What is Passover?

Passover is one of the most popular festivals of the Jewish year. It is an important holiday when we gather with family and friends, to recite our founding tales, to reflect on the ideals of freedom and leadership, and to examine oppression and tyranny. According to tradition, Passover commemorates the Jewish people's exodus from slavery in Egypt in ancient days. At Passover, we retell the biblical legend of Moses and the children of Israel escaping Egypt, crossing the Red Sea, wandering in the desert, and reaching the promised land. Humanistic Jews add the stories of the twentieth century exoduses of our parents and grandparents. Passover is a serious but joyous holiday, filled with music, good food, stories, and community.

In the Beginning...

On our ancient calendar, Passover was the original Jewish New Year. Many historic near eastern cultures celebrated the rebirth of spring as the beginning of the year. Our Passover is actually a combination of two older holidays, and the two names in the Bible for the holiday reflect our dual roots. One holiday, Hag Hapesakh (holiday of the pascal lamb), is a shepherd's holiday, and was marked by the late-night sacrifice of a lamb as a blessing of the new flocks. The other holiday, called Hag Hamatsot (holiday of matzos), was an agricultural festival in which farmers offered the fruits of their fields in hope of a good harvest. These two ancient holidays provide the combined symbols of our modern Passover celebration.

Later in Jewish history, the story of the Exodus from Egypt, an archetypal struggle for freedom from oppression and slavery, was overlaid onto these older and universal themes of birth, renewal, and sacrifice. Symbols from the older rituals were infused with new meanings connected to the story of Moses and the children of Israel leaving the tyranny of Pharaoh and finding their freedom.

In modern times, the Passover Seder (which means "order") was again imbued with fresh meaning. The civil rights struggle in the United States, the period of harsh Soviet imprisonment of "refuse-niks" (Jews who wanted to leave the Soviet Union), the women's movement - all these modern struggles for freedom from oppression have contributed to make this holiday a more meaningful and powerful community celebration today.

New Symbols

Some people add new symbols to their Seder plate to ensure that the holiday stays fresh and vibrant. Two of these symbols are:

An orange. This is a grand bit of urban folklore. Every community claims this story relates a conversation overheard at a bat mitzvah in its biggest shul: A woman rabbi is on the bima (pulpit) and a traditional Jewish man in the congregation is said to have remarked: "a woman belongs on the bima like an orange belongs on a seder plate." Therefore many people place an orange on the Seder plate as a symbol of the sweetness of freedom and equality.

A potato. In 1987 thousands of Ethiopian Jews emigrated to Israel. They came from a land of famine and starvation. Their first meal was boiled potatoes, the fruit of the earth, so that their frail bodies, racked with hunger, would not be subjected to the shock so many victims of the concentration camps suffered when they were fed regular food too soon after liberation.

(source: Society for Humanistic Judaism website)