Passover Seder

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.

The Passover meal described in Exodus centered on a lamb, slaughtered at twilight and roasted whole, its blood marking the doorposts of the Israelite houses in Egypt. For as long as the Jerusalem Temple stood, this remained a sacrificial rite: families brought a lamb to the Temple to be slaughtered by priests before eating it that night, a practice ancient sources outside the Bible also describe.

The Temple's destruction in the year 70 removed the sacrifice itself, and it was the rabbis of the following two centuries, compiling what became the Mishnah tractate Pesachim, who built the Seder as it survives today around that absence: wine, unleavened bread, bitter herbs, and a script of questions and answers that turns the missing lamb into an occasion for retelling rather than eating.

The Haggadah, the text read at the table, is not itself biblical; its core dates to the rabbinic period, but it kept absorbing material for over a thousand years, including medieval poems, the song Chad Gadya, and modern additions such as an orange on the Seder plate or a cup for Miriam, symbols added in the twentieth century to mark concerns the older text does not address. Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox households today can use Haggadah texts that differ substantially in content and length while calling the result by the same name.