By Jeff Clark

The first time I finished all four cups of wine at a seder, I vomited on my cousins’ front porch.  One year we tried making a shidduch between family friends at our seder table. One got horribly ill, there was an argument about the timing of dinner, and the whole thing was a bit of a disaster. At another family Passover celebration, someone mistook the gefilte fish for matzo balls and tossed them into the chicken soup. While these moments were unpleasant at the time, I look back and smile and recall them as cherished memories.  

What a blessing to have a collection of special times shared with family and friends! They are stored forever in my mind largely because they were imperfect and chaotic. 

I recently learned that seder means order. There’s order in the arrival of spring and Pesach. There’s order in the Seder itself, the telling of our exodus from Egypt, the four questions, reciting the plagues, and finding the afikomen. There’s order in our traditions of where we gather and the loved ones we see. Maybe there’s even order in the spilling of a glass of wine, uncomfortable arguments over politics, and undercooking the matzo balls.  These memories are the best parts, where traditions shared by our people through millennia become deeply personal pieces of our identity. 

In the words of Rabbi Sacks z”l:  “There is a profound difference between history and memory. History is his story – an event that happened sometime else to someone else. Memory is my story – something that happened to me and is part of who I am. To be a Jew is to know that over and above history is the task of memory. Pesach is where the past does not die but lives, in the chapter we write in our own lives.” 

Seders are like life: they can be messy, frustrating, and challenging. All of our lives have felt unsettled since 10/7, and those feelings will continue until every last hostage has been returned and a new peace is established.   

It’s been a particularly challenging time to be a Jewish college student the past six months.  College campuses around the country have become hotbeds of antisemitism. Here in Buffalo, Jewish students’ studies have been disrupted by anti-Israel protests, and their social media platforms have become divisive battlegrounds. Their need for a safe space to gather as a community and enjoy the comforts and wildness of Passover traditions has never been greater. Hillel nourishes Jewish identities through our seder and celebration of other Jewish holidays, cooking and “adulting” classes, ShaBARK Shalom, Jewish learning opportunities, summer internship program, Birthright trips to Israel, yoga, and movie nights; in all the memories created throughout the year. Hillel provides order, a place where students write the stories of their lives. 

Passover presents the opportunity to find meaning and gratitude in the craziness; to find order in the chaos.

Jeff Clark is the Executive Director of Hillel of Buffalo and a lifelong resident of Jewish Buffalo.