How to avoid a banana bread Seder

Rory Smith, the New York Times football/soccer [delete as appropriate] correspondent, has what he calls the “banana bread theory” of sports journalism.

It goes something like this: A new coach takes charge of a team and, all of a sudden, the team’s fortune changes. They start winning games, the players look twice as competent, and the fans are thrilled. Journalists flock to the team’s training base to discover the secret to the new coach’s success.

What inevitably happens next, Smith argues, is a ten-thousand-word article profiling the new coach, in which the key to his success is revealed: it turns out that, once a week, the coach brings in some home-made banana bread for all the players – and that morale boost is the source of all their success.

The problem, Smith points out, is that the banana bread is never the reason the team has gotten better. It’s always something far simpler, yet far more boring. The coach has made some tactical adjustments or doubled down on player positioning in training. Something that actually makes a difference, in other words.

But journalists don’t want to write about that and no one wants to read about that. In part, it’s because of the lack of excitement, but it’s also because we don’t tend to care too much about professional athletes spending most of their time doing really boring things. So, the banana bread becomes the reason – even though it obviously isn’t.

Towards the very end of Maggid, we read the statement of Rabban Gamliel – taken from the Mishnah (Pesaḥim 10:5): that if we don’t reference the korban pesaḥ, the matzah, and the maror, then we fail our job at the Seder.

But given the point in the Seder in which we read it, Rabban Gamliel’s statement serves as a crucial warning. Because we’ve just spent the past however long discussing Yetziat Mitzrayim by reading Maggid, and we’re about to start the first half of Hallel and spend the rest of the night either eating or singing.

And so, it’s easy for us to slip into a banana bread theory of the Seder (even though, if you actually see banana bread at your Seder, you have bigger problems). We think that what makes the Seder the Seder are the discussions of Maggid, or the multi-course meal of Shulḥan Orekh, or the six different tunes we have for singing Eḥad Mi Yodea in four different languages.

And while there’s nothing wrong with any of these things (as long as they don’t stop you from eating the Afikoman before ḥatzot), we can end up becoming so focused on their centrality, that we move quickly through the most important items at the Seder: the matzah and maror. There’s not much, after all, we can really do to make them more exciting – so we just get on with eating them quickly so that we have more time for the Ḥad Gadya puppet show.

And this is why I think it’s important to heed – if not necessarily do – a practice noted by the Mishnah Berurah in the name of the 17th-century Kabbalist, Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz: to kiss the matzah and maror as a reflection of our love for the mitzvah (M.B. 477, 5). So excited are we to fulfill these crucial parts of the Seder that we are infatuated with the opportunity to fulfill the mitzvah.

Because these items are, in many ways, the focus of our Seder, “you shall eat [the korban pesaḥ] with matzah and maror” (Ex. 12:8). And even though there’s not much excitement surrounding them, they are a part of our Seder we must dwell on – indeed, the continuation of the Haggadah following Rabban Gamliel’s statement is an exploration of the themes raised by matzah and maror (along with the korban pesaḥ).

This year, then, let’s make sure to take some time to kiss the matzah and maror – be it literally or proverbially – and ensure that our Seder has the proper focus.