INTRODUCTION

The long history of our people is one of contrasts — freedom and slavery, joy and pain, power and helplessness. Passover reflects these contrasts. Tonight as we celebrate our freedom, we remember the slavery of our ancestors and realize that many people are not yet free.

Each generation changes — our ideas, our needs, our dreams, even our celebrations. So has Passover changed over many centuries into our present

holiday. Our nomadic ancestors gathered for a spring celebration when the sheep gave birth to their lambs. Theirs was a celebration of the continuity of life. Later, when our ancestors became farmers, they celebrated the arrival of spring in their own fashion. Eventually these ancient spring festivals merged with the story of the Exodus from Egypt and became a new celebration of life and freedom.

As each generation gathered around the table to retell the old stories, the symbols took on new meanings. New stories of slavery and liberation, oppression and triumph were added, taking their place next to the old. Tonight we add our own special chapter as we recall our people’s past and we dream of the future.

For Jews, our enslavement by the Egyptians is now remote, a symbol of communal remembrance. As we sit here in the comfort of our modern world, we think of the millions who still suffer the brutality of the existence that we escaped thousands of years ago.

Here are some occurances at the annual Obama White House seder:

*An the annual reading of the Emancipation Proclamation right before Elijah sneaks in.

*The President has a vocal impersonation of Pharaoh.

*the Secret Service always knows where the afikomen is hidden. “It’s no different than you hiding it at your grandmother’s house, except there’s a Secret Service person watching you stash it away. And the house is a bit bigger,”

*The group uses the Maxwell House Haggadah, serves Manischewitz wine and shmura matzo, and still use the line  “Next Year in the White House” to the end of the Seder.

*The evening’s readings are done, as always, as a round robin.

*Malia and Sasha Obama recite the Four Questions. They also hunt down the afikomen in exchange for small gifts — like a rubber chicken for their dog, Bo, and bottles of nail polish

How long should the ideal Seder last. Everyone is hungry; the kids are squirmy, guests are growing impatient. You're on step 5 of 15 and dinner isn't even in sight.

It might interest you to know that originally, the meal PRECEDED the recitation of the Passover story (Maggid - step 5 of 15) and now it's at step number 11!Why? Because the rabbis were wise enough to know that few would hang around for the rest of the Seder once their appetites were satisfied. Of, course, they were correct. So, they shuffled the order of the Seder to make sure that the spiritual mitzvah of telling the sacred story was completed in its entirety before the main course, so to speak, the actual meal, was eaten.How long should the ideal Seder last? Well, that depends on the ages of the children and the tolerance of the guests, but here's a good rule of thumb:The Seder should be short enough and interesting enough to capture everyone's attention, but not so long as to hold them hostage!And therein lies the art.Happy Passover.

The four questions that are found in the Haggadah are borrowed from a Mishna in the Babylonian Talmud Tractate Pesachim Chapter 10, Mishna 4.  The Jerusalem Talmud Tractate Pesachim Chapter 10 provides for a different set of questions:  Why is this night of Passover different than all other nights? On all other nights we dip food only once while on this night we dip some food twice.  On all other nights we eat leaven and unleavened bread while on this night we eat only unleavened bread.  On all other nights we may eat meat that is roasted, boiled or cooked while on this night, we only eat meat that has been roasted.

The third question found in the Jerusalem Talmud leads many to argue that the questions found in the Jerusalem Talmud were asked only while the Second Temple was standing. The basis for their argument is that most Jews today follow the practice of abstaining from eating roasted meat at the Seder.  That is based on a concern expressed by our Sages that some present at the Seder might mistakenly think that the roasted meat they are eating at the Seder is a substitute for the paschal lamb.  That sacrifice could be prepared by only one method of cooking; i.e. by roasting it.

Thanks to the discovery in the 1880’s of a Geniza, a place where old Jewish books were placed to await burial, located in the attic of a synagogue in Cairo, we now know that Jews who followed the customs of Eretz Yisroel during the Middle Ages deliberately ate roasted meat at the Seder.  That practice was in conflict with the customs of the Babylonian Sages who prohibited the eating of roasted meat ate the Seder.  What lay behind this conflict?  The Jews who lived in Eretz Yisroel felt a much closer connection to the Second Temple than did the Jews of Babylonia.  The Jews in Eretz Yisroel believed that if they maintained as many of the customs of the Temple as they could, they would be demonstrating to G-d that they were ready to have G-d bring the Moshiach and to cause the rebuilding of the Temple.  

The Jews of Babylonia expressed a different attitude.  Being Jews who had lived in the Diaspora for many centuries, they had adjusted to not being able to participate in the Temple activities.  They had a concern that following the customs of the Temple even after it had been destroyed as a means of hastening the coming of the Moshiach and the rebuilding of the Temple could lead to the rise of false Messiahs.  They were not totally wrong.  Many believed that Bar Kochva, the great military leader who led the second century CE rebellion against the Romans in Eretz Yisroel, was in fact the Messiah.

One of the findings in the Geniza was the Haggadah that was recited by Jews who lived in Cairo in the 1200’s and who followed the customs of Eretz Yisroel. The three questions provided in the Jerusalem Talmud were the questions that opened the Seder for those Jews. That is evidence that as late as the 1200’s, a group of Jews continued to follow the customs of Eretz Yisroel and deliberately ate roasted meat at the Seder as a substitute for the Paschal lamb in the hope of hastening the coming of the Moshiach and the rebuilding of the Temple.

The four figures epitomize the Jewish cultural and class struggles in interwar Poland. The wise figure is a delicate intelligent yeshiva "bochur" (unmarried student) dressed traditionally yet meticulously. His body language expresses the grace and modesty of the Torah student ideally understood as an intellectual and religious aristocrat. In contrast, the wicked figure is a middle-aged bourgeois Jew dressed to show off his aspirations to Western European modernity. While the wise student has no props, not even a book, the wicked figure sports a riding crop, a cigarette with cigarette holder, and a stylish monocle. He is dressed in a hunting outfit with a jaunty Tyrollian hat with a feather, an ascot around his neck, silk gloves and sharp spurs on his leather boots. His stance is self-confident, self-contained and arrogant in contrast to the simpleton who is fat and smiling, opening himself to the world trustingly with arms and legs spread out.
While the simpleton is still traditionally dressed with a small tallis, the one who does not even know how to ask is a worker dressed poorly, wearing proletarian boots, without any visible link to Jewish tradition. His contemplative expression suggests that his direction in life is not yet determined.

Here the generation gap between Eastern European immigrants to the U.S.A. and their assimilated wicked son is foremost. Having adopted new-fangled American ways, the son smokes, dresses in black clothes with a modish cut and dances on his tilted chair. He takes the initiative in attacking his parents with an accusatory finger as if to say derisively, "what is this ritual for you?" The simple and the silent children, distinguished only by their hand motions, are mesmerized by the wicked son who sits at the head of the table holding forth. The other three figures — mother, bearded father and wise child with kippa — are dressed traditionally in pale white. Their body language bespeaks paralysis, passivity and lack of communication. The conversation is dominated by the three children in black, all with uncovered heads and backs turned. The family is divided culturally and generationally. Only the wise child identifies with the old ways.

The Boxer as Rasha, 1920, illustrated by Lola
The wicked child is a new kind of soldier. The culture of the naked physique, of sports, of the aggressive boxer is contrasted with a middle class seated scholar with a tie, glasses and a book. The passivity and introspection of the intellectual whose head is supported by his arm reflects the defensive status of traditional Jewish culture, when contrasted with the rise of American sports and perhaps contemporary Zionist youth movements that praised the values of the body. For example, two in a series of great Jewish boxers of this era were "Battling Levinsky" (nee Barney Lebrowitz, light heavy weight, 1916-1920) and Al McCoy (see Albert Rudolph, middle weight, 1914-1917)

For American Jewry during the Civil War, the Passover story was especially powerful. Northern soldiers saw clear parallels between the Union freeing the South's slaves and Moses leading the ancient Hebrews out of Egypt. However, creating a seder during in a war zone requires flexibility and creativity.

In 1862, the  Jewish Messenger  published an account by J. A. Joel of the 23^rd Ohio Volunteer Regiment of a seder celebrated by Union soldiers in Fayette, West Virginia. Joel and 20 other Jewish soldiers were granted leave to observe Passover. A soldier home on leave in Cincinnati shipped matzot and hagaddot to his colleagues. Joel wrote:

We . . . sen[t] parties to forage in the country [for Passover food] while a party stayed to build a log hut for the services. . . We obtained two kegs of cider, a lamb, several chickens and some eggs. Horseradish or parsley we could not obtain, but in lieu we found a weed whose bitterness, I apprehend, exceeded anything our forefathers 'enjoyed.'

We had the lamb, but did not know what part was to represent it at the table; but Yankee ingenuity prevailed, and it was decided to cook the whole and put it on the table, then we could dine off it, and be sure we got the right part.

The necessaries for the  choroutzes  we could not obtain, so we got a brick which, rather hard to digest, reminded us, by looking at it, for what purpose it was intended.

Yankee ingenuity indeed! Historian Bertram Korn observes, "It must have been quite a sight: these twenty men gathered together in a crude and hastily-built log hut, their weapons at their side, prepared as in Egypt-land for all manner of danger, singing the words of praise and faith in the ancient language of Israel." The seder proceeded smoothly until the eating of the bitter herbs. Joel recounted:

We all had a large portion of the herb ready to eat at the moment I said the blessing; each [ate] his portion, when horrors! What a scene ensued . . . The herb was very bitter and very fiery like Cayenne pepper, and excited our thirst to such a degree that we forgot the law authorizing us to drink only four cups, and . . . we drank up all the cider. Those that drank more freely became excited and one thought he was Moses, another Aaron, and one had the audacity to call himself a Pharaoh. The consequence was a skirmish, with nobody hurt, only Moses, Aaron and Pharaoh had to be carried to the camp, and there left in the arms of Morpheus.

More problematic was the situation of Union soldiers who, unable to form their own seders, were forced to "fraternize" with local Jews. Myer Levy of Philadelphia, for example, was in a Virginia town one Passover late in the war when he saw a young boy sitting on his front steps eating a piece of matzo. According to Korn, when Levy "asked the boy for a piece, the child fled indoors, shouting at the top of his lungs, "Mother, there's a damn Yankee Jew outside!" The boy's mother invited Levy to seder that night. One wonders how the Virginian family and the Yankee soldier each interpreted the  haggadah  portions describing the evils of bondage.

On the eve of the fifth day of Passover (April 14), 1865, Abraham Lincoln was shot and died of his wounds in the early morning of April 15^th, which had already been scheduled as a national day of prayer to mark the end of the Civil War. Jews across the land were gathering in synagogues to give thanks. When news of Lincoln's death arrived, Korn notes, the synagogue altars were quickly draped in black and, instead of Passover melodies, the congregations chanted Yom Kippur hymns. Rabbis set aside their sermons and wept openly at their pulpits, as did their congregants. Lincoln had been protective of American Jewry, overturning General Grant's infamous General Order #11 expelling Jews from the Department of the Tennessee and supporting legislation allowing Jewish chaplains to serve in the military. The Jewish Record  drew the analogy between Lincoln not having lived to see the reconciliation of North and South and Moses dying on Mount Pisgah before he saw the Israelites enter the Promised Land.

When no American armed forces are in combat anywhere in the world, it is easy to forget how difficult it can be for Jewish soldiers to serve their country while maintaining the traditions that beautify Judaism. Nevertheless, for Jewish Union soldiers fighting between 1861 and 1865 to free others from slavery, the Passover parallels must have made each seder particularly sweet and meaningful.

Eggs are prominent and pervasive on Pesah. In fact, so prevalent are they during the holiday week that one might suspect that the ancient Greek name for Pesah actually may have been Cholesterol!

Let's start with the Seder Plate, where a roasted egg (Beitzah ביצה), said to represent the holiday sacrifice, or Haggigah (חגיגה) finds a prominent place on a plate otherwise filled with symbols of subjugation and suffering: the roasted shankbone (זרוע), reminder not only of the paschal lamb whose blood was smeared on the doorposts of Israelite homes in Egypt on the eve of the 10th and final plague - the killing of Egypt's firstborns - and which was roasted whole and wholly consumed on that fateful night preceding the Exodus, but also of the z'roa netuyah (זרוע נטויה) the outstretched arm of the Almighty reaching out to rescue the people as promised; the bitter herbs Maror (מרור) and Hazeret (חזרת), evoking memories of bitter bondage; the parsley (כרפס) representing the hyssop used to paint the lamb's blood on the doorposts, and salt water (מי מלח), reminding us of the salty tears shed by slaves; the Haroset (חרוסת), a tasty pasty mixture reminiscent of mortar, meant to mitigate the bitterness of the herbs dipped into it, and lastly, the Matzah itself (לחם עוני) - the poor bread, the bread of affliction which our slave ancestors ate in Egypt and which was miraculously transformed by our tradition into the hastily baked bread of freedom, in consonance with the theme "from slavery into freedom."

So the roasted egg means what? Perhaps the loss of vitality and hope? A people steeped in sorrow, consumed by cruelty, sacrificed to the ambitions of tyrants and burned out - whose very bones have dried out, as in the vision of Ezekiel in Chapter 37?

But then, the egg reappears right before the the Seder meal, as a delicious and symbolic "appetizer," served peeled of its hard shell and, in most households, swimming in salt water representing the sea, source of life, and saline, a life-sustaining solution of similar pH to human bodily fluids.

It seems that the egg, a pagan symbol of fertility and the cycle of life and rebirth - of resurrection of life and nature in the spring after the harsh frigid northern winter - has now become a symbol of beginnings, not endings, not of hopelessness but of hope. Far from being roasted and with burnt and broken shell, it stands instead as a symbol of resilience to suffering. Most foods, when cooked, become softer and fall apart. The egg, however, gets tougher - hard boiled - the longer you cook it, an appropriate symbol of a people persecuted and "steeled by adversity" stubbornly resurrected as a nation determined to live anew.

Maybe Pesah SHOULD be called Cholesterol after all, in honor of the "incredible, edible egg," and the proudly adorned and lavishly decorated egg become one of OUR celebrated holiday symbols, too.

More often than not, the history of the Jews is one of upheaval rather than stability. It is the story of migration, change, renewal--and more change. And yet, through it all, one phenomenon has endured and held its own for millennia: a very humble food product fashioned from wheat, water, and salt which we know as matzah.

Think about it. Matzah, the unleavened bread which the Israelites ate as they hurriedly prepared to leave Egypt for the Promised Land, continues, thousands of years after the fact, to be consumed at the Passover seder by their latter-day descendants, contemporary Jews who call the suburbs, rather than Canaan, their home. What's more, come Passover-time, the shelves of supermarkets throughout the length and breadth of North America are crowded with box after box containing identically shaped, neatly perforated sheets of matzah. How many ritual foodstuffs do you know that go back that far and are mass-produced today?

Matzah's longevity is even more remarkable given our fickle palates and nationwide penchant for indulging in and then discarding one gastronomic trend after another. Add to the mix the availability of whole-wheat matzahs, salt-free matzahs, tea matzahs, and self-styled artisanal matzahs that sell for well over $20 a pound, and the staying power of this food is nothing short of breathtaking. 

Scholars of the ancient Near East are quick to point out that the matzah we eat in 2005 is probably not quite the same unleavened bread our ancestors consumed way back when. For one thing, the type of grain the Israelites used was undoubtedly a different species than what's produced in the US today; for another, the size and overall appearance of matzah in the ancient world was a far cry from ours: much larger, more disc-shaped (the Bible, for instance, refers to "cakes" of matzah), and far more roughhewn around the edges than our own.

But then, our contemporary notion of what constitutes authentic matzah is itself a relatively recent invention, an artifact of modernity, as the research of Professor Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University makes clear. Well into the 19th century, matzah was made by hand, in dark and unheated basements to prevent the dough from rising; the shape of the matzah was irregular, at best; and packaging came in the form of newspapers rather than sanitary boxes.

More to the point, the very idea of industrializing and standardizing matzah production was anathematized by leading rabbinical authorities of the time. Although by 1838 a device capable of kneading matzah mechanically had been invented, Europe's rabbis expressed grave reservations about it, in some quarters even going so far as to pronounce its use as  treif.  Some feared that mechanization would destroy the livelihood of those who had traditionally earned their modest keep from the kneading and rolling of the matzah dough; others worried that, with the new technology, stray contaminants might work their way into the matzah, rendering it unfit for ritual consumption. And still others were simply unready to come to grips with the manifold challenges modernity posed to the traditional, time-honored way of doing things.

Attempts at convincing the rabbinate, and with it, traditional elements of both European and American Jewish society, that the mechanization of matzah might well be a boon rather than a drawback took some doing. That responsibility fell to Dov Behr Manischewitz, the creator of America's very first matzah factory, which opened in Cincinnati, Ohio in the 1880s.

A rabbi as well as an astute businessman, Manischewitz took great pains to secure the approval of the leading Torah sages of Jerusalem, whose consent he succeeded in winning by trading on his own  yichus  (pedigree), cultivating close ties with the rabbinical establishment of the Holy Land, and demonstrating his religious rectitude and noble intentions by establishing a yeshiva in Jerusalem that bore his good name. He would subsequently display their endorsement--"There is none more faithful to be found"--in both English and Hebrew on the exterior of his mass-produced matzah boxes.

At the Manischewitz plant in Cincinnati, where, it was said, "no human hand touches these matzahs," or at the factories of its competitors such as Horowitz Bros. & Margareten, whose owners boasted that, when it came to making matzah, they followed "carefully computed formulae," much was made of the felicitous union between modernity and tradition.

Much was also made of hygiene. In an effort to persuade Jewish consumers to relinquish their tried-and-true ways of doing things (e.g., purchasing old-fashioned, irregularly shaped matzah, loosely wrapped in newsprint), modern-day matzah manufacturers appealed to what, earlier in the 20th century, had already become an issue of great concern: the fear of germs. Drawing on what was then called "antiseptic-consciousness," they spoke lyrically of their sun-flooded factories and of the "sanitary and painstaking conditions" under which modern-day matzah was made.

If health concerns were not reason enough to switch, matzah manufacturers drew on an additional source of persuasion: the radio jingle. "Manischewitz Matzo, buy, buy, buy" went one jaunty B. Manischewitz Co. commercial. Another radio ad put it this way: "When you hear the word 'sterling,' what comes to mind? Silver. When you hear the word 'matzah,' what comes to mind? Why, Manischewitz." The handiwork of lyricist and Yiddish lexicographer Nahum Stutchkoff, these pitches, along with dozens of others like them, endowed Manischewitz matzah with attributes worthy of Mother Nature herself: "burnished," "pearl-like," and "bright as the rising sun."

If neither health nor peppy jingles did the trick, there was always the recipe. Sometime during the interwar years and peaking in postwar America, test kitchen cooks and Jewish cookbook authors joined forces in a concerted attempt to broaden matzah use beyond the boundaries of the seder, and to avoid "matzah monotony" by adapting this ancient foodstuff to modern tastes. Appealing to what one food writer of the 1930s called the "unusual recipe-consciousness" of America's Jews, they crafted imaginative uses for it, from making spaghetti out of matzah meal to fashioning farfeloons, an exotic, macaroon-like concoction, from matzah farfel.

So pliant, so versatile was matzah, the organizers of the 1939-1940 World's Fair invited Horowitz Bros. & Margareten to showcase a model matzah factory on the grounds of an international exposition devoted to "Building the World of Tomorrow." For some reason, the exhibit did not materialize (historians aren't quite sure why), but the very idea of displaying a matzah factory at the World's Fair underscored the possibility that tradition could make its peace with the modern era.

Industrialized, standardized, advertised, sung about, and otherwise reimagined, millennial matzah lent itself admirably to adaptation. Under these circumstances, is it any wonder that so many American Jews found it difficult to resist what one of their number, in 1911, described as the "call of the matzah"? Then, as now, there's something in that ancient amalgam of water, wheat, and salt that speaks of hope. 

Jenna Weissman Joselit is a cultural historian of American Jewish life and the author of  The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture.

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