Daddy’s approach to leading the Seder seemed equal parts careful planning and heartfelt winging it

A few months after I got married, my father was niftar, and along with him went our family Pesach Seder.

Mommy gave away most of the Haggados. My husband and I would go to his parents, my sisters went to their in-laws, and my older brother would make his own Seder and host my mother and grandparents.

Aside from the few years we’d gone to a hotel in Miami, my parents had hosted a grand Pesach Seder every year for decades. We’d had grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends gracing our table. Friends would bring cousins and cousins would bring coworkers.

As a baal teshuvah with no minhagim of his own, my father tried so hard to make the Seder meaningful, and his Haggadah held dozens of handwritten papers along with printed sheets of divrei Torah he’d collected over time.

Daddy’s approach to leading the Seder seemed equal parts careful planning and heartfelt winging it. Some years we all got up to wash for Urchatz, other years only Daddy did. Parts of Nirtzah we just read through because no one knew the tune.

But he led the Seder like an orchestra conductor, calling on one person to read in Hebrew, motioning the next one to read in English. Daddy was in no rush and wanted to hear every single question in the Pesach booklets we brought home from school. Some of our company was less interested, but so long as we had Daddy’s attention, we took our time.