One of the handful of Hebrew words known to virtually every American Jew is seder, literally “order,” referring to the liturgical meal that constitutes the main rite of Passover. But although the seder has a strictly scripted series of steps, its retelling of the story of the Exodus verges on chaotic. Yosef Lindell writes:

We seem to begin this narrative [at a natural point, with the words], “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt and the Lord our God took us out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.” Yet the Haggadah quickly gets sidetracked, speaking of rabbis who stayed up all night telling the story, expounding on the commandment to say the sh’ma morning and night, discussing four different types of children, trying to determine the appropriate day for holding the seder, and backtracking to the patriarchs and their idol-worshipping ancestors. When we then raise our glasses in joyful praise of the One who saves us time and again, it is long after sundown, and we still haven’t begun explaining how God redeemed the Children of Israel from Egypt.

To Lindell, the Haggadah’s haphazardness is not the result of editorial incompetence, or the accumulation of additions and insertions over the centuries, but of a deliberate effort to create a text that demands to be studied rather than recited.

Thus, spirited discussion becomes central to the seder. Around the seder table, we must study the Haggadah together. Its words are the beginning, not the end, of the conversation. The maggid, [the narrative portion of the Haggadah], is lively: full of questions [and] answers. . . . We interrupt, talk over one another, discuss the meaning of passages, or perhaps even demonstrate the plagues with plastic frogs. The Haggadah says that “whoever tells more about the Exodus is praiseworthy,” and the sages of Bnei Brak, [as the Haggadah itself recounts], led by example: going strong all night until their students reminded them to recite the morning sh’ma.

[T]he seder is many . . . things: a conversation between parents and children, a spirited discussion as colorful and sometimes as inscrutable as the Talmud, a family affair around the table with food. The seder is not exactly orderly, but it is all the richer for it.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.