For more than 2000 years Jews have gathered together with friends and family to celebrate the
Passover festival with what else? Food! Matzo, wine, charoset, gifilte fish and the little matzo puff balls that float in chicken soup are just a few examples of foods associated with Passover. Depending upon your family’s traditions, meal and Seder, the rituals can be as diverse as snowflakes with no two looking exactly alike.
Behind all the symbolism, traditional
Haggadahs and prayers, the intention behind this holiday is the same for us all. It’s to become inspired by the ancient story of our ancestors’ liberation from spiritual and physical oppression. Behind closed doors we may be waging our own private battles against oppression. Perhaps we’re evolving into a new personal freedom in our lives? Wherever you are on your path, Passover offers the perfect setting to lay claim to a new way of living.
This can be especially appropriate if you have recently been divorced or there’s a major change in your family dynamic. Embrace this holiday as an opportunity to create your own traditions that you can pass on to the next generation.
Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of
The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership says, "People begin to own their own traditions, interpret them, wrestle with them, morph them, make them real to their own experience, Seder unites us. The basic ritual unites us. After that, the meaning of it is completely open”.
Here are some examples of new traditions, rituals and recipes to make this year’s
Passover Seder the most personal yet.
1. Female-focused Seder. Want to feel the vibe of sisterhood this Passover? Make this night different from all other nights and honor the women from the Book of Exodus whose names have been lost in popular retellings of the Passover story. ‘Who are they,’ you ask? They are Shifra and Puah, the midwives who refused to murder Jewish newborn boys as the Pharaoh ordered; Yochaved, Moses' mother, who hid her infant for three months; and Miriam, who placed her baby brother Moses in a basket in the Nile for the Pharaoh’s daughter to find. The Bible describes how after the Jews crossed the Red Sea, the "prophetess" Miriam played her tambourine, and led the women in song and dance to celebrate their freedom. Much like a Biblical Jewish version of the Indigo Girls, perhaps?
2. Orange you glad you’re a woman? Some ‘women-focused’ Seders have added an orange to the symbolic food on the Seder plate. The orange was added to symbolize an anecdote from the era before women could become rabbis. According to the story, a male rabbi said a woman belongs on the lectern of a synagogue ‘like an orange belongs on a Seder plate’. "Something about this has touched a nerve with Jewish women," said Rabbi
Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, who has organized a women’s oriented Seder for the past 10 years. "We tend to hear only about history through the eyes and voices of men. This is about filling in the blank spaces. When I see the local grocery stores running low on oranges around Passover, I’ll know this tradition will be catching on!" Leave it up to us women to take a comment made by a man and make him ‘eat’ his words.
3. Pour the lady a glass.Traditional Seders place a cup of wine on the table for the Prophet Elijah; women's Seders also add a cup of water for Miriam. Ancient rabbinic writings associate Miriam with a well of water that followed the Jews as they wandered in the desert. Miriam's cup is filled communally, with each person at the table adding a drop from her glass. Tamara Cohen, former program director of May’an, a Jewish Women’s group in New York City says, "We're celebrating the fact that we're living in a time when we want to be in the kitchen, we can. When we want to be working, we can and when we want to speak up around the table and share our insights, we can. That hasn't been true for most of Jewish history. Women didn't have access to the language of the texts because in the past they weren't taught Hebrew."
