At the Seder with Larry and Woody
Today in American Jewishness: Ivan Marcus, Bar Mitzvah Disco, Kitsch, “Christmas Time for the Jews,” Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Curb Your Enthusiasm Episode 47, “The Seder.” It was your typical look at ritual, focused on questions of religious tradition, cultural negotiation, the status of Judaism as an American religion, and the meanings and values of vicarious experience.
Actually, “The Seder,” as an entire episode of an American television series entirely devoted to celebrating a Jewish holiday, is a particularly fascinating lens on an American Jewish ritual. The episode finds Larry’s decidedly non-Jewish wife Cheryl preparing her first ever Passover Seder for Larry’s family, their friends, long-time neighbors, and a new member of the community, a convicted sex offender. Suffice it to say, hilarity ensues, though, oddly, one accompanied by a peculiar sense of morality.
It’s hardly the first time that the Seder is used as a vehicle for discussions of morality—-even within the limited frame of American popular media. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, Martin Landau’s character imagines himself back at his family Seder, using the opportunity to ask for their opinions of his own crime as they struggle with the enormity of the holocaust and some speak favorably of the Soviet Union. This is clearly one in an endless series of arguments, repeated every Passover; their own ritual derived from the Holiday’s message of liberation and Rabbinic ideal of debate.
The Hebrew utterance we hear as Landau enters is actually the prayer said before eating the bitter herbs. Fitting given their subject matter.
There’s a Hebrew prayer during the Seder episode in Curb, but it’s a very different one: the “she-hekhianu,” a blessings said to mark an occasion, either its first occurrence or the renewal, the first in a cycle. Here the prayer is symbolic of Cheryl’s initiation into Jewish ritual, and to take it a step farther, the gentile American audience watching. As Larry explains the afiqomen to the children gathered around the table, he also explains the idea of the afiqomen to the audience. The episode teaches something of Jewish ritual. Not much, but something.
What he does teach, however, brings the moral element into focus. The sex offender spots the father of a child telling his son exactly where the afiqomen is hiding and he reports back to Larry. He feels compelled by an internal code to tell Larry. The whole series revolves around Larry’s particular sense of morality, debating whether it’s appropriate to do things a certain way or not, and the injustice he feels when others cross his lines. In a way, the sex offender is the perfect foil for Larry. For this one episode, their moral codes align. With one major exception.
And yet the episode also implicitly asks questions about rehabilitation in our country. No one wants the sex offender at the Seder, and Larry only gets Cheryl to agree by defining his inclusion in terms of Christianity. Earlier he’d claimed that Jews were obligated to take other Jews in for Passover, ensuring that they’d have a place to eat (true), and Cheryl agrees to take another couple in for the Seder (itself a scheme! You try describing an episode of Curb). But inviting in a sex offender is a line she won’t cross, and the only way Larry can get her to agree is by asking “What would Jesus do?” It’s a joke, but a one with a punch. Cheryl wouldn’t take him in if it only corresponded to Larry’s values. The whole notion of taking this person in for dinner is placed into a religious values context rather than a societal one. Certainly a more comfortable frame of reference for much of the audience.
The episode has the dual effect of teaching America about the Seder while also teaching them that it conforms to the values they already have. Nothing at here is at odds with America. Even Cheryl a can do it.
