The salt water on the Passover table is underrated as a symbol. It's lesson is not about hardship or bitterness which can be temporary reminders but about life itself. On one hand, salt water represents tears and too much salt can even be like poison. And yet, salt is a source of life, which begins not in fresh water, but in the depths of the oceans. What is dry and without flavor can sustain us but it takes more than that to produce new life.

The words “Breaking News” used to mean that something big and unexpected just happened. Now, every single news story begins with “Breaking!”  Our world has become simultaneously in need of repair and numb to it's brokenness.  At the Seder, though, before we even begin telling the story of Passover, we split the middle matza and let the sound of it breaking call us to attention. The following is breaking news: We are free!

A little taste of Israel from a friend who lives near Tiberias.  May we always find these moments where we remember why we begin our seder by welcoming to our table all who are in need!

“Standing in line at the grocery store and the entire line is held up for a couple buying groceries for needy families, trying to use every every shekel of the donated money. Everyone is helping. The cashier is giving suggestions and running back and forth with more products. Cashier apologizes to us all waiting, but it's a mitzvah. No one is remotely impatient. We all know. Finally they reach their sum. Ten shekels over. Cashier yells 'it's on me!'”

  The Passover story is a yearly opportunity to re-encounter what it means to be a stranger and face bigotry. Then, like our bodies produce antibodies to fight off an infection, our people finds new ways to express our own identity and what it means to face a certain kind of hardship and oppression. If hate is a virus, the Seder is like a vaccine. Some get two doses.

The only ingredient that changes regular flour and water into matza is time: the baking must take less than eighteen minutes or the mixture is assumed to have risen and cannot be eaten for Passover. Matza then is not just a symbol or a reminder of the haste with which we left for freedom but an embodiment of having to act quickly. Like time saved in a bottle, matza is urgency baked into bread.

Bittersweet is a strange word that we just take for granted makes sense. We don't really talk about being happysad or tiredawake the same way. Because bittersweet doesn't mean halfway between bitter and sweet but the kind of sweetness that is also bitter and the kind of bitterness that is also sweet. Something about those to seemingly opposite descriptions somehow allow them to be part of the same experience. I think it is nostalgia. A pain of separation that goes with the sweetness of memory.

Growing up, my grandmother said that if you sing at the table you will marry someone strange. Grandparents can say those things and I won’t think too much about where the saying actually came from.  Only later though I put together how much singing at the table went along with the celebration of Jewish holidays, from Shabbat dinners to that strange ceremony, the Passover Seder.  There is something about singing at the Seder table and the Shabbat table and once in a while just on a regular day that teaches that to remember what it was like to be strangers we might have to be somewhat strange as well.