A Seder Surprise: Returning to God

There were so many ideas buzzing through my mind before we sat down for the first Seder last Saturday night. After all the bad news we’ve lived through, I thought of a “Seder of good news.” Given that the Seder revolves around stories, I also thought of asking people to share personal stories that have moved them. I also couldn’t forget my own Passover column about “liberating laughter,” or our cover story on a Seder for the “women of the Exodus.” And how could we ignore the Israeli hostages who are still mired in misery in Gaza?

But one idea in particular ended up cutting through: Ask people to ask questions. This idea came from my friend Rabbi Shlomo Seidenfeld who brought it up at a recent Passover Torah salon at my home.

I tell you all this because “asking questions” led us into a surprising and unlikely theme for the night: God.

What is it that makes God an unlikely and surprising subject? And why would it never occur to me to make our Creator the theme of a Seder?

Here’s one possible answer: We’ve become so concerned about Jewish continuity that we tend to look for easy entry points into Judaism, and Divine faith is simply not one of them. We prefer ideas that resonate instantly, like adding joy and meaning into our lives, improving the world, connecting with our people and our ancient story, gathering around community, experiencing Israel, and so on.

For many disconnected Jews, in other words, the leap of faith required to believe in God is a hard sell. Indeed one of the top selling points of Judaism is that you don’t have to believe in God to be part of the Jewish people. 

If anything, we tend to get a little apologetic when the subject of God comes up. Trying to prove God’s existence to an atheist is a fool’s errand, not to mention answering for how God could “allow” horrors such as the Holocaust. Focusing on the concrete benefits of our tradition is a much easier route.

And yet, God became the main theme of our Seder. How did that happen?

It started with one of the questions, when a nonbeliever shared her struggle to be open to belief in God without compromising her integrity. She was a nonbeliever, however, with a ray of hope: She yearned to gain a sense of God and wondered whether she was forestalling it through her own dogmatic materialism. 

She wasn’t satisfied with the usual answer: Don’t worry, even if you don’t believe in God, you can still be a great Jew and do important Jewish things and be part of a great people and be a great Zionist.

She wanted more.

Something that seemed to move her was the notion of expanding her view of God to embrace the transcendent and the mysterious. Two books also came up in the discussion that were useful: “Believe,” by Ross Douthat (reviewed in our Passover issue by Matthew Schultz), and an older book, “The Jewish Way,” by Rabbi Yitz Greenberg.

As the Seder wore on, we ended up touching on some of the ideas that had buzzed through my mind earlier. We honored the hostages. We told stories. We shared a few laughs.

But as we neared the end of the Seder, after the blessings and rituals and the discussions, something unexpected happened. The person who didn’t believe in God but yearned to gain a sense of Him read aloud a long section of the Haggadah in English. 

She recited the psalms of Hallel, which, as explained in My Jewish Learning, “are closely related to the song that the Israelites sang at the Sea of Reeds, a prayer of thanksgiving that both describes the personal experience of redemption and promotes worship at a central site where the glory and kingship of God can be proclaimed in public.”

It was almost jarring to hear a nonbeliever utter with a tone of conviction words like, “The soul of every living being shall bless Your Name, Hashem, our God, the spirit of all flesh shall always glorify and exalt Your remembrance, our King.”

The moment itself felt transcendent. Here was a nonbeliever reading a love letter to God as if she really believed it. I have no idea what impact this will have on her, or on others at the table.

All I know is that someone who doesn’t believe in God asked a question that brought our Creator, the essential theological pillar of our tradition, into our Seder of good news.