Nowadays it's not unusual to find strangers at the table. Seders, the most popular Jewish ritual, draw a full house. Some Jews may fight the ennui of the annual gathering, but the awe it evokes in a newcomer can kindle new appreciation of this foundation of our faith.

I am looking forward to the Seder this year. We'll spend both nights with my wife's family. Her sisters will greet me affectionately; their children will call me Uncle. I'll take off my jacket, recline and wait for the prayers to begin. The scents of foods I've learned to enjoy-if not pronounce-will beckon to me from the kitchen to signal that the meal is almost ready. If you could save holidays in a jar, this is what you would smell when you opened the lid.

I have learned in my short association with Jewish culture that to be welcomed into a Jewish family means to be welcomed at the table and I dine in the warmth of acceptance, knowing that a place has been saved for me in my mother-in-law's home. My spot is reserved through marriage, not birthright, and much of what is intuitive to my wife and her family continues to elude me. But with each year, I feel I am less a stranger than the year before.

I have only recently married into this family and I still have much to learn about the customs and traditions that shape my wife's heritage. Passover remains new to me but I am beginning to get acclimated to the practices of the holiday. The first Seder I attended was also the first time I met most of my wife's family; it was like "meeting-the-family jitters" times chai squared. Like most holidays, that evening began with lighting candles and saying the blessings. This all seems safe enough now but at the time I hid behind my wife as two terrifying fears dominated my thoughts: "I hope no one is offended that I am wearing a yarmulke" and "It feels like my yarmulke is falling off."

As a Catholic the only thing I knew about Passover was that the Last Supper had been a Seder. Indeed, when they offered me something called "gafilta fish" I thought it would be my last meal as well. Love, however, often drives us to do the unthinkable, and I had no choice but to sample the stuff. As often happens when my wife encourages me to try something that I am leery of, I found I actually liked it.

The rest of the meal was less mysterious: You pretty much got what was advertised. The bitter herbs were bitter, the salt water was salty, and although you couldn't build much of a wall with the charoset, the unleavened bread was, in fact, flat.

At our second Seder together, when my yarmulke didn't threaten to fall off (for some reason, the less hair I have, the more secure it begins to feel), I relaxed enough to be rewarded with an even greater surprise than liking gefilte fish. When we sat down to begin reading the prayers, I opened the Haggada. I had used this book the year before but this time I actually looked inside. Many of the prayers had been recited in Hebrew and, like with the Latin masses of my youth, I could not understand a word anyone was saying. In this Haggada were English translations of the Hebrew stories, prayers and songs. I was surprised to find embedded within the text familiar passages that I had been hearing ever since they started saying mass in English.

I suppose I should have expected this. We read from the same Bible, we pray to the same God. It's easy to forget that all of God's people probably ask Him for the same things. At the Seder we praise God for liberation from slavery and ask him for continued freedom for ourselves and others. But the story of Passover is the story of escape from persecution. After Treblinka and Dachau, I wonder how Jews can ever have the faith to pray for others.

I wonder about the faith that Moses must have had. I get nervous walking through metal detectors at the airport; how does one muster the belief to walk through parted seas? How much faith does it take to convince others to follow you? If I get lost driving someplace my wife will read from John Gray's Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus out loud until I stop and get directions. How much faith does it take to convince your wife and your friends that you will find the Promised Land after you have spent 40 years walking around the desert looking for it?

How much faith isn't enough? God told Moses to talk to a rock and water would flow forth, but Moses tapped the rock instead and was banned from entering the Promised Land. It hardly seems like the kind of retribution that would spawn such an enduring tradition. And yet here we are, thousands of years later, gathered around a table in the home of my wife's family. I sometimes think about what that means; people were probably gathering and reclining and eating and praying and putting out wine for Elijah and hiding the Afikoman from children for a thousand years before my religion was a religion. The whole concept is incredible. What kind of faith does it take to keep something alive that long?

Faith is one of those things that is hard to define but you feel like you know it when you see it. I look around the table and see wonder in the eyes of children, love in the eyes of family. There is something comforting in knowing that all of this will be safe for another year.

Tim Rossi, a business manager at a publishing company, shares holidays and life with his wife in Pleasantville, New York.