I just had one of the most revelatory food experiences of my life, and I didn’t even eat a single bite. Read on if you’d like to see how the Broadway musical South Pacific might inspire your Passover Seder this year.

Last night, I was fortunate enough to attend a performance of the gorgeous new Broadway revival of South Pacific, by Rogers & Hammerstein. The show centers around the star-crossed love stories of two couples, both fraught with the tensions of race relations in the mid-twentieth century. Neither Lt. Joseph Cable nor Ensign Nellie Forbush seem to be able to get beyond their societal conditioning towards racial prejudice, as explained by Lt. Cable in the heart(and ground)breaking lyrics,

“You’ve got to be taught/To hate and fear,/You’ve got to be taught/From year to year,/It’s got to be drummed/In your dear little ear/You’ve got to be carefully taught…

…You’ve got to be taught/Before it’s too late,/Before you are six or seven or eight,/To hate all the people your relatives hate,/You’ve got to be carefully taught!”

This attitude costs Ivy-leaguer Lt. Cable a chance for happiness with the native islander Liat, and nearly costs the southern-born Nellie the life of her lover, Émile de Becque, a French-born widower who had previously fathered two children with his dark-skinned Polynesian wife.

So here’s where the food part comes in: In the finale of the show, we see that Nellie has overcomes her prejudices as she sits down to a simple meal with Émile’s two mixed-race children, intending to raise them as her own if her lover does not return from his dangerous war-time mission. When Émile triumphantly returns and the music swoons, Nellie does not rush to him for a cliched closing scene embrace. Rather, she waits for him to sit at the table with their newly-reunited (and accepted) family, and, in an epiphanal display of love, acceptance, and commitment, she hands him a spoon. The show concludes with Émile’s words to Nellie quoted above: “Mangez, Nellie” (Eat, Nellie).

Only in a show written by two Jews could the hopes, fears, and determination of America’s post-war generation to build a better future be symbolized by sharing a bowl of soup!

This Pesach, as we sit around our own communal bowls of soup, will we focus on pouring out our wrath on the Egyptians; “carefully” teaching our children “to hate all the people our relatives hate?” Or will we use this communal meal as Émile and Nellie did, to celebrate our liberation from hatred, even as we struggle with what the New York Times’ glowing review called “the fire of daily life, with all its crosscurrents and ambiguities?”