A guest post by Lauren Bulfin.
After years of neglecting Jewish traditions, at best using the religious holidays as an excuse to socialize with friends, my mother decided, for reasons beyond my comprehension, that 2009 was the year to hold a Passover dinner. I gently corrected her: “you mean a Passover Seder, right?” From the blank stare that passed for a response, I realized that Mom, indeed, did not mean Passover Seder. “Mom, you can’t have a Passover dinner without having the services beforehand. You just can’t.”

There was a pause, and then a sigh. “Fine you lead the services. I’ll show you where the Haggadahs are. Make it short. It’s a Wednesday. Your father’s tired from working.” Thus, I found myself perusing through The Concise Family Seder, trying to make it more concise.
Passover isn’t high on my list of favorite Jewish holidays. I am more concerned with what is going on now in the occupied Palestinian territorities than I am with our freedom from bondage three thousand years ago.
I am a also a little leery of being a “High Holiday Jew” – that is, one who celebrates the Jewish religion, but only on major holidays. For almost a year and a half, I have gone to Buddhist classes once a week, for two, and now, two and a half hours. I meditate every other day but not a day goes by that I do not think about the dharma in application to my own life. I have proven to myself that I am able to incorporate a religion into my daily life and I have felt the difference between practicing a religion out of an ethnic obligation and doing so because you actually want to.
But Moms are Moms and so I set out to lead the Passover Seder for her. Despite my detachment from the material, I took the task seriously, reading The Concise Family Seder several times, cutting it from an hour to 30 minutes. I wanted my family, boyfriend and friends to experience the essence of Passover, even though half of our guests were Christian and just coming over to be nice to my Mom. I fretted over how much Hebrew to include and incorporated as many Old Testament verses as possible to make our Christian guests feel comfortable. I thought of Ethan preparing for his dharma talks. I wondered what it would be like to be a real spiritual leader.
The Seder went over surprisingly well. None of our guests displayed the visible boredom or irritation I had feared. Buoyed by their enthusiasm, I got much more into the role of Seder leader than I had thought I would, displaying a surprising dogmatism towards the rituals proscribed by The Concise Family Seder. At the end of the Seder, I got that warm feeling which I had gotten as a child at Passover, surrounded by family that had not yet divorced and relatives who had not yet died. Performing the ancient Jewish ritual had made me feel, for a brief while, like I belonged to a group of people, a tradition.
But was it a spiritually moving experience? Not really. I was happy that my Mom was happy, but throwing out all the leavened food in your kitchen and eating only matzo for eight days still seemed like silly superstition. I felt a certain sadness that I didn’t feel attached to the one group, which by birth, I belonged to. (Growing up mostly with the children of immigrants has led me to feel that American is more a lack of an identity, than an identity in its own right.)
After dinner, my boyfriend Stuart and I talked by ourselves in the living room. Stuart was asking my advice about something. Most of the advice I give tends to influenced by my limited understanding of the dharma. Therefore, it was logical that Stuart was soon asking me, “What does Buddhism say about this?” Friends and family, knowing my interest in Buddhism, have started asking me these questions, which has cut down on my practice of skimming Hardcore Dharma readings. To the best of my ability, I told Stuart what I knew about how Buddhism applied to his situation. I searched for “The Fours Vows” handout we had received in HCD. It’s rude to search for things when you have company over, so I didn’t search too hard and I didn’t find the handout.
After Stuart had left, a more thorough search turned up “The Four Vows.” I ended the first night of Passover, and my role as a Seder leader, by texting The Four Vows to my boyfriend:
Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.
Desires are inexhaustible, I vow to put an end to them.
The dharmas are boundless, I vow to master them.
The Buddha way is unattainable, I vow to obtain it.