There was a moment, about 15 years ago, when I felt I had reached probably as far in my klita, my absorption into Israeli society, as I am ever going to get. At that point, I knew that I had to choose my battles (or, rather, those areas where absorption was even conceivable). I am never going to recognise many popular Israeli singers (I’m pretty good on Arik Einstein, and Kaveret, but not much beyond that). But, then, I am never going to recognise many popular British singers, either. (Even in the 60s, my knowledge was embarrassingly partial.)

Similarly, I’m never going to become a fan of basketball, let alone Israeli football. At least 30% (and sometimes considerably more) of any Israeli stand-up artist’s routine, and most Israeli sitcoms and satirical programs, are always going to fly over my head.

At the same time, by 15 years ago Bernice and I were following not only Hebrew-language but also original Israeli theatre. I still invest time in wrestling with modern Israeli literature. Above all this, I still harbour hopes of improving my own Hebrew.

So it was that, 15 years ago, I made my first pun in Hebrew, and native Hebrew-speakers laughed. In the screening-room of my mind, this moment in my life-story plays out in glorious, celebratory slow motion, like the opening sequence of Chariots of Fire.

All of which is relevant only as a preface to explaining that anyone trying to tie the title of this week’s blog to the subject is faced with a challenge. Our subject is, broadly speaking, the answer to the question that has been on everyone’s lips in Israel this last two or three days. I apologise, in advance, for rubbing salt water into the wounds of our co-religionists in Britain and elsewhere. The fact is that, last year, most of us in Israel celebrated the Pesach seder alone or with our partner, whereas this year we were allowed to extend the seder table to accommodate the wider family. So, the question everyone is asking is: ‘Did you prefer last year’s two-person seder, or this year’s 12 (or 22, or 32) -person seder?’

Looking again at the title: to understand it, you need to translate it into Hebrew, which will give you misparim sidduri’im, which is a play on the phrase misparim sedari’im, which you could translate as seder-y numbers. Like all jokes, this gains little by having to be explained. Having to be translated makes it even feebler. I’m beginning to wish I had called the blog Seder and avoided this whole tortuous ramble. Let’s move on quickly!

Turning again to the question: What is the ideal number of participants at a seder? I have heard conflicting answers from different people, and I am not quite sure what my own answer would be. Instinctively, I expect myself to prefer a large, inter-generational, extended-family seder. This is, after all, the seder I grew up with.

In my childhood and youth, every year, we held seder with my mother’s family. She was one of four siblings, and each year, two of the four would each host one seder. With the addition of survivors of the generation above, this meant that our sedarim typically comprised somewhere around 18 people, one or two grandparents, 8 parents, 7 children, and, often, one other couple, sometimes with children. All of my parents’ generation had grown up in observant homes, and were, themselves, traditional, though almost none of them were observant. They belonged to Orthodox shuls, and, like so many of their generation, were unabashed in their non-observant identification with Orthodoxy.

All of this meant that our sedarim were what, on reflection, seems a curious blend. We always recited every word of the Haggada, for the most part in unison, and typically with a good majority of the participants taking a fully active part. However, there was, as far as I can remember, absolutely no commentary or discussion on the text. Younger children were guided by their parents, obviously, but as soon as we could read the text ourselves, we were more or less on our own.

What replaced the commentary were the family traditions. My maternal grandparents had belonged to a London shul whose rabbi was, for the time, very progressive with regard to women’s place in Judaism. (He had a daughter who was an exact contemporary of my mother, with the result that my mother, and the rabbi’s daughter, had a proper batmitzva ceremony and celebration in shul. Let me assure you that in 1932 London this was not the norm!)

Another mark of his progressiveness was that he was not opposed to girls singing in the shul choir. I believe that, when the Chief Rabbi spent a shabbat at the shul, the girls would move from the choir-loft to the adjacent women’s section of the shul, and sing from there.

As a result, my mother and her sisters were all choristers. Our seder was, accordingly, fairly ‘High Church’. The highlight of the evening was probably the last four verses of Psalm 119 (beginning Baruch Haba B’shem HaShem). Traditionally, these four verses are sung as a bride processes down the aisle of the shul to stand under the chupa. As you might expect, this was a high point of the choral contribution to a wedding. Psalm 119 forms part of the Hallel that is around the middle of the seder, and the entire family used to give it everything. The setting is perhaps, the closest Anglo-Jewish liturgy came to the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. I have hunted in vain for the exact version we grew up singing, but this one is very, very close, and gives you a good idea of what I meant earlier by ‘High Church’.

One other feature of the seder that sticks in my mind is a very long-standing family tradition. As a child, my mother would have seder with her aunts and uncles and cousins, just as we did. Her youngest cousin, who had a fairly strong working-class London accent, would, apparently, sing Shochen Ad Marom v’Kadosh Sh’mo with great gusto, pronouncing each of those ‘o’ sounds as an Eliza Dolittle ‘O-o-w-w’. This young boy’s pronunciation was mimicked (affectionately) at every year’s seder as I was growing up, and still lives on in our sedarim, although the ‘boy’ himself is now over 90 years old.

When Bernice and I married and moved to South Wales, we at first always went to friends for seder night: one night at the parents of Bernice’s closest friend, and the other night at their elder, married daughter’s. Even to me, the outsider, these were people who were more like family than friends, and this felt like an extension of my childhood sedarim. Of course, the traditions were not all the same as those I had grown up with. The paterfamilias was one of the least musical people I have ever known, and I attended seder there for years before I realised that the tunes that he sang, and which he had taught the whole family, were, in fact the same as those I had grown up with, though no longer recognisable.

It was not until the early 1980s, after we had been married for something like 10 years, that we actually hosted our own seder for the first time. This was therefore the first opportunity that we had to use the rather grand seder dish that we had been given as a wedding present. When we pulled the dish from its box, a small gift card emerged with it, inscribed from Morry and Jean to Suzanne and Daniel. (The names have been changed to protect the guilty.)

This was interesting since, not only did we have no idea who Morry and Jean were; we could not even think who Suzanne and Daniel might be. The provenance of this seder dish is a mystery to this day. My suspicion is that either the dish was not to Suzanne and Daniel’s taste, or possibly they received three seder dishes as wedding presents. In either case, I guess that they sold the dish at a discount to friends who were planning to buy us a wedding present, and this third couple did not check the box for tell-tale evidence.

When we first came on aliya, once again we initially became seder guests, spending first chag with Bernice’s sister Sue and her family. Once again, we were at a sprawling, multi-generational family seder, with, sometimes, three grandparent couples, two parent couples, and six children. These sedarim were subtly different from my childhood sedarim, in that the balance of power had shifted from parents to children, and much of the leading, and most of the discussion, increasingly came from the older children, rather than the adults.

Gradually, as Sue and David’s children married, and started their own families, we moved to making our own sedarim again. (There is a critical mass at which the family naturally splits again.) Since then, numbers have been considerably more modest. We have sometimes invited another family, which usually opens us to new experiences. When, one year, as I usually do, I asked each of our guests to bring a thought, idea, topic or other contribution to the seder, I wasn’t expecting to hear a rendition of Ma Nishtana in Klingon. But ours is an ecumenical table.

Last year, of course, Bernice and I were alone together, which made for a slightly more subdued seder with quite a lot of discussion. This year, Esther joined us. (She and Ma’ayan felt that they should, for this year, each spend time with their own parents, having seen so little of us during the year.) This made for a slightly more lively seder. Esther is so much better at the hand gestures for Echad Mi Yodea than I am. It also meant that the reading burden was shared a little wider.

So, that’s my personal; seder history. Having reviewed it, I am still uncertain which style of seder I prefer. However, I do know that my ideal seder would have (as of now) seven participants, and span three generations. That’s my personal L’Shana Haba’a.

Meanwhile, 5000 kilometres away, a family has taken a big step towards their own Exodus from the fleshpots of Penamacor to their own promising land, by erecting their tipi, with, of course, expert assistance.