Seder Plate Explanation

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Many people love to say that the Passover experience is one of the earliest forms of experiential education, a buzz word in today’s world. In its simplest terms, it means we learn by doing. John Dewey, a progressive educational philosopher, explains that “the belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative.” Tonight, let’s make an effort to not just tell the story, but to experience it completely through sight, smell, taste, and song and reflection. Our first opportunity is the seder plate.

The first symbol is the matzah, an unleavened bread was one of the foods the Jews in Egypt were commanded to eat along with the paschal lamb (Exodus 12:8). In commemoration of that first seder meal, and the haste in which the Israelites left Egypt — giving them no time to allow their bread to rise — we eat matzah at the seder.

The second symbol is the roashted shankbone or Z’roa, a roasted lamb shank bone that symbolizes the lamb that Jews sacrificed as the special Passover offering when the Temple stood in Jerusalem. The z’roa does not play an active role in the seder, but serves as a visual reminder of the sacrifice that the Israelites offered immediately before leaving Egypt and that Jews continued to offer until the destruction of the Temple

The third symbol is the roasted egg or betzah, that symbolizes the hagigah sacrifice, which would be offered on every holiday (including Passover) when the Temple stood. The roundness of the egg also represents the cycle of life — even in the most painful of times, there is always hope for a new beginning.

The fourth symbol is the marror or bitter herbs which allows us to taste the bitterness of slavery. Today, most Jews use horseradish as maror. Originally, though, maror was probably a bitter lettuce, such as romaine, or a root, such as chicory. Like life in Egypt, these lettuces and roots taste sweet when one first bites into them, but then become bitter as one eats more. We dip maror into haroset in order to associate the bitterness of slavery with the work that caused so much of this bitterness.

The fifth symbol is the charoset. This mix of fruits, wine or honey, and nuts symbolizes the mortar that the Israelite slaves used to construct buildings for Pharaoh. The name itself comes from the Hebrew word cheres or clay. Ashkenazi Jews generally include apples in charoset, a nod to the midrashic tradition that the Israelite women would go into the fields and seduce their husbands under the apple trees, in defiance of the Egyptian attempts to prevent reproduction by separating men and women. Sephardic recipes for haroset allude to this fertility symbolism by including fruits, such as dates and figs, mentioned in Song of Songs, the biblical book that is most infused with images of love and sexuality.

The last symbol is the karpas or greens. Karpas represents the initial flourishing of the Israelites during the first years in Egypt. At the end of the biblical book of Genesis, Joseph moves his family to Egypt, where he becomes the second-in-command to Pharaoh. Protected by Joseph’s exalted status, the family lives safely for several generations and proliferate greatly, becoming a great nation. The size of this growing population frightens the new Pharaoh, who enslaves the Israelites, lest they make war on Egypt. Even under slave conditions, the Israelites continue to reproduce, and Pharaoh eventually decrees that all baby boys be killed. In the course of the seder, we dip the karpas in salt water (Ashkenazi custom) or vinegar (Sephardi custom) in order to taste both the hope of new birth and the tears that the Israelite slaves shed over their condition.

Karpas also symbolizes the new spring. One of the names for Passover is Hag Ha-Aviv or the “holiday of spring.” Right around Passover the first buds emerge, and we look forward to the warmth and sense of possibility that accompany the beginning of spring.

haggadah Section: Introduction

Source: MyJewishLearning.com and John Dewey