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Susan R. Friedland is the Director of Cookbook Publishing at HarperCollins Publishers. She collaborated with Raymond Sokolov on The Jewish-American Kitchen and is the author of Ribs and Caviar.

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Passover Table

Quill

In every generation, each individual should feel thathe or she personally had gone forth from Egypt, as itis said:And you shall tell your children on that day saying,this is on account of what the Eternal did for me, when Iwent forth from Egypt. For the Lord redeemed not onlyour ancestors; He redeemed us with them.

This instruction from the Talmud (Pesachim 116b) has been observed by Jews for more than three thousand years. On the fifteenth day of the Hebrew month of Nissan (which corresponds to late March or April), they commemorate in the Seder and the entire week of observance their liberation from two centuries of slavery by the Egyptians.

Passover, or Pesach, literally refers to the "Passing over" by God of the homes of the Jews enslaved in Egypt, who were identified by a smear of the blood of a slaughtered paschal lamb on their door posts, when He killed the firstborn son of each Egyptian family. This was the tenth and final plague God visited on the Egyptians and the one that finally persuaded the pharaoh, whose own son lay dead, to free the Jews.

Passover is a continuation and amalgam of earlier holidays: the pagan agricultural one celebrating spring and the first barley harvest, and later the religious holidays of hag ha'Pesach, the festival of the paschal lamb, when nomadic Jewish shepherds offered their spring lambs in ceremonial sacrifice, and hag ha'matzot, the festival of the unleavened bread, when Jews discarded the old bread made from the previous year's flour. Passover also draws its identity from one of the three pilgrimage festivals when Israelites journeyed to Jerusalem to thank God for His bounties and to offer sacrifices at the Temple. It was the only one of the pilgrimage festivals that required women as well as men to travel to Jerusalem. The main Passover service was limited to those who could make the pilgrimage and to those who lived near the Temple ("You are not permitted to slaughter the Passover sacrifice in any of the settlements ..." [Deut. 16:5-6]). When the Temple was destroyed, the paschal lamb was eliminated from the Seder, but the other elements of the ritual were transferred to the home, and Seder became a family ceremony with only a symbol of the paschal lamb retained: a roasted shank bone on the Seder plate.

The Talmud emphasizes Passover as the story of continuing deliverance, an event in which all Jews participate. It is meant to ensure that the thread of memory will be unbroken. Each Jew should feel that he himself has fled affliction; she herself must experience slavery and the exhilaration of liberation. This immediacy accounts for the spirit and gusto most Jews bring to the Seder.

The focus for the reliving of the Exodus is the Seder (literally, "order of the ritual"), a ceremonial and didactic meal. The service is presented in the Haggadah (literally, "to tell"), a liturgical text. It retells the story of the Exodus, gives instructions on how to conduct the Seder, explains the Passover symbols, and gives selections from Psalms (113-18), along with songs, riddles, and prayers.

The written Haggadah is more than two thousand years old; before it was transcribed, the head of the family would tell the story of the Exodus, aided by a mnemonic for remembering the order. The formula consists of fourteen words, each of which stands for a specific element of the ritual and is now included, as a chant in rhymed verse, in the introduction to the Haggadah.

Kadesh-blessing over wine

Urhatz-washing hands

Karpas-eating the mild herb

Yahatz-dividing the matzo

Maggid-telling the Passover story

Rahtzah-washing hands

Motzi Matzah-blessing the matzo

Maror-eating the bitter herb

Karekh-the Hillel sandwich

Shulan Orekhthe- festive meal

Tzafun-eating the afikomen

Barekh-grace after the meal

Hallel-psalms

Nirtzah-conclusion

Haggadahs were improvisatory until the early rabbis adopted the ritual of the Hellenistic symposium for them. Rituals varied and still do: Radical socialist kibbutzim in Palestine didn't mention God; a lesbian Haggadah presents Miriam as the leader, almost ignoring Moses; there is a California Haggadah that has ancient Israelites surfing in the Red Sea; a socalled Liberation Haggadah of the 1960s quoted the 11 prophet" Eldredge Cleaver. In the 1930s and'40s, Haggadahs were created by Maxwell House and other manufacturers of food products and given away at supermarkets. These free Haggadahs went a long way to codifying the rituals of the Seder. Regardless of the spin or bias of the ritual, it is halachically correct to conduct the Seder in the native language of the participants so that everyone will understand what is going on.

The Haggadah has played an important part in developing Jewish figurative art because it has provided artists with many subjects suitable for illustration: the four sons, the ten plagues, the crossing of the Red Sea. There is a fourteenth-century Spanish Haggadah with pictures of Seder scenes, including a small child asking his father the meaning of the festival. The Amsterdam Haggadah of 1695 was illustrated with copper engravings, made to order for the family of Moses Wesel. A later Amsterdam Haggadah was lavishly illustrated with woodcuts borrowed from a Venetian Haggadah. In modern times, Ben Shahn and Leonard Baskin have illustrated Haggadahs.

Like all Jewish festival meals, the Seder starts with the kiddush-a ritual of domestic worship in which the sanctity of the Sabbath or festival is affirmed over a cup of wine. Because there is such a long service between the kiddush and the actual meal and another long service after the meal, additional cups of wine were added to the Seder.These were incorporated into...

Excerpted from Passover Tableby Friedland, Susan R. Copyright © 2004 by Susan Friedland. Excerpted by permission.
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