Story from Rabbi Harold Kushner
Excerpt from Seder Stories, pg. 54-56
Most newlywed couples can look forward to spendingtheir first few Seders at the home of either the husband’s orthe wife’s parents. (Some scholars wonder if the custom of having two Seders arose in order to satisfy both sets of in-laws.)But about a year after my wife and I were married, weinvited two hundred people, many of them strangers, to ourSeder, and we got the government to pay for it.
I was ordained a rabbi by the Jewish Theological Seminaryin 1960 and entered the U.S. Army as a chaplain. Mywife and I were married for only a few months when thearmy sent us to Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma, where Iwas chaplain to a constantly shifting population of soldiersand some fifteen Jewish families in the town. I was expectedto conduct services, counsel troubled men in uniform,supervise a Sunday school, and in the spring, run akosher mess hall that would serve three meals a day for theeight days of Passover.
Many people had to cooperate to make that work. Mywife planned the menus, came up with the recipes (how do you translate a recipe that serves eight so that it will servetwo hundred?), and supervised mess-hall cooks who wereutterly unfamiliar with such concepts as keeping meat andmilk utensils separate.
The quartermaster’s office was immensely helpful. Sincethey periodically had to order new dishes and silverware, theytimed their order so they could give us brand-new utensils for
the holiday and afterward put them into regular service.
Both Seder meals were attended by some two hundredGIs, some from traditional homes for whom missing a Sederwould have been a serious deprivation and some only nominallyJewish who were surprised to discover how importantit was for them to share a holiday meal with fellow Jews.This being the first Seder I had ever conducted, I struggledto maintain a suitable ratio between Hebrew and Englishand between reciting and eating.
The morning after the Seder, our kosher-for-Passovermess hall was open for three meals a day, meeting the needsof Jewish troops and the occasional non-Jewish buddy whoheard how much better the food was at the Jewish mess hall.
When Passover was over, we inventoried the dishes andsilver, thanked the cooks, counted up how many meals wehad served, and looked back with profound satisfaction athow well everything had worked out.
I would go on to be a rabbi for another thirty years, but Iwould never again do anything as logistically complicated, orin many ways, as rewarding as those first Passover holidays.
Rabbi Harold Kushner