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Passover is coming! I love this holiday. My extended family is Jewish, and they have given me the gift of including me in so much that is beautiful in their lives ... especially Passover. This year, we won't be together due to illnesses and other unavoidable unusual circumstances. I find myself mourning the loss of this gathering this year. So instead of being sad, I want to share with you some treasured memories, and I ask you to share with me your memories -- or those moments that you would miss if you couldn't connect with your family this year.
First -- for those who have not yet been blessed with the joy of a Passover Seder, this is an eight-day festival that celebrates the escape of the Israelites from over 400 years of enslavement in Egypt by Pharaoh. Led by Moses, they implored Pharaoh to let them go. When he just heaped more indignities on them, more suffering, Moses threatened him with various plagues if he did not relent. Pharaoh was arrogant. So along came the plagues -- boils, locusts, dying livestock, frogs, flies, hail, lice -- and more. But Pharaoh stayed resolute and threatened to kill Moses. Then the tenth plague -- all the firstborn of Egypt, human and animal, would be killed. That night, Israelites put a mark of a slaughtered lamb above their doorposts to identify their homes. The Angel of Death came that night and "passed over" only the marked homes. It was then that Pharaoh relented, and the former slaves started their exodus from Egypt.
That period in history is recalled in the rituals and elements of a special family dinner that occurs around a religious liturgy which is recorded in a prayerbook called the Haggadah. Passover lasts eight days, but usually only the first two nights have the elaborate Seder meal. This event is all about attaining freedom, about celebration.
Many of the foods are symbolic: bitter foods for bitter years, unleavened bread as a reminder of having left Egypt in a hurry, and so on. You can read about the symbolic meaning of items on the Seder Plate.
One of my most treasured memories is a simple silly thing that our host does every year. He reads this portion of the Haggadah and asks the same question every time:
It happened that Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarphon were reclining [at a seder] in B'nei Berak. They were discussing the exodus from Egypt all that night, until their students came and told them: "Our Masters! The time has come for reciting the morning Shema!"
His question: "Where is B'nei Berak?"
And we all answer, in unison and with gusto the lesson we have learned every year. "It is a suburb of Tel Aviv!" And then we all laugh because it is so silly to be asked what we already know. We smile, because we all share the joke. Our host feigns surprise that we remembered.
But on another level, it is an interesting bit of knowledge. It is a real place, a place many around the table have visited -- that hiding place for the rabbis. It may seem strange that they had to be told that it was daylight, and time for morning prayers. But during the time of these rabbis, the Roman Empire was in charge, and forbade the practice of Judaism. They were celebrating Passover in secret, perhaps in a cave, while their students stood watch. It might have cost them their lives to be discovered.
Our host knows that we cannot let important places just become suburbs in our minds -- that we have to understand that people paid a price to preserve what we enjoy now in freedom. And that is not just a lesson for the Jewish community.
One year, our host forgot to ask us about B'nei Berak. We made him stop and go back. It wouldn't be right to skip over our lesson about sacred ground.
And every year, we know the folks at the table who don't like homemade gefilte fish, and the ones who love matzoh noodles. We know who can take the strongest blast of homemade horseradish and who is a gastronomic coward. And we know that there are millions of families probably nothing like ours, but
