the universal redemption and added the homily that God’s grew angry with the Jewish people for rejoicing when the Egyptians drowned. ⁸⁹ This philosophy also influenced the Seders developed by the kibbutz movement, as noted previously, which adapted the ceremony to Zionist and socialist values. But none of these gained much popularity among the broader public. From the 1970s onward, their prestige declined in the kibbutzim, too, most of which reverted to holding traditional Seders. Very few Israelis have followed in the footsteps of the American Jewish movements that modified the texts and rituals to suit modern sensitivities in response to criticism from feminist, liberal, or other perspectives, and to make them more comprehensible and accessible. ⁹⁰ In most Israeli families, the text of the Haggadah is read without changes—at most, with omissions and shortcuts. This is not for lack of attempts by Israeli cultural entrepreneurs affiliated with the Jewish Renewal movement to make the text more comprehensible and the ritual more relevant, using new Haggadahs that include challenging new commentaries from a diverse range of sources (including kibbutz Seders) as well as current subjects for discussion and games for the family, even if they do not revise the text itself. ⁹¹ The Jewish New Age movement, too, has not left the ritual and the text untouched. Indeed, it has proposed various novel interpretations of the Seder, which are rooted in the fields of mysticism and psychology and have actually been implemented in practice. ⁹²

Nevertheless, these ceremonies and Haggadahs cannot compete with the popularity of the Haggadahs that are mass-produced and distributed in bulk to the Israeli public and contain nothing but the traditional text with the technical instructions for the rituals to be conducted with the bitter herbs (maror), the matzo, the fruit-and-nut dip (haroset), and so on. They do not offer even a cursory discussion of the meaning of the text and the ritual. Most of the Haggadahs in use in Israeli homes are printed and given away by banks, newspapers, political parties, and the like, or by the army, and contain only the bare minimum of text and instructions required to conduct the rituals. In most families, these Haggadahs have displaced the ethnic and ancestral Seder customs. It is actually on Seder night, a family celebration, that the Israeli melting pot has proven most effective, even though the overwhelming majority of Jews in Israel prefer to celebrate at home, rather than in public. More or less the same text of the Haggadah is used everywhere. Even when the printed and illustrated text mentions the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, or other contemporary topics that might provoke lively discussion around the table, the adults usually choose to ignore them and race through the text. Thus, the text has essentially been stripped of all meaning. ⁹³ The purchase of a contemporary and accessible Haggadah represents an investment of money and mental effort that is beyond the horizons of most Israelis, who are generally focused on getting through the ritual and reaching the meal. This fact merely underscores the question: why do Israelis even bother to read the Haggadah?

Before addressing this question, I will mention two parts of the ceremony and text that do still elicit identification in the average Israeli home. The first is the question-song “Ma Nishtanah,” (literally “How is this Night Different?”) which children learn to sing in preschool and perform at the beginning of the ceremony; it is customarily sung by the youngest child in the family. The song is a sort of rite of initiation for small children who learned it in preschool (usually at age three to five) and must stand up and perform in front of the family. Occasionally, the public recitation of passages from the Haggadah also functions as a sort of rite of passage that brings children who are just learning how to read into the world of literate adults. The second part of the ceremony that evokes identification is the custom that children “steal” the afikomen matzo at the beginning of the Seder. In many homes, it is customary for the child who steals it to bargain with the leader of the Seder and receive a present before giving it back at the end of the meal. Both of these elements—the serious ritual of “Ma Nishtanah” and the playful ritual of the afikomen—bring the children of the family into the ceremony as active participants and also make it interesting for the adults, adding the childish touch to the holiday that is so needed in the industrialized world. During the rest of the Seder, the children are bored—no less so, of course, than the adults. But it is rare to encounter any scrutiny of the meaning of these two rituals and what they are telling us, no less than the other parts of the ceremony.

How do adults deal with the boredom and the foreignness of the ceremony and the text? The most common method is parody and ridicule. Various elements in the ceremony and text give rise to jokes, which sometimes ridicule them and sometimes make cynical use of the text to voice inside jokes at relatives’ expense. These jokes are often recurring wisecracks based on the text and made every year by or about the same people. This is exemplified in the Eretz Nehederet skit mentioned previously, which describes the attempts of a bachelor’s family to drag him to the Seder. The most memorable aspect of the Seder for the participants is the dirty joke that one of the uncles tells every year. ⁹⁴ The very same joke appears in the advertising clip for the supermarket chain mentioned previously. ⁹⁵ Several of them also appear in Hasfari’s play Hametz, in a scene that bitterly mocks the jokes themselves and the ceremonial nature of their yearly repetition. ⁹⁶

It is interesting to note that the novel Haggadahs created by kibbutzim in the first half of the twentieth century were preceded by humoristic Haggadahs, which, on one hand, filled the void created by the absence of the traditional Seder, and on the other hand, papered over the sense of a revolution in the ceremony, due to their lack of seriousness. ⁹⁷ Satirical pamphlets based on the Haggadah were written in the cities, too, although, as far as we know, they were never used as the text for any actual Seder. ⁹⁸

Secular Israelis are not the only ones who use humor to cope with the foreignness of the text. Telling jokes and making fun of the text is a common practice in religious families as well, even though their participants by and large (or at least most of the men) feel more comfortable with the language and world of the text than do their secular counterparts. There are even a few humorous Passover Haggadahs in use within this community, such as Baba’s Haggadah, by the religious cartoonist Shay Charka. ⁹⁹

An explanation of the ceremony’s survival, which connects the foreignness of the text with familism in a way that makes the theory applicable to the religious community as well, was proposed by Fruman. The Seder night is a gathering of all branches of the extended family, who in daily life do not get together very often. Hence, the initial encounter is likely to be marked by somewhat forced conversation. According to Fruman, “The Haggadah provides a text that offers a basis for communication. There is no need to struggle to find things to talk about at the table. As the participants share comments about the text and its associated customs and laugh together at the amusing text and its amusing rituals, a comfortable, humorous atmosphere develops and the tension felt at the start of the evening is broken.” In other words, the existence of a clear and familiar ceremony that includes reading texts, singing songs, eating specific foods, and so forth, makes the initial encounter easier and fosters communication among family members who do not see each other on a daily basis. Fruman also emphasizes that “the very traditionalism involved in the repetition of the usual comments and jokes strengthens the relationship among the participants by highlighting the fact that they belong to a traditional family framework.” ¹⁰⁰ We can add to this the typical complaint voiced throughout the tiresome reading of the fixed text: “When do we eat?” In American Jewish folklore, this interjection is “as much of a ritual as those set forth in the Haggadah.” ¹⁰¹ In both Israeli and American Jewish cultures, it prepares participants for a meal that acts as a sort of icebreaker after a much longer waiting period than they are used to. In every family, the atmosphere during the meal is more relaxed, after the Haggadah has been read and the usual jokes told.

Support for Fruman’s explanation can be found in the fact that many people break off the reading of the Haggadah and stop the ceremony after the meal and do not continue with the rituals that follow it, as Ashkenazi, too, confirms. Those who do go on with the service are usually musical and song-loving families, because most of the songs in the Haggadah come after the meal.

We may add to this explanation the fact that all extended families are marked by a range of religious diversity. While the nuclear family could hypothetically implement a “reform” of the content and procedures of the Seder, the religious heterogeneity of the extended family essentially acts as an impediment to insertions of new content and form to the Seder. In a situation where no member of the family has full ownership of the format of the ritual, the most convenient family solution is simply to stick to the ceremony and instructions that appear in the mass-circulation Haggadahs, while leaving room for complaints about this decision.

Philosopher Adi Ophir, too, tries to understand why the Haggadah, “this somewhat boring, even alien text,” as he puts it, “is still considered a privileged text, whose privileged status in Jewish cultures remained unaffected by Zionist secularization.” ¹⁰² But he takes a different tack. Ophir maintains that the text does have a meaning of its own, not just as a fossilized tradition that serves to diffuse family tensions. He asserts that the point of the ritual and the text is the recurring emphasis on the distinction between the Jews and the Gentiles and the accent on what is common to all Jews, as such, and differentiates them from the Gentiles. Ophir goes through the elements of the text, one by one, and demonstrates ethnocentrism in a persuasive and troubling manner. The Haggadah was composed by a minority group that felt persecuted, and therefore created the ritual to “pour out their wrath on the Gentiles.” ¹⁰³ Ophir is concerned by the way “Zionist readers derive nationalist, chauvinist meanings” now that the power relations have been inverted and the Jews are the majority group in their own nation-state. ¹⁰⁴ In his opinion, it is actually this common denominator that explains the privileged status of the Haggadah for Israelis, and specifically the rabbinic version that has not been modified to make it more politically correct. The closing monologue in Hasfari’s play also hints at this idea, which explains the playwright’s choice of the Seder—an event that Hasfari sees as a ritual of “over-remembering” that disrupts normal life in the Jewish nation-state—to criticize Israeli nationalism. ¹⁰⁵

In other words, the popularity of the Seder night ceremony and text emphasizes the depth of ethnic nationalism’s hold on the Jewish Israeli public. Jews in Israel see Passover as a Jewish and ethnic holiday that reflects not only “gastronomic Judaism” but also the unique nature of membership in the Jewish people rather than any other. Unexpected corroboration of this opinion can be found in Yael Darr’s study of the responses to the Holocaust in Hebrew children’s literature. It turns out that many children’s stories about taking revenge on the murderers used to appear in children’s publications right before Passover and that some of them used motifs from the festival itself. ¹⁰⁶

In my view, Fruman’s claim that the text is completely bereft of meaning for participants in the ceremony goes too far. For the younger generation, the Seder night is one of the most important forms of socialization to ethnic Jewish nationalism and the historical distinction between Jews and non-Jews. The Passover Seder illustrates the way in which Jewish Israelis identify deeply with the Jewish ethnos, not because of compulsion by the state or rabbinic establishment but because of processes of socialization that take place inside the family sphere.

Ophir’s anthropological analysis of the role of the Seder in Israeli society complements rather than contradicts Deshen and Fruman’s analyses (and all the works of popular culture discussed here) as to the familial nature of the event. Jewish nationalism is a form of ethnic familial nationalism, in the sense that the relationship among members of the nation is conceived of as a relationship among members of a biological family. The extended family, therefore, works as a metaphor for collective self-identification. For many Israeli Jews, the ritual gathering of the actual extended family for an incomprehensible ceremony is an expression of their mode of Jewish affiliation, which can be summarized by the famous saying: “You can’t pick your family.” While many other national movements use domestic images as a metaphor for the national public arena, Zionism works in the opposite direction as well. It politicizes the private sphere, which becomes a source of socialization to the familistic national ideology. ¹⁰⁷

The conservative division of labor between men and women that characterizes the Seder can also be understood against the backdrop of Jewish familism. The women’s perceived exclusive responsibility for entertaining the guests, buying presents, and producing the event is not unique to Passover. There is certainly room for additional research as to whether and to what extent Israel is exceptional on this issue, in comparison to other industrialized countries. ¹⁰⁸ Historically, women’s specialization in household matters has played a role in the institutionalization of the family as the center of Jewish family life, from the bourgeoisification of the Jews in the nineteenth century to this day. Marion Kaplan believes that this is why Jewish rituals and customs in the domestic sphere have proved more durable than those in the public sphere: women made sure to perpetuate them, in the belief that these traditions provide a stable identity in a changing world. ¹⁰⁹ This was also the case in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution. ¹¹⁰

But this does not make the Seder any different from other holidays and customs. The more interesting and exceptional point here is the men’s exclusive responsibility for running the ceremony, even when it was clear that their textual and ritual skills are no longer superior to the women’s. Here, Jewish Israeli culture is quite different from Jewish American culture, which is sensitive to feminist criticism, particularly on matters of ritual. ¹¹¹ By contrast, traditionist Israelis, ¹¹² both men and women, prefer to adhere to a conservative division of gender roles when it comes to tradition. But traditionists are not the only ones who take this position. Even on Labor Movement kibbutzim, where women participate in the kibbutz Seder as narrators, singers, ushers, and so forth, women have never actually run the Seder. As one kibbutz-born woman put it: “There was never a ‘Seder mother’; there was a ‘Seder father.’” ¹¹³ Secular Seders (and religious Seders all the more so) are usually run by men. The Seder night expresses Israeli society’s symbolic preference for the patrilineal family model with the older man, the tribal leader, as the absolute authority for perpetuating the tradition. This continues to be the case even when his level of knowledge does not justify it and when the fact that the man is sitting at the head of the table and running the event has epiphenomenal significance but does not denote any educational authority. The adherence to this gender division of roles reflects the biblical (as opposed to rabbinic) genealogical myth, which sees patrilineal descent as the primary thread of family continuity and assigns the symbolic function of preserving the tradition to the men of the family.

The Seder night functions as a ritual for individuals’ dual socialization to the two extended families of which they are a member: their own actual extended family as well as the larger and imaginary extended family—all the Jews in the world. As a metaphoric extended family, the Jews have characteristics similar to those of the actual extended family to which each of us belongs: they hold weird ceremonies; they have conflicted relationships among themselves, as well as moments of spiritual exaltation, brotherhood, and pride; they have a somewhat overly patriarchal tradition; and, of course, they unite in the face of external persecution. The complaints about the actual extended family and the in-jokes told about it on Seder night apply equally to the imaginary extended family—the Jews. The Jews may not be the most successful family in the world, and as Adi Ashkenazi put it, they may not be the people we would have chosen to spend a whole night with; but you can’t pick your family. In Israel today, Jewish identity is conceived of first and foremost as a vast family bond from which there is no escape—and hardly anyone even bothers to try anymore.

Conclusion: The Extended Jewish Family in Israeli Public Culture

For Israeli Jews of all streams, the ritual prescribed in the standard-issue Haggadah is observed as a politicization of the Jewish familial identity, rather than a religious act. In fact, for many Israeli Jews, observance of various Jewish practices is motivated by their national or family heritage or at least by their family culture. Despite the obvious differences with regard to the format of the festival, the details of the ritual, and the meaning of the celebration, secular, traditionist, and religious Israeli Jews all recognize the demarcation between the imaginary extended family and those outside it as represented in the Seder ritual. The actual extended family is the most appropriate social setting for highlighting this dividing line, because Jewish identity is perceived as something one is thrown into, just as people are thrown into their families: neither family is chosen.

In his landmark study of images of kinship in American culture, anthropologist David Schneider differentiated between “blood relatives,” who are perceived as biologically related and therefore a permanent feature of our lives, and in-laws, whose relationship to us is perceived as a result of free choice and hence may also be dissolved. ¹¹⁴ In Israeli culture, even relationships that bear the tag “in-law” in English (siblings, parents, etc.) are perceived as a matter of shared genes rather than a matter of choice, because they too belong to the metaphoric extended family and are not chosen voluntarily. In contemporary Israel, it is common to conceive of all Jews as biological relatives, although this idea is a matter of controversy in current population genetics. ¹¹⁵

Familism is generally held to imply “loyalty and cooperation ties only with those who belong to one’s own family group,” ¹¹⁶ and therefore seen as at least potentially opposed to civic culture. The case of Jewish Israelis provides an interesting variation on this theme. Israeli familism supports Israeli republican-civic culture, which functions well for the members of the extended family that owns the Jewish nation-state. ¹¹⁷ The continuing dominance of Israeli familism, which differentiates Jews from non-Jews, may explain the social gap between Jews by descent or conversion, on one hand, and those who are prevented from joining the majority group, on the other—a gap that has recently grown wider. The latter, especially the Arabs, may be granted a broad range of civic rights, but they are prohibited from joining the family and their access to symbolic and political resources is limited. ¹¹⁸ The extended Jewish family controls the national and symbolic resources in the public sphere, which is imagined as an extension of the family sphere. This logic suggests that we classify modern Jewish nationalism as “familial nationalism.” ¹¹⁹

This article has examined the Seder celebration in Israel as a key that reveals a significant degree of collective identification among contemporary Israeli Jews. Israeli familism, as celebrated around the Seder table and in many other festivals and rituals, is the most effective social glue for Jews in Israel today. With the decline of the pioneer-Zionist ideology that underlay the Israeli social consensus until a few decades ago, familism has become the main obstacle to Israel’s transformation from a familial-nationalist society into a post-national society.