That is the lesson of the seder, an exercise in family education ritually choreographed. With the Haggadah as our lesson plan, we use stories, songs, pictures, and games to induct our children into the grand drama of Jewish history. The seder is meant to be participatory, creative, and joyful. Jewish education is too vital to wait till school. As parents, we are our children's first teachers, assigned the task to raise them Jewishly from the ground up.
Continuity begins at home.
But most Jewish parents are unprepared to do that. Jewishly speaking ,the family is the most attenuated institution in American Jewish life. These dismal statistics hardly reflect an ambience suited to cultivating in our children a lifelong attachment to Judaism marked by pride and practice. To counter this abdication on the home front, we adult Jews need to muster just a tad of the willpower I witnessed recently in a Conservative synagogue on a shabbat morning. I had received the seventh aliyah to the Torah.