A Meal Built to Be Questioned

The Passover Seder is the ordered meal (seder means order) held on the first night, or first two nights, of Passover, commanded in Exodus as a perpetual remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt. Its script is the Haggadah, and its governing instruction is pedagogical: each participant is to see themselves as though they personally came out of Egypt, and the evening is structured around questions, most famously the Four Questions asked by the youngest present.

The table carries symbolic foods read aloud as the story is told, the bitter herb for the bitterness of slavery, the charoset paste for the mortar of forced labour, the roasted shank bone for the paschal offering, unleavened matzah for the haste of departure, and four cups of wine mark the stages of redemption named in the text. The Mishnah's tractate Pesachim already fixes much of this order in the early rabbinic period, and its logic is that the deliverance is not merely narrated but tasted, so that memory is carried by the body as well as the words.