Performance Art and Jewish Spirituality: Some Insights into Leading a Seder

A seder, whether it takes place on Passover or Shabbat or any other time, is not merely a banquet. First, let me clear away a couple of misconceptions. A lot of Jews when they think of the seder as only referring to the Passover Seder. A seder is a meal which is distinguished by a number of distinctive prayers and rituals which highlight a special time and theme. The Sabbath meals, especially Friday night, can be considered as seders. Jews have marked seders on many other holidays such as Rosh Hashannah, Tu Bishvat, and Purim. The Passover seder is the most comprehensive and in many of its aspects is governed by Jewish law.

One of the most distinctive ways of Judaism is to transform a banquet, a feast of delectable foods, into a religious experience rich with meaning and a sense of community. But there is not one way to run a seder, contrary to the approach taken by the editors of the "Maxwell House Haggadah". Noam Zion in his leader's guide to the Haggadah, A Different Night deals with the issue of how to approach a seder. He brings a debate from another field of human endeavor as a way of understanding how we might approach the way we experience a seder.

One of the reasons that many seders fall back into being family banquets is that we have misconceived what a seder can be. Is it a rigid order of rituals? Do we merely 'go by the book'? The passage below gives us some helpful metaphors with which to understand a seder and to begin to see it again as religious experience which is shared by everyone around the table. One of Judaism's great gifts is to transform eating activity into a moment of communal and spiritual awareness. This may repoint the way for us on how to sanctify those gatherings around our tables.

"The leader of the seder is similar to the conductor of an orchestra and the Haggadah is the musical score. What is the approprieate relationship to the maestro to the masterpiece to be played? How much freedom should be allowed in adapting the music to the audience's needs? Is the Pesach seder meant to be a jam session or a Bach Fugue?" Zion then brings a remarkable passage from another field which suggests how a seder can be conceived.

"There has been a general tendency to passivity on the part of people as an audience for art; they have been receptacles for workd developed by others-the artists. A form of specialization emerged-specialization in all the fields. Over the centuries artists have become specialists for the people. They expressed the highest and deepest felt essences of a culture; they painted for the people, they made music for the people, they built buildings for the people. This created a dichotomy whose results are all around us. A dichotomy betwen the act of art and the act of life; between the score-maker and the scored-for; between the technician and the layman. It is a dichotomy which did not exist in traditional cultures where all the people were artists, nor does it even exist among children."

"In the realm of music, a score can either control or allow leeway. The difference, however, is enormous. In the older music, scoring devices were used to control, with precision, the the notes and true intervals played by the performer. A Bach score is Bach and not something else. It communicates exactly what Bach had in mind and controls what the performer does." "The newer musical scores on the other hand are not devices for control in the same way. They communicate an idea and a quality-what emerges is soemthing both more and less than what was intended. The hand of the composer lies less heavily on the performer."

"It is the performers almost more than the composer who make the music (an approach, incidently, dating at least back to the beginning of jazz). The inevitable question that arises is: Whic is better,that the composer control what we do or that we ourselves play a major role in determining our own music? Each performer must determine this answer for her or himself."

"We are searching for ways to break down this dichotomy, for ways to allow people to enter into the act of making art, as part of the art process of open ended scoring devices which will act as guides, not dictators. These kinds of scores have the built-in possibilities for interaction between what is perceived beforehand and what emerges during the act. They allow the activity itself to generate its own results in process. They communicate but do not control. They energize and guide, they encourage, they evoke responses, they do not impose."Lawrence Halprin, "RSVP Cycles".