Day Schildkret
The Broken Seder: A Post-October 7th Immersive Installation

Passover has always been a time to gather, to ask questions, and to remember the journey from bondage to freedom. But in the spring of 2023, my own seder cracked wide open. What should have been a night of shared ritual became a night of rupture—friends clashing over what it now means to feel safe as a Jew in the world, and over how we make sense of the crisis in Israel and Palestine. That evening did not simply expose political tensions; it revealed a deeper, spiritual fracture—ancient and entirely of this moment.

That rupture became the raw material for The Broken Seder.

This immersive installation reimagines the Passover table as both altar and artifact. Each table—split, spilling, luminous—holds symbolic objects of our tradition made strange again: bones, roots, salt water, eggs, bricks. It is not a linear story. It is not a resolution. Instead, it is a place to sit with what is unholdable, to witness what has broken, and to begin asking: what now?

I believe ritual and art, at their best, don’t resolve tension—they hold it. As Leonard Bernstein once said, “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them.” The Broken Seder is not meant to soothe. It is meant to stretch us open—to grieve, to remember, and to remain human through it all.

Created in the wake of October 7th, this work reflects the emotional terrain of being Jewish today: exposed, resilient, protective, alert, tender. It is a public invitation to feel our fracture—and to imagine a wholeness we haven’t yet known.