On a snowy morning in Woodstock, New York, retired filmmaker David Tapper is sitting comfortably inside Storybook, his country Tudor-style house.
Surrounded by family photos and fresh-cut flowers in a vase, he tells a tale. "When I raised my family we always had guests for Pessah," he says. "Many weren't Jewish, and they always loved it."
Tapper, 72, expanded the tradition when he moved to Woodstock and spearheaded the Neighborhood Seder for the entire community. After all, he reasons, the Haggada says, "Let all who are hungry come and eat."
The all-volunteer crew welcomes everyone who shows up. In the legendary hippie haven of Woodstock, that can mean quite a cast of characters.
"The community of people who come together is extremely diverse," Tapper says. Guests range from the rich to the homeless, and from neighborly gentiles to Jews with nowhere else to go for Seder.
"Woodstock is a very unusual town. It's an artistic town. You can be schizoid, clearly out of touch with reality, and get along in Woodstock," he says.
The filmmaker says his fellow creative individuals who helped start the Neighborhood Seder seven years ago used to do a dramatization of Moses crossing the Red Sea. Soon the service became so unbearably long that they asked Rabbi Jonathan Kligler of the Woodstock Jewish Congregation to take over.
As Tapper puts it, "We were inviting people to dinner and then starving them." So now the script lasts an hour or less. The motley and not-so-motley crew of guests enjoys klezmer music, Jewish folk songs, Torah readings, and, of course, lots of food. Their bellies are full, and so is the venue.
The Woodstock Community Center seats 160 persons for "the world's oldest continuous celebration of freedom," and more arrive for take-home portions of vegetarian matza balls, salad, broiled chicken, tsimmes, kugel, and macaroons.
Volunteers hold a matza-ball party the night before, cooking up plenty of food and fellowship among themselves. Many take on the mitzva of roasting chickens at home to help feed the guests.
"The spirit is very sweet," comments Tapper. "The sweetest thing about it is that everybody pitches in."
Tapper also helps out at an area shelter throughout the year. "If I work at the soup kitchen, they'll greet me a month later and say, 'Hi Dave. Great Seder.'"
The Neighborhood Seder illustrates what Tapper likes about Judaism. A religiously eclectic man who was married to a gentile and has an Israeli Arab daughter-in-law, he defines himself as a Buddhist intellectually and a Jew emotionally.
Mystically, he muses over tea and chocolate biscuits, "My Buddhism informs how I hear and receive the Jewish teaching. The wisdom I see in Judaism always has a Buddhist flavor.
"I think the thing Judaism has done better than any religious tradition is sangha, community. Judaism has caring for each other and the world built into its structure, and it makes it a very rich and beautiful place to be."
Tapper grew up Conservative in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn before the area became a Hassidic enclave. He describes himself as a Type-A personality. He elbowed his way into the fledgling TV business by way of the CBS mailroom in Manhattan. He rose to cameraman, and then the US Army put him through motion-picture school on Long Island, New York.
"When people ask, 'What did you do in the service?' I say I was a tailgunner on the subway," Tapper quips.
He launched his career as a freelance writer/director by producing a script by an Israeli, Daniel Bourla. Many years later, with Peabody Awards and Emmy nominations under his belt, Tapper still considers Bourla's work the most brilliant script he ever read. It concerned the last man on Earth, Noah, who created a whole world in his head - much like Tom Hanks in the recent movie Castaway.
Tapper's credits include Circus Town, a prime-time documentary about a circus's winter home in Indiana, and That's the Spirit, a series for a Catholic organization which garnered him an Emmy bid.
In real life, the show-biz hustle and his drivenness made for tense drama. In 1974, Tapper took up meditating to click his high-strung personality down a few channels.
Stretched out casually in blue jeans and black shirt on his living-room couch, Tapper talks about the health benefits of meditating. He reflects, "It seemed to me that if we have a fight-or-flight response, then nature also would have given us the opposite.
"The scientific evidence persuaded me to meditate. After my first meditation I knew it was something bigger, broader, and deeper than relaxation. I went home flying."
He intuitively knew that mysterious seizures he had suffered since the early 1960s would never trouble him again. And they haven't.
A widower, he joined the Zen Mountain Monastery after moving to Woodstock in 1992. Two years ago, he underwent a ceremony called jukai to become a committed Buddhist.
The more-serene Tapper has still found it hard to stop working in his retirement. He started a company two years ago selling SeiFus, adjustable cushions he developed to allow meditators to sit either cross-legged or in a kneeling position. He recently gave the business to the Zen Mountain Monastery.
Tapper and his girlfriend traveled to Israel in February to study Jewish "koans" with Bernie Glassman, the first abbot of the Zen community of New York. Koans are questions which cannot be answered with logic. According to Tapper, they go deeper, and they don't measure one's brain power.
His previous trips to Israel included a visit with his daughter, Gwendolyn, when she lived on a kibbutz, and a wedding celebration for his son, Seth, in Galilee.
Seth and his Israeli Arab wife, whom he met at Harvard University, held their first wedding ceremony at the boat basin of Central Park in New York, then traveled to her home village of Arrabe in Lower Galilee for a second one.
Tapper says his son "did all the traditional things. I was so proud of him. He really got into the Arab customs." But not Jewish customs.
What's left for this peripatetic grandfather of one Jewish-Arab-Chinese-Scotch/Irish little girl? Tapper confides that a great yearning at this stage of life is to learn Hebrew.
[Published in the Jerusalem Post, April 6, 2001]