Imagining My Ancestors’ Passover Helps Me To Prepare For My Own | TC Jewfolk

Two years ago on erev Passover, my mother’s first cousin emailed us an amazing surprise: he’d received an audio recording of an extended family seder from the late 1950s from another cousin. Seder guests included my great-grandparents — who had died long before my birth, my grandparents and various great-aunts and uncles. My Mom was likely away at college that year because she wasn’t mentioned; I couldn’t ask her about it because she had passed away two years before. She fills one of the metaphorical empty chairs as I prepare for Passover now, though I feel her spirit close to me.

The sound quality of the digitized clip wasn’t great — no surprise there — but I listened attentively to the prayers and rituals — the singing of the Kiddush over wine, the hiding of the middle matzah, the dipping of parsley into salt water to represent the tears of the Hebrew slaves, and an off key and hurried singing of ‘ — a song that captures the essence of the Jewish spirit. Dayenu means ‘it would have been enough’ — if the Holy One had only led us out of Egypt, Dayenu! But we go on to sing of more blessings and then cheer — Dayenu!

I had hoped to hear my great-grandparents’ voices, but they were blended into the cacophony of the group’s collective voice. Dayenu, I thought instead, it was enough to know that…