Passover

I’ve studied a half-dozen Passover  haggadahs in the past month ahead of  hosting a “salon seder” last night with a great group of women.  We used the recently published New American Haggadah  (check out the “simultweets”).  The haggadah is the book that  guides the seder ritual, and tell you what, Passover is a marvel of an  all-over-the-place holiday:  we  observe the festival because the  Almighty told us to, but we’re also supposed to tell the story of the mass  escape of the Israelites from Egypt.  The story, the festival table, even the food, are all heavy with  symbolism, but the underlying message is self-determination.  Freedom.

Often everybody attending a Passover seder has a book in hand—the  haggadah—men and women, young and old.  Literacy affords an unparalleled promise of  freedom.

matzah = flight  from Egypt into the desert…the Israelites took off without time even to let  their bread rise; charosset, a  mixture of fruit, nuts, and spices = the mortar the Israelite slaves used  in building for the Egyptians; beitzah (hard-boiled  egg) = mourning the destruction of the Second Temple (and celebrating springtime); maror, here horseradish = the bitter harshness of slavery; z’roa (shankbone) = the  Passover sacrifice and the protection of the firstborn from the last plague; karpas (parsley) dipped in salt water =  the tears of the Hebrew slaves.

The orange is a  late addition to some seder plates:  a rabbi’s wife is alleged to have said that women belong in the  rabbinate like an orange belongs on the seder plate.

We do love our irony.

Four questions tell  us about different types of children, or different types of Jews.  Four  glasses of wine mark the holiness of the occasion, the telling of the  Exodus story, grace after the meal, and the psalms of praise.  A cup of wine welcomes the prophet  Elijah.

An observant Jew might hear the Bible’s telling of Exodus once a year, like  clockwork.  If you’re not so  observant, though, maybe you channel-surf past The Ten Commandments,  but you may be a bit vague on the details (Moses, reed basket…ten  plagues, “Let my people go,” miraculously divided sea…).  The parts of Exodus that get into the haggadah  and then into English translation assume an intimacy with the story that many  celebrants may not have. Like…Did you know that Moses had a speech  impediment?  Did you know that the  first thing the Almighty said to Moses after calling him from the burning bush  was “Take off your shoes”?   Did  you know that four women get named in the Exodus story, and the Jewish people  owes its existence to them all (Miriam, Shiphrah and Puah the midwives, and  Zipporah, the Midianite who married Moses)?

Susana Darwin