How is this Seder Different from Other Seders? Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential questions facing Jewish life. I’m Yehudah Kurtzer, we’re recording on Monday, March 31st, 2025.

The main question at Seder night on Passover, if we’re being honest, is not, how is this night different than other nights? Even before you get to the whole matzah curiosity or the leanings or the bitter herbs, everything is already different than other nights. And anyway, you can see Pesach coming from a mile away just by periodically stumbling into the apocalyptic Passover food aisle in the supermarket any time after around St. Patrick’s Day.

The real question is not how is this night different than other nights, it’s actually how is the Seder different from other Seders before it? I wrote about this in my book on Jewish memory, how Passover is a layered exercise of remembering previous Passover’s. This has some banal implications, like how we use Passover as a means of marking time, like wait, was that the year when we were in Virginia? But it has more profound implications, as I think we’re meant to think less and less over time about the actual Exodus and more about our more recent incarnations of the remembered past.

Sometimes the things you remember about previous Passover’s were so wacky and outrageous that you can name the Seder where it happened. In our family, it’s like that first time when my usually placid grandmother threw plastic frogs at everyone, caught everyone off guard, we remember that first time that she did it. Or the Seder, when I was a kid, when an Israeli peace activist came to our Seder, had such a great time and got so drunk that he fell into the bushes on his way out. Or one of those times when a guest who we barely knew riveted us with some personal story of redemption or salvation. Those are like bold, independent art pieces in our memory.

But more often than not, the memories of Seder’s past blend together more like sfumato paintings, like most of our memories. They’re hazy. They give us an image of a past and a composite experience of passovers built over time, independent elements harder and harder to discern. That’s precisely when we need to ask what’s different this year from last. And it’s, anyway, rarely the menu.

I think it’s fair to say that the main forces that drive the differentiation of passovers from year to year are us and the world around us. The four children in the Haggadah stay the same age, but we don’t. I think about the difference between personally relating to them at times in my life as images of children like I was, and then later about them as my children, in between most commonly as abstractions of children.

And that’s just one window, one example, about how our own evolution and development as people takes the fixed script of the Haggadah, the one on the pages, and the script that every household has about the roles we invariably play year after year, and makes that script still feel different as we change and grow. So the book might not change, but we do. And the world changes too. The implicit subplots of subjugation and liberation translate into different debates at our Seder table each year corresponding to the news cycle.

I think in all the right ways that Torah and Jewish tradition are supposed to breathe and pulsate with relevance just by being reapplied over and over to whatever world we inherit and create. Show me your fears and your hopes right now, and I’ll tell you what parts of the Haggadah will emerge as your moments for tears or laughter. None of us are the same, and none of us experience the world’s turbulences the same way, and still we seem to be surprised that in the evening, when we’re each supposed to bring all of that to the table and to read ancient parables about hope and suffering, that that often elevates our simmering disagreements and conflicts into passionate disagreement.

Passover seders are choose your metaphor, a microscope, a magnifying glass, an amplifier, a laboratory. You take a great story and the legacy of a great past. You add obligations to live that story in that past as though you’re in it. You add the vicissitudes of the human condition and the plain reality of human difference. You filter in all the ways that our closest relationships can be crucibles in our own self-definition. Add wine, a little strategic deprivation of food. Good luck.

I love Pesach and I love talking about it. By the way, I think it’s also the underrated best night of eating on the Jewish calendar once you get to the actual eating, but that’s a different podcast. As we’ve done periodically here on Identity/Crisis, this is an episode in advance of a holiday to help you get in the mood for the holiday. It’s going to be a Chavrutah session, hopefully a rich conversation on these essential moments in the Jewish calendar. And maybe if we’re lucky with some nuggets, you can bring home to your own seder.

And I’m delighted to be joined by my friend and colleague, Dara Horn. We’ve had Dara on before, but the real prompt for this visit at this time of year is Dara’s exciting new book, her first young adult graphic novel written in collaboration with her illustrator, cartoonist and co-author Theo Ellsworth. The book entitled One Little Goat is a trippy journey through Passover’s past in one family’s effort to end a never-ending seder. There’s a portal into other dimensions, a scapegoat for a tour guide, and the book is very, very deep, echoing with some of the themes I shared in my introduction, some powerful ideas about Pesach.

My favorite lines, perhaps not surprisingly, read as follows: “A tell is a human made hill formed out of the ruins of different periods of civilization, one piled on top of another. The earliest layers are at the very bottom and the most recent ones are at the top. The night of the seder is like a tell. All the seders that ever happened in the past before this one, they’re all here underneath yours.”

Now, it’s hard to do justice to a graphic novel by just reading some prose from it aloud, but hopefully that excerpt gives you listeners a window into the depth of the book and the mystery it’s trying to impart. Dara, of course, is a frequently award-winning author. Most recently, before this book, of the book, People Love Dead Jews, which I think we did an episode on as well, about recent incarnations of antisemitism and about its re-rise. I’m grateful to say that Dara also serves as a member of the editorial board of our journal sources here at Hartman.

Dara, thanks for coming back. Thanks for being on the show. And I’ll start by asking you, you, like me, I think you love Pesach too. I don’t think this is your only book about Pesach. What’s that about for you first? And then I’ll ask you about your seders.

Dara: Yes, first of all, really thrilled to be here, Yehuda. I feel like, it’s like I wrote this book for you.

Yehuda: Yes you did. Thank you.

Dara: I feel like we’ve been like having this conversation through our work before we even get to this book. yes, obviously Pesach is my favorite holiday. This is something I’ve been obsessed with since I was a child. And it’s all of those things that you mentioned. For me, it is about this, you know, thing that the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi talks about, about memory versus history.

And the idea that, you I think there’s a line in his book, Zachor, where he says, you know, the past is not something that in Jewish tradition that is, that we think of the way we think of history, where it’s, you know, a series of events to be contemplated as at a distance, but rather a series of situations into which one is existentially drawn. Right. And we’re basically commanded to do that with Pesach, right. We’re commanded to enter into this story to see yourself as if you personally came out of Egypt. And we’re always trying to evoke that in creating. That’s sort of really the goal of the Seder is to evoke that in everyone who’s present.

For me as a writer, this has been hugely important to me because as a writer, my subject is time. And this is something I’ve been obsessed with since I was a child. I used to go to bed at night when I was a child and think, you know, this day that just ended is gone. Now, where did it go? And, you know, I’ve started writing as a child in, in a sense, almost like just taking notes to try to record things that were happening. You know, my journals and diaries from when I was a child are not like contemplations about my emotions or my personal life. They’re like, it’s almost more like a reporter’s notebook about, you know, was basically just trying to capture these disappearing days and I found in Pesach many thousands of years worth of people who were trying to do the same thing. And that was very resonant to me.

And I can tell you a little bit about, sort of two seders that I regularly attended growing up that instilled this in me. So one was the seder that my parents hosted. I’m one of four children. And you mentioned before the whole four children thing. I’m one of four children. I now have four children. So this is very resonant also. We could talk about that.

Yehuda: There’s four children in the book.

Dara: Yes, yes, there are four children in the book. There are four children in the Haggadah. When I was growing up, my parents, parents said it was very important to them to make us feel like we were part of this experience, right? So, and to feel ownership over the story. That was what was important to them. So they would assign us every year to sort of create these creative interpretations of the story that we would perform at the Seder, like songs and skits and parodies and things. And, you know, these tended to be a little bit silly and, you know, riffing on whatever was, you know, the thing in pop culture that year.

But this was, the result of this was that, you know, my siblings and I all felt really invested in this story and knew the story really well and really felt like it was something we looked forward to where we had like a part that we were playing that we felt an ownership of. So that was one seder that was key to my idea of this growing up.

The other seder we used to regularly attend when I was growing up though was family friends of ours, not relatives. And this is where we would go often for the second night. This was a gigantic multi-generational gathering with like about 40 or 50 people. And they had us all seated at this very, long table and they seated us by age. So at the one end of the table were the old people and, I’m 47 years old, so what this means is this is like in the 1980s and early 90s. These were old people, the old people in the Seder were Holocaust survivors, several of whom had actually fought in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, which of course started on Pesach in 1943. And that was what their Seder was about. Like that was what they were singing, Yiddish songs, which I didn’t understand at the time and now I do, and that was what they were talking about in their Seder.

In the middle of the table were people my parents’ age. And a few of those people were what they used to call refuseniks. So former Soviet Jews, these are a couple of people who had managed to come over to this country and were very active in this movement to free Soviet Jews. And that was what their seder was about. And then way on the end of the table were the children who were making jokes about TV shows.

And I just remember feeling like there were three different seders going on during this seder. And I was very aware of that as a child and I felt like, to me, this was like a negative contrast to my own Seder where I was like, you know, and my parents’ seder, like, you know, I’m really involved in this. And here it’s like, you know, there’s these old people at the other end who don’t want to know for me. And then the middle people who are doing their own things, something, something Cold War, right? And, you know, then there’s kids who maybe are bored or out of it.

But I remember having these moments during that Seder where it was almost like a vision that came to me. And this is something that stayed with me since I was a child, that I felt like this room that we’re all sitting in is like this lighted box and that it’s standing at the top of a tower of other lighted boxes, of other rooms of seders that have happened in the past, right? Including the seders that other people at this seder were at when they were younger, right? Whether it was in Minsk in 1980 or whether it was in the Warsaw Ghetto or, you know, or wherever the old people from those seders, the seders they had experienced in whatever year they were having a seder as a child, right? The person who was the old person in one of their older people’s seders.

And I just thought like, this is this tower of rooms that’s going, that just goes down, there’s 3,000 years to the original seder, which is the night before the Exodus. And this idea just stayed with me for, I I think about this every single year and this is, yeah, then I finally wrote a book about it. But as you say, now my first book about Pesach, I do have another book that’s dealing with Pesach themes, but this one finally was my opportunity to literally dive very literally into this idea.

Yehuda: Yeah, so let’s talk about this a little bit more because, you know, like you, I’m very drawn to this. Where have I seen this before is a question that Jews don’t ask about themselves personally, they ask about our people, right? We process the present through like, what version of this does it look like in the past?

And I, at the same time, wonder whether this fixation with time as a tower or as a cycle, whether it’s a little bit of a trap for us as modern Jews, like what does it do to us about our limitations or inability to see new expressions of old great problems as genuinely new? Do we get seduced into mythic narratives of the past that may not accurately describe what we’re in?

And I think the biggest case is, you know, really I think maybe this year at least the most evocative line. in the Haggadah of V’hishe’amda, that truth that holds, which is in every generation they rise up to destroy us and God comes to save us, which by the way many Jews did not experience as being the case. They may have felt the first part of the sentence and not the second part, but it locks us into a kind of a theological narrative of history and the instinct to look at every version of a new challenge that the Jewish people faces as like a replication of the earlier version.

And I, I sometimes like that and feel like that’s helpful because then I feel like I’m standing on the basis of all this history and precedent that our people have seen before. And I wonder whether it’s also a little bit of a trap.

Dara: So I don’t think it’s a trap because as Americans, everything in our culture is pushing us in the other direction. This is a tension that I felt as an American Jewish writer. I feel like there’s two different sort of cultural elements that go into being an American Jew. And one is this American idea that the past does not matter. And that we’re only creating new things from here on out. Right? That is like so foundational to American… that’s like a founding, the founding legend of America is this idea that it doesn’t matter where you came from, it doesn’t matter who your parents are, who your great grandparents are.

What matters is what you do with the opportunities this country gives us. That’s what we call the American dream. Whether this is true or not factually is irrelevant. This is the founding legend that’s like the animating idea of American life and which is, you know, American Jewish communities, of course, hugely invested in this idea.

You know, and when you think about the founding legend of Jewish life is, of course, the opposite idea, that it actually does matter who your parents are, who your grandparents are, who your great-great-great-great-grandparents are, and it doesn’t even have to be biological. It’s, you know, where you place yourself in this tradition. could be teacher, or a student, whatever it is. And that, in fact, the most important things in your life happened thousands of years before you were born, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Right? Which is like, basically the opposite of the American dream, right?

And I felt this tension in my life, throughout my life as an American Jew and also as an American Jewish writer. So I am actually grateful to this tradition for providing this historical consciousness that otherwise is very absent from, I think from our lives as Americans in terms of American culture and absolutely from our lives, you the way the culture is, you know, the way so much of our culture is today where there’s just zero historical consciousness, I mean, history’s barely taught in public schools anymore, I don’t know. I’m not really worried about this trap that you mentioned, to be quite honest, because I feel like everything in our lives as English-speaking American Jews is pushing in the opposite direction. And a bit of historical perspective, I think, is actually very useful.

And I actually have a bigger problem with it in the context of a holiday like Tisha B’Av. And I’ve actually written and spoken about this. I have an essay and a speech that I created about 10 or 15 years ago called The Eicha Problem, where I talk about sort of the problem with this like Jewish theological idea that’s expressed in Eicha, in the Book of Lamentations, about the destruction of Jerusalem, where it’s basically this idea that it’s this sort of solipsistic view of history where, you know, other nations have no agency. Right?

And it’s all about, Jerusalem was destroyed because of the people’s sins, you know, it’s, you know, and then that’s exacerbated by the rabbinic tradition, you know, the temple was destroyed because of causeless hatred among the people and all, know, because you didn’t educate your children, because you didn’t observe Shabbat, whatever it is. No, not one of these brilliant rabbis ever says, you know, the Temple was destroyed because of the Babylonian superior weaponry. Like, doesn’t come up. Right? It’s this like completely solipsistic view that like, basically saying, you know, that anything that happens to you is your fault.

And so that I do have a problem with… but for Pesach, have less of a problem with the theology behind it because I think that what, to me, the, the sort of overriding and abiding message of Pesach is hope. It’s sort of the opposite of this kind of punitive, self-punitive, and I don’t even regard it as victimhood. It’s not, it’s the opposite of that. It’s a, you know, this sort of, you know, you’ve brought this on yourself kind of thing. Pesach to me is the opposite. It’s this story that, you know, even when you’re in these dire circumstances, that there’s hope for a better future.

And I think, you know, I just spoke about how, you know, in America now we have this opposite idea of time, you know, nothing exists that ever happened more than five minutes ago. But I also think in the ancient world, they had a different problem, which was this idea of total absence of the idea of progress, right? That everything is cyclical, right? And there’s this fatalism. And that was sort of the prevailing cultural elements in the ancient Near East, are pointing toward this fatalism and a social hierarchy always being the same and change being something terrifying, right?

And so here you have this idea that really introduces this Pesach story, I think really introduces this radical idea of hope. So yeah, I don’t have a problem with that.

Yehuda: Yeah, I don’t have a problem with that either. It reminds me of the last line, which we read as one of the supplemental readings that we bring to Haggada from the last line of Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution. “Wherever you are, it’s probably Egypt. The only way from here to the Promised Land is by linking arms together and marching.”

I guess the solipsism kicks in for me around the application of the contemporary conditions of anti-Jewish attitudes and anti-Semitism to the core myth of the subjugation of the Jews under Pharaoh, the oppression of the Jews under Pharaoh, which comes out more actually in the rabbinic pieces of the Haggadah than it does in the biblical text. After all, we don’t really read the biblical text in the Haggadah. We read stories about the story. And the stories of the suppression and persecution of the Jews are more prominent in the rabbinic story.

And I fear, I guess, sometimes that what it’s doing is collapsing what may actually be new expressions of anti-Semitism or if one can say such a thing, or new political conditions under which anti-Semitism is emerging into a certain narrative of the past, but maybe it does make a difference. Maybe it’s bad either way.

Dara: So I actually do see a continuity here. And this is actually something I’m thinking about a lot and we could talk about this. have a new nonprofit that’s about educating the broader American public about foundations of Jewish civilization and dynamics of anti-Semitism.

And one of the key things that I have been emphasizing in that is something that does really sort of come to the forefront in the Passover story, which is, if you think about the idea of monotheism, which is, you know, this idea in the ancient world that’s, you know, obviously everyone knows this is the origin of monotheism is with Am Yisrael, with the Jewish people. And today we think of monotheism as a spiritual idea.

I actually think that in the ancient Near East, this is a political idea. Because you have these surrounding ancient Near Eastern cultures where these are societies that have many, many gods. And you have situations where among these many gods, one of them is the dictator. And this is, of course, what is on flagrant display in the Pesach story. I would actually argue even more so in the original text in the Torah than in the parts that are emphasized in the Haggadah, perhaps, that this is really this showdown over this idea of the Pharaoh being a god.

And when you think of it that way, then you realize this radical political aspect of monotheism, which is that when the Jews say that they don’t bow to other gods or they don’t bow to idols, what they actually mean in that context is that they don’t bow to tyrants. And then you sort of can think about Am Yisrael as essentially an anti-tyrannical movement.

And to me, there is this pattern that does persist. To me, there’s often a way we try to understand anti-Semitism where it’s this scapegoating, and we can talk about that because I wrote a book called, One Little Goat, about a scapegoat, that the Jews are just targeted because they’re a minority, they’re minding their own business.

But I actually think that there is actually a dynamic between the content of Jewish civilization and the persistence of antisemitism, which has to do with this being essentially a movement against tyranny, which is always going to piss off tyrants. Right? It’s, and you know, this is like a counterculture that runs through world history. And I do think there’s absolutely something really powerful about understanding that idea and how incredibly radical it was and frankly, how radical it still is.

Yehuda: Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of that I find politically compelling, but also morally compelling. It creates, though, a little bit of an interpretive problem, which is, you know, one of the kind of strange features that’s been pointed out many times over the years by traditional commentators and contemporary Jews is Moses’s absence from the story. There’s a lot of hypotheses why Moses doesn’t appear in the Haggadah. The Haggadah’s choice to curate Moses out…

Dara: We’re not asking… from the Torah account?

Yehuda: No, not absent from the Torah account, but that’s what makes this disappearance from the Haggadah particularly stark. And what is painful about that, as you’re describing this resistance against tyranny, is that Moses is actually one of only two characters who is described as actually speaking truth to power against, in some ways, the most tyrannical character sometimes in our tradition, which is God, when God wants to destroy the Sodomites. Abraham speaks out against it.

And then as a replication of that story, right after the exodus from Egypt, when God wants to destroy the Israelites for the sin of the golden calf, and says to Moses, let me restart this civilization on the basis of you, which is a repeat of the Abraham Genesis 18 story, Moses says, if you want to do that, erase me from your book. And if you wanted this to be an anti-tyrannical story, actually humanizing the resistance to tyranny in Moses, who in the Bible stands up first against Pharaoh and then second against God, would be the ultimate illustration of the story.

And it feels like there’s a hole there that we do want this to be an anti-tyrannical story, but I’m left with two powers that I’m supposed to be subordinate to, either earthly tyrannical power or heavenly power. How do you… what do you make of Moses’s absence from the story within this framework of thinking about how the Torah is resisting tyranny or wants the Jewish people to resist tyranny?

Dara: You look at the rabbinic tradition as a tradition where these are the rabbinic traditions created by people who don’t have this kind of political agency. And so, you know, they’re looking to have this become more of a spiritual story. And I actually see this drama and I do put this into the graphic novel, which we can get to, but I do see this drama in there sort of two threads through the Haggadah of what this story is about. And they’re attributed to Rav and Shmuel, right, who are these two rabbis from the time of the Babylonian Talmud. So, you know, the later half of the rabbinic tradition.

And they have basically two versions of what this story means. And I feel a little bit outclassed talking about this with a rabbi who’s going to know more about this than I do. I hope you’ll correct me with whatever errors I make.

Yehuda: No, no, we’re all, we’re in this together.

Dara: Yes, this is our Chavruta. I think it’s Shmuel who sees this really the way that I just described as a political story about tyranny, where he says, is a story, it’s like that we first were serving Pharaoh and now we are serving God. Right? This is our, it’s a political story about liberation.

And Rav casts this instead as a story of spiritual liberation where he says, and his story begins on that page of the Haggadah where it says our ancestors worshiped idols. And he says the story isn’t we used to serve Pharaoh and now we serve God, it’s we used to serve idols and now we serve God. Right. And it’s this story of spiritual liberation. And I think that those two stories are both in the Haggadah. Right. Those two versions of the story are both in the Haggadah.

And to me, that to bring it back to our experiences with these seders in our own lives and through history, each of those two stories are going to be more or less resonant to people depending on the circumstances they find themselves in. There are some circumstances where you do experience Pesach as this story about, for lack of a better term, political liberation. Or that there’s these threatening circumstances that you’re finding yourself in that are really truly outside of your control that are part of the society you’re in.

And, you know, it’s a war, it’s a whatever it is, a persecution, those kinds of things. And then there also is this more spiritual understanding, right? And that’s when you get into all, you know, and then there’s a gigantic tradition around that, right? Of like, you know, these Hasidic commentators who talk about Mitzrayim being, you know, Egypt, but the word Mitzrayim being the narrows, which it physically is because of course, ancient Egypt was about this narrow area on the Nile where there was, you these fertile fields, that’s where it gets its name, but they interpret that as, you this is a narrow place that, you know, when you’re in a narrow place in your life spiritually, and then you’re trying to find this outlet to freedom, or, you you’re trapped in whatever mindset you’re in, right? I mean, there’s, you we’ve had, you know, those kinds of seders where that’s the part of the story that’s resonant, right? So I think that both of those elements are there. And, you know, that’s why this is such a powerful experience of being at the seder, because it has all of those things and, you know, depending where you are in your life, different parts of those things are going to be resonant.

Yehuda: Yeah, so I should ask you about the book and then I’ll come back to the Haggadah itself, which is why this now, I mean, this so different in terms of the format, the audience of the books that you’ve written to date and your books all do, especially your fiction works all do a dance between the past and the present that’s abundant in your work and your commitment. As you said, your primary work is around time. This just looks and sounds really different. Maybe just share a little bit about how this came about.

Dara: But I actually am gonna disagree with you, actually think that all my books are actually the same book, writing the same book over and over and over again in different forms and this one is actually just the most direct…

Yehuda: I appreciate, by the way, I appreciate that you say that because I think that’s true of almost every thinker and writer. They have one idea, one idea that they’re hammering over again. And there’s a myth of the fox and the hedgehog, but really most of us are hedgehogs. And it’s good to kind of admit that we keep saying the same thing over again. And the sign I think of growing up is knowing that you have one big idea that you’re pushing over and over again, and that it stays interesting to you. And maybe it stays interesting to other people as well. Anyway, but thank you for saying that.

Dara: Of course! Yes! It’s not exactly the same idea, but it’s an evolution of an idea over time. So yeah, I mean, look, as I mentioned, I’ve been thinking about this idea for a very, very long time. Since I was a child, this has sort of been in my head.

I first thought of this a few years ago and it was a little bit random. I was on a road trip with my family in California and was like, we stopped at a comic book shop and we bought a bunch of comic books and my kids were all fighting in the car over this one really thick graphic novel that they had picked up that was by this indie cartoonist named Theo Ellsworth. They’re fighting over this book. Like, you know, it’s like, oh, it’s your turn. It’s all mine. You already had it already. You know, it’s my turn to read it. And I was like, what are you guys, what are you even talking about?

And I looked at this book, you know, I sort of stole it from them later and I was just enchanted by this person’s artwork. Like there was something about, it’s kind of this like underground comics kind of feel. It’s like a little bit grungy, subversive, art crumb kind of vibe, but it also is what it’s incredibly detailed, you know, pen and ink work.

And what he does, I think, really well is he makes abstract ideas literal. That was what I saw in this other graphic novel that he worked where he would have these images where there’d be like a cutaway of what’s going on inside someone’s head. It would be all these different rooms inside somebody’s head and little staircases going up and down to different parts of their brain, like that kind of thing. And I was just enchanted by it.

And I had had this idea, as I mentioned, in my head for many years about this way of traveling down into these previous seders. And I cold emailed him. I mean, I remember looking at this, looking him up and he’s quite a respected, he’s a pretty acclaimed indie cartoonist. And I remember just thinking like, his name is Theo Ellsworth, he lives in Missoula, Montana. He’s probably not Jewish. This idea I have is like kind of deep in the weeds for someone like that, to even just explain like, what is an Afikomen, right?

But yeah, I cold emailed him. I was like, hi, I’m a writer. I love your work. I have an idea for a book. Deep breath, it takes a little while to explain this. He was completely game, was very excited by this idea. And there were some bumps along the way in terms of getting this project off the ground. I actually started writing this before People Love Dead Jews came out, my last nonfiction book. That book came out at the end of 2021. And I already was working with him on this before that.

But for various boring reasons, it took a long time until it finally came to life. It was just an amazing experience working with this person because I had never collaborated with another artist before. And there’s so many things that he brought to the story that I would not have thought of. And I mean, it’s just, it was just really a wonderful gift to be able to work with him.

Yehuda: Yeah. What are you expecting in terms of your relationship to a different generation of readers?

Dara: You know, I didn’t think about that very carefully except from sort of a logistical reason. I do remember thinking like… and this has more to do with the publishing industry. To me, this is a book for anybody. Like anybody who likes to read a graphic novel can read this book. They’re all going to get something out of it. Like it’s not like it’s for kids, it’s for this age, it’s for that age. I don’t really care about those things. The publishing industry does care about those things.

So I remember doing a little research about that to think like, you know, because obviously, you know, as a writer, you have to sell it to a publisher. And I remember thinking, I learned about, you know, there’s categories of books where it’s like they have something called middle grade, which is like ages eight to 12, which are people who know how to read by themselves, but aren’t buying their own books. And then you have ages 13 to 18, which is young adult, which is people who are buying their own books with their parents’ money. These are categories in the publishing industry and they’re marketed differently.

What’s interesting about it, and it does affect the way you write it, because young readers like to read aspirationally because children’s lives are necessarily constricted and part of reading is their opportunity to explore other worlds. For example, the way this impacts you as a writer is that the protagonist has to be at the high end of that age bracket. I had no idea about this, all books published in the United States in, I don’t even know how many decades, if it’s a middle grade book, the main character has to be 12. And if it’s a young adult book, the main character has to be 17 or 18. You will not find a book with a 15 year old protagonist. You will not find a book with a 10 year old protagonist. You might find a picture book. But will not find, like, you know, that’s why like Diary of a Wimpy Kid. All those books, like, have a main character who’s 12. It’s like a bizarre, bizarre thing.

And it’s like, you know, there’s many things we could talk about how publishing industry shapes what people write. So to that extent, I thought about, I’m like, OK, I need to make a decision about how old is the protagonist. That’s not what you thought I was going to say.

Yehuda: Well, no, not at all.

Dara: You thought I was going to say something about, you know, reaching out to young readers and Gen Alpha or something like, no, didn’t think about any of that. I really didn’t because to me this is like this is a book for everyone who read graphic novels and you know the only point at which I was thinking about those kinds of things was for you know publishing reasons honestly.

Yehuda: Yeah, although I had to, I mean, I assume this is the case. Like I became much more interested as an educator in recent years in building out programs for teens in no small part because I had teenagers in my house and I was fascinated by learning through their eyes what they had access to in terms of serious Jewish life and Jewish thinking and what actually was being held back from them. That’s not the only reason we created the Hartman Teen Fellows. But it wasn’t a coincidence.

And I have to imagine that you, as a parent also, are also seeing not only what’s available to consume, but how, by the same notion that you described, like what’s available to young adult readers in terms of aspiration, what’s available to young Jews in terms of thinking about the complexity of the narratives of their own tradition in mainstream publishing.

Dara: Okay, yeah, so this is something actually, to be fair, yes, I have thought about this a lot because as you say, yes, I have four children. This was actually something that… now my children are mostly teenagers or almost, I mean, a couple of months from now, I will have four teenagers. Youngest is having a Bar Mitzvah in June.

Yehuda: Mazal tov.

Dara: Thank you. But, you know, and also, but I started this project a few years ago. But also, this was something I did think about throughout their growing up because my children had a hard time sitting in shul. And so I always was looking for ways for them to stay in shul and you know, to sit through a long boring service basically. And they were not interested in like, you know, for some people that happens through the music, for some people that happens through the community, there’s other, my kids were not interested in those things, but all four of them really love to read.

And when they were younger, I told them that it was fine for them to bring books to shul as long as they were like, books that were related to Torah or to Jewish life and history. so I, they, especially when they were younger, I was absolutely always on the lookout for books like that that were going to be engaging for them. And yes, they went through this whole phase where like, as I mentioned, they’re obsessed with comics and graphic novels and things like that. And there was a phase where I was like constantly scouring the internet to find like any possible graphic novel that had any kind of like Jewish theme.

And yeah, I mean, there’s some great stuff out there and I’ve definitely found all of it that was existing at the time my kids were those ages. But yeah, mean, there’s never as much as you’d like, right? In terms of things that aren’t talking down to the child, right? And are giving them an opening, right? Rather than sort of, know, spoon feeding them something, yeah.

Yehuda: Yeah, I think that’s one of the most beautiful elements of the book is that to your metaphor of these light boxes in a tower is that in the journey of the protagonist through the past, you’re basically now, you know, you know, turning on the lights in each of these boxes to the places that you curate in the journey along Jewish history. But I think the implicit message is, okay, well, I showed you whatever it is, three or four, maybe five light boxes on the journey, but now there’s an infinite number of them, and that you as, a not only as a searcher or reader or thinker, but even as a Jew, have a responsibility to interrogate what those seders looked like.

And you express this very powerfully near the end of the book of like, why have you not been willing to interrogate as you describe, like, why did they seat the children separately from the table of those Holocaust survivors? Like, that’s like bonkers. They should you all should have been mixed up at those tables for exactly that reason.

Dara: But I understand why they chose that. Right? Yes. I mean, I completely respect why they chose that. And now as an adult. But at the time, yeah, I’ve absolutely experienced that. It’s like, I’m not part of the story.

Yehuda: Let me move back to some of these themes. You know, one thing I thought about recently when I read Josh Leifer’s recent book and we had him on the podcast to talk about his book, Tablets Shattered. And one of things that was striking to me was he too starts his story with like, here’s where my American Jewish family comes from. And he kind of appeals to a story of, you know, progressive politics on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

And part of me was like, great, okay, you’ve shown me a little bit of your heritage and therefore what frustrates you about Jewish politics today. But I don’t have that. That’s not like my family story. And by the same token, like I have no direct ancestors who were Holocaust survivors. My family was all in America. And so I don’t have that lightbox, which is such to say. And I wonder what that does to our attempt to create a sense of coherent belonging to the same story.

Like we, you and I probably both believe in this thing called Jewish peoplehood, but we actually have like totally different layers of seders pass before us, which lead us to kind of investigate the key themes of the seders that recur. How might we do that collectively? Like take seriously our own narrow heritages, but also find a way to see that other lightboxes that might not have been our own light boxes are part of that story?

Dara: Well, so I wonder if we should take a minute just to explain the structure of the book. Yeah, is that okay?

Yehuda: Go for it. Yeah. Yeah.

Dara: Yeah, so just to explain the structure of how I set up this book. So it’s a, one little girl, it’s about a family at a contemporary Passover Seder and they cannot find the afikomen, which is this piece of matzah that’s hidden toward the end of the meal that you sort of needed to complete the meal.

And because they can’t find this afikomen, the Seder cannot end. And they’re trapped at this never-ending Seder. And they’ve been trapped there for six months. And the food’s regenerating on the table. They’re all driving each other insane. And about six months in, there’s a knock on the door. They’re like, maybe it’s Elijah the prophet. But it can’t be Elijah the prophet, because they’re, of course, not up to that part of the Seder yet. And the oldest child, is, there’s, of course, four children—Wise, wicked, simple and can’t ask.

And the oldest child goes to answer the door and it’s a talking goat who says, I’m the scapegoat. I’m the reason for all of your problems. I can help you find your afikomen. And the kid’s like, great, where is it? And the goat says, not where, when. And then the goat explains that over the past six months, thousands of years of previous seders have accumulated underneath your seder. And we now have to travel down through those seders to find your Afikomen. And so as you said, it becomes this journey through Jewish history. So that’s the structure of the book.

As you point out, there is, I’ve curated this, right? I’m making choices about, you of all those, and you see these many thousands of doors they can open. The goat is the guide and he’s sort of choosing which stores they open. At the beginning, the child sees people who are in his family who we’ve already met upstairs, so to speak. We’ve met at the contemporary Seder. And it becomes this sort of way of him accessing some deeper understanding about choices that his family has made and that the people at his current Seder have made.

So the child is given access to some of these seders that are involved, the people from his upstairs, so to speak, from his current seder, and this enables him to understand something a little deeper about his family, about his personal family.

And sometimes these are these like world historical political events and sometimes they’re personal events. So for example, he has a father who’s like obsessed with holidays, very over eager about all this is like, you know, who wants to dress up as the angel of death? Right. He’s like that guy with like the frog puppets and everything, and you know, this kid is like a little too cool for this now and he finds this incredibly annoying.

One of the seders he visits is his father seder in Minsk in the former USSR in 1981 and the Seder consists of like his mom has smuggled a piece of matzo from a secret bakery and it’s like tonight’s the night and that’s it. This, like, you know, Natan Sharansky kind of experience and then he’s like, well that’s weird, you know, my dad’s really obsessed with holidays. And then he’s like wait. And you see it clicking with him, like that’s why my dad’s so obsessed with holidays. So for that, that’s like a world historical kind of circumstance.

But then for his mother, it isn’t, right? So in the way we’ve met the mother in the upstairs Seder, right, the contemporary Seder is that she’s just announced, you know, there are these four children and she’s just told everyone she’s pregnant again. And which the wise child is like not too thrilled about this, right. He’s just like, you know, last thing we need is like another baby for me to have to like supervise while my mom is busy with somebody else. Right. You he experiences this as like this burdensome thing, less attention from parents, all the things that children often feel when there’s another sibling.

He sees his mother’s Seder, which is in New York City in 1990. And, you know, there’s no world historical, I’m being persecuted, I’m experiencing political liberation, none of that. But he sees her Seder and he says, wow, there aren’t any other kids there. She’s the only kid at this Seder table. Wow, that looks really lonely. You know, at my Seder, there’s always lots of them. He’s like, oh. Oh. And it starts to like sort of sink in.

But very quickly in this book, you get past the seders that are people he knows. So to your question about, you know, like, how do we have that like, oh, this isn’t part of my family. This isn’t part of my personal history. What makes you think it isn’t? Right? What makes you think it isn’t? You know, all of these things are, you know, at some point, I think it’s like, you know, I forget what number of generations it is where somebody has like a million descendants. Right. And also, why does this have to be your biological ancestors doing this? I mean, if you were someone who would join the Jewish people as a person who was a Jew by choice, this wouldn’t be your, oh, it’s not my personal experience. Like, that’s not what this is about. Right. This isn’t about like doing some 23andMe test on you and seeing, what is your personal experience, right?

This is about this collective experience of the Jewish people, which has a lot of variety to it, as you say, right? I mean, there’s a lot of different streams to it. And I mean, you know, I don’t have Holocaust survivors in my family. My children do. But I don’t. OK. Right. That doesn’t mean that that’s not part of the Jewish people’s experience. It is my children’s direct ancestors. So. Yeah.

Yehuda: Yeah, so I think that that’s a powerful way to help us understand that the search for the past vertically is supposed to live on an axis with the search for the Jewish people horizontally. So the people of our own generation all are the heirs of a different vertical, but we have responsibilities…
Dara: And also the people at a Seder table can be that, right?

Yehuda: And the people at our seder table as well. That’s right.

Dara: I can often have, mean, you know, there’s a limit to how many people this illustrator could draw at a table. But like, you know, if you think about, like all the people who are at the Seder table, like, you know, you have many representatives of many different Jewish stories of recent years.

Yehuda: Yeah, so let me raise one other tension that I was listening for in the book, which I think is an intentional tension as part of the very story of what makes the Seder so complicated, which is, the Seder has these elements of total preservation of tradition. You have a character who is reading the Haggadah and kind of doggedly reading the Haggadah. There’s one in every family. It’s like, let’s follow this. You have a character who insists that everyone who’s doing everything is doing it wrong.

And at the same time, the message throughout the book, and especially near the end, is about a kind of, I don’t know, radical curiosity about questioning, about the culture of debate. I had a colleague who said to me recently, and I didn’t know what to make of it, said, I said, know, I don’t know how it came up. We were talking about, like, what Haggadah people use, like the most boring conversation. And he said, yeah, most years we don’t actually have a Haggadah.

And I was like, yeah, that’s… Okay, I don’t know what I would do without it. There’s things that I would never want to not have from the Haggadah, but there’s, not wrong to say we’re sitting here, that the Haggadah was just the effort of some generation of Jews to codify the obligation to tell the story of liberation from Egypt.

I feel that that’s a warring tension within your book about the Seder as well, is how much of this is just about the radical curiosity of the stories that we carry and their application to the president and how much of this is about a kind of dogmatic performance of this ritual way that it’s supposed to be performed. You want to just share a little bit of insight into that?

Dara: So in the book, yeah, there is like the great grandmother at the theater who’s like the 98 year old great grandma who survived the Warsaw ghetto uprising. And the only thing she ever says is you’re doing it wrong. Right. And then there’s like the grandfather who’s always like, ahem, now I’m going to continue dogmatically reading the Haggadah, right. And drive everyone nuts. So yes, there is that.

But, you know, I blow that apart in this book because there is a point where the main character in The Goat decides to take a shortcut back in time and the shortcut leads through medieval Haggadahs. And this was just really an opportunity for the artist to just go to town with these amazing images that are… I just gave him tons and tons of examples of various medieval Haggadot and he basically latched onto the ones that he loved the most and kind of ran with them.

And part of that is bringing in these multiple dimensions, right? Because there’s like the bird’s head Haggadah. It’s like, why do these people have bird’s heads? Why not, basically, is the answer. There isn’t really a more scholarly, conclusive answer to it beyond that. There’s the Prague Haggadah, which is the very first printed Hebrew book, which there’s these columns in it and he’s walking through the columns. This becomes part of it. There’s, the four children in the Haggadah are, the images he takes from there are from, think it’s from the Washington Haggadah, which is another medieval manuscript. But he illustrates them the way that they’re illustrated in some other Haggadah where they’re portrayed as playing cards. It’s like, you know, kind of like the King, Queen, the Jack, you know, but they’re portrayed as playing cards.

So, you know, that is also kind of you see how like that tension with the what we’re doing with the story is already there even in the artwork in these medieval Haggadahs, you already see that kind of people playing with these ideas. So the playing with the ideas, already part of that experience and the variety of Haggadahs and the variety of places that people are telling the stories, of course, part of the story too. And yes, I love the way you put that is what I’m suggesting in this book is what you, as you put it, radical curiosity.

Yehuda: All right, last question, which is what are the best things you do at your Seder? What works the best? I want to give people a little bit of takeaway of, know, I think if you’re committed to this, you should also be radically curious about what happens to other people’s Seder because, you know, just because you did it one way last year doesn’t mean it’s not the best that it could be this year. So what are some of the great things at your Seder?

Dara: Oh my God. So I’m, I feel like you’re going to regret that you asked this question. So my Seder, which I, so now I now I’m the host of the Seder, and my Seder evolved out of two things. One was this heritage that I personally had from my parents, you know, asking us to, you know, invent all these creative ways of participating in the Seder and riffing on pop culture and that kind of thing, and letting the children take over certain parts of the Seder, combined with wanting to really do the entire traditional liturgy.

Like to be, you know, I am that person who’s like, you’re doing it wrong. I’m going to read this page and whether you like it or not. But that experiencing that tension of I want to be the person who reads this page, whether you like it or not, with being part of a very large family with a lot of young children, many of whom are not the kind of kids who are going to like, sit for this. So that was the challenge that I had for myself when I first started hosting these seders and I’m now doing this now 15 years.

And yeah, I yeah, that’s like, I have four children. I wanted four children. My parents have 14 grandchildren. Plus there are some other members of the family who are also, you know, it’s a very large young seder. And it was this tension, as you say, between wanting to make sure we do all of the things in the ritual that are halakhically required. And we read this stuff, but also wanting children to experience this as something where they were invested and where they were excited and where they felt like they’re part of the story.

So one thing I will say, I mean, I will put this out on the table, like we use technology. So this is not like, if you’re the kind of halakhic person who doesn’t, you know, turn on lights or something like that, this would not work for you. But so it is traditional in that we do the entire liturgy, but we do use technology. We have turned this, dialed this up to 11, in terms of special effects. So for example, one of the things that we do during Maggid, during the long portion of the Seder where you’re telling the story, we build a walkthrough Exodus experience in our basement and garage. We actually, it’s actually quite a small basement, it’s only one small room, but we divide it up with like mural paper. So like black mural paper, it’s paint, we paint it with neon paint, we have black lights.

It’s almost like if you’ve ever been to one of those Halloween walkthrough experiences where it’s like a haunted house and you come around a corner and somebody pops out in a zombie costume. It’s kind of like that experience, but it’s like you come into different little experiences where my children are actors in costume for this. So it’s like you go into one room and it’s like all stone painted walls and there’s the blood on the door and you open the door and you come in and it’s all lit with those fake candles and there’s one of my kids and they’re sacrificing a lamb.

And then you go it’s, you know, that’s a, I mean, made out of like a big balls of cotton and whatever. Then you go into the next room and you’re in this neon-lit Egyptian palace where you meet Pharaoh and his son, and like Pharaoh is like, you know, lashing out at his son for like, you know, being a bum and not living up to his potential or whatever.

Then, you know, there’s another kid who pops out of a closet in a Grim Reaper costume and slays him. And, you know, at some point you then go to you open the door to the garage and we have, we’ve set up the garage as what’s, it’s called a laser swamp. Do you know what this is?

Yehuda: No, but I can guess.

Dara: You can, it’s, I, have, we have blue lasers at waist height that are around the edges of the garage. And then you have a fog machine where the fog appears to only go up to the height of the laser. It’s like a plane of lasers that’s at waist height. And that plane, when you look at the surface, it looks like water cause it’s got, you know, because of the swirling effects of the fog and it, it parts in front of you as you walk through it.

Yeah, so everyone in my seder really feels like they personally experienced the exodus from Egypt. I mean, this is like the tip of the iceberg. We have like something like this for every, every page of the Haggadah. Like there’s some crazy special effect that’s attached to it. So yeah, it’s very, very elaborate.

Yehuda: Listen, I think, I think, I don’t know if everyone’s going to do that, but I think that one of the things that you’re suggesting, which is something that is close to our hearts also is, you know, kids will participate in things that you give them assignments to do that they actually want to do, which is not the same as like forcing them to sing the one piece of stuff that they got from Hebrew school or day school.

But like for our kids, when they were at a certain age, we just, we were like, forget about fancy table settings. We, we put brown paper, we basically put down brown paper on the table, gave them all the Legos on Erev Chag, and they built the massive centerpiece was the Exodus from Egypt. And they felt so proud of it. And by the way, then they had something to play with during the Haggadah, during the Seder. And it was the opposite of, do something to show off for us. It was like, do something that would make this evening feel, like, weird and fun, which is kind of the whole point.

Dara: Exactly. and these are like some these are ancient ideas, right? I mean, like one thing we’ve we’ve done for many years is when you open the door at Halachma Anya, like when all who are hungry come and eat, we’ll have like some of the kids will come in and like be in costumes and put on a little skit about, where are you going? Where are you going? Where did you come from? That is like not my idea. That’s from some I forget which medieval commentary it is that tells you to do that.

There’s another thing I got an idea from… You know, I’m leading the Seder and when we do Kadesh Urchatz at the beginning, I always announce to everyone there, like, as you can see, we’ve got a lot to go, you know, we’ve got a lot to get through this evening and, we really want to stay on track. And so, you know, if I, if any of you try to interrupt me with questions about the Seder, questions about the story of the Exodus, I am going to be forced to throw marshmallows at you. And then, you know, like marshmallows are flying all night long, people are asking questions all night long. That wasn’t my idea. That’s from, I think it’s Rambam. Rambam talks about throwing nuts at children when they ask questions and nuts, like, first of all, there’s allergies, second of all, it’s going to take out somebody’s eye. So we went with marshmallows instead.

Yehuda: Well, thank you so much, Dara. The book is called One Little Goat: A Passover Catastrophe. It’s available from Norton Young Readers, available everywhere, by Dara Horn and Theo Ellsworth. Thanks for being on the show today. Congratulations on the book and Chag Sameach.

Dara: Thank you, chag sameach to you.