Preparing for Passover II When is Passover in 2011? Passover in 2011 will start on Tuesday, the 19th of April and will continue for 7 days until Tuesday, the 26th of April. Note that in the Jewish calander, a holiday begins on the sunset of the previous day, so observing Jews will celebrate Passover on the sunset of Monday, the 18th of April. |
Preparing for Passover II Zola Levitt
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Preparing for Passover II When is Passover in 2011? Passover in 2011 will start on Tuesday, the 19th of April and will continue for 7 days until Tuesday, the 26th of April. Note that in the Jewish calander, a holiday begins on the sunset of the previous day, so observing Jews will celebrate Passover on the sunset of Monday, the 18th of April.
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Preparing for Passover II
Thinking on why Christians would celebrate Passover and the Seder Dinner as we prepare for Easter… Ishouldn’t have been surprised when the questions came, probing, searching like a river rushing on. God knew they would. Didn’t He prophesy it millennia ago? “When your children ask their fathers in the time to come…’”(Joshua 4:21). The time is here and our children’s dams, full of wonder, spill over with a babbling stream of wonderings: What is fire made of? Why do coyotes howl at the moon? Where is France and why is the jungle of Peru larger than it? When birds fly, do their wings get tired? It is as just as God intended: children ask questions. So we rise each morning and embark as storytellers to this generation, to future generations; storytellers of one story. For really, there is only One Story to share: His. Come an eve in early spring, when the trees are budding and the birds nesting high in their limbs, children the globe over gather around feast tables to ask four age-old questions; questions that answer more than intended. So our children too ring the old oak farm table and echo the quartet of queries, seeking answers to the drama of a Lamb and new life birthing. Keeping “this ordinance in its season from year to year,” (Exodus 13:10), I lay the Passover emblems out on the table in the early twilight: the matzah lies under a linen cloth, goblets of juice of the vine flicker in the candle light, sprigs of lush green parsley circle a tray, water drops jewelling leaf tips. Off to the side, behind the crystal bowls heaped with mashed potatoes and glazed baby carrots, a dish of ground horseradish sits beside a dark, heavy shank bone of lamb. Not our usual fare for a spring evening meal. Weary and worn from the all-day effort, I have my own questions: Is all this business of keeping Passover unnecessary burden? Have we knotted the holy day up in redundant encumbrances? Does this old covenant really have bearing on new covenant living? But, slipping my hand through my husband’s, my queries hush. For there are children pressing in now, anxious for just this, this tradition, this meal before candles, this sipping of goblets. The questions now trickle, the same four questions that have come rippling down from one generation, to the next, for centuries; from the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob….to our children. Six-year-old Levi, his young voice pitched high but gentle, asks the first of the three-thousand-year-old queries, “Why are we eating unleavened bread, or matzah, tonight?” I pick up the matzah, a flat cracker of bread, striped with narrow lines, and pierced with small holes. And I answer in the only way I know how, “Because tonight we remember Jesus. By whose stripes we are healed. Yeast leavens, or puffs up, as pride and sin inflates our hearts. Tonight we eat unleavened bread, bread without yeast, to remember Jesus who was without sin.” I break the matzah in half and whisper, “Just like He was broken for us.” Hope comes next, slender fingers reaching out towards the horseradish, face contorted in slight grimace,“Why are we eating bitter herbs?” Lifting a small, silver spoonful of horseradish, I trace time’s prints back. “For on that long ago night, that night of Passover for the children of Israel, God said that ‘bitter herbs they shall eat’ (Ex. 12:8) and so we do too. To remember the bitterness of the cruel slavery of the Israelites to Pharaoh, to recall the bitterness of our relentless, ugly bondage to sin.” This is the telling of the story to answers the human heart’s pleas…and prayers. Picking up the evergreen parsley, I close my eyes to see the answer, as my husband speaks the scene. “Our fathers dipped hyssop branches into the blood of the Passover lamb, that they might mark their doorposts.” He dips a parsley sprig into the salt water and continues. “As they wept salty tears for their life of slavery, they, in faith, painted the door lintels with the blood, that the Angel of Death may pass over. For without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.” He dips the parsley again, this time into a small glass dish of apple and raisins. “But now we have hope. Because of the blood shed by the thorns piercing Jesus’ brow. Because of the blood from the wounds of the nails, that we, in faith, mark on the door of our hearts. Now we wipe away our tears, for we have glorious, endless new life in Christ. We have been rebirthed into His hope.” Young faces around the table, intent and listening, deliver up their own smiles. Caleb, the pensive eldest, leans his head on his hand and serves the crowning question: “Why are we eating this meal reclining?” In the culminating twinkling of toast glasses, so comes my answer to why we keep Passover. It isn’t about keeping laws and regulations. It isn’t about keeping our burdens. It isn’t about keeping some empty, meaningless customs. On the night of four questions, the answer gurgled in the stream of time: keeping Passover is about keeping our way down this river of life. It is about keeping something worth preserving: emblems pregnant with the fulfillment of the New Covenant. It is about the questions that keep time to the beat of our children’s heart: Why am I here? What does all of this living really mean? Where am I headed? When will I be all that I am to be? And this story, His story, told on a quiet evening in spring when the trees are budding under the nesting birds, this three-thousand-year-old Passover story has answers.
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Preparing for Passover II When is Passover in 2011? Passover in 2011 will start on Tuesday, the 19th of April and will continue for 7 days until Tuesday, the 26th of April. Note that in the Jewish calander, a holiday begins on the sunset of the previous day, so observing Jews will celebrate Passover on the sunset of Monday, the 18th of April.
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Preparing for Passover II
Fried matzo with traditional Seder plate accompaniments at JoeDoe in Manhattan. WHEN Victoria Herrmann’s grandparents died in 2005, her family’sPassover Seder tradition passed away with them. Her parents never had a Seder. (And her siblings had converted to Christianity.) Alon Shaya with his haroseth at Domenica in New Orleans. “I love Seders,” Ms. Herrmann, 26, said. But last year, when Passover began midweek, she and her boyfriend, who live in New York, couldn’t even go to his family’s Seder because it was held in Maryland. So she did what an increasing number of Jews are doing for Passover. She made a reservation. She had a Seder at JoeDoe, in the East Village. “The prayer books were on the table if you wanted them, the door was open for Elijah, and when we came in for the Seder, Joe welcomed us,” she said of Joe Dobias, the chef and an owner. “It was very comfortable, and it reminded me of the Seders I went to when I was younger with my family.” Ms. Herrmann, an adjuster at an auto-body shop and a musician, will be at JoeDoe on Monday for the first night of Passover. “Some of my cousins are coming who haven’t experienced a Seder since my grandparents passed,” she said. “This is becoming our tradition.” For years, families have been going on cruises or to hotels where the entire facility is meticulously prepared for Passover and everything is 100 percent kosher for the holiday. But increasingly, less traditional, more secular Jews who want a festive family feeling are finding that a restaurant Seder fits the bill. “I think that this is a trend all over the country,” said Rabbi Joy Levitt, executive director of the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan. “Literally 10 minutes ago a J.C.C. nursery-school mom came into my office and was talking about how much she enjoyed a restaurant Seder she goes to in Florida with a klezmer band, and everyone gets up and dances.” Over the past few years, the number of restaurants serving Passover meals has risen to more than 50 nationwide. Bret Thorn, senior food editor of the Nation’s Restaurant News, said that was partly because more Jewish chefs have been drawn to the profession as it has become more prestigious. “At the same time,” he said, “restaurants are doing anything to get people in — Groundhog Day, Earth Day. And Passover.” The experiences vary. Many are not kosher. Some have full-fledged Seders with rabbis and cantors, as at Lumière in Newton, Mass., or at Spago, which has held a Seder in Southern California since 1984. Peter Hoffman, at Savoy in SoHo, has led a Sephardic Seder for 19 years, expanding a few years ago to two seatings. Some restaurants’ Seders are held on the first, most important, night of Passover. Most, however, like JoeDoe and Domenica in New Orleans, an Italian restaurant with a Jewish chef, Alon Shaya, offer Passover-inspired menus for a few days or the entire week and leave the ritual service up to the customers. “We put out a Seder plate with horseradish, haroseth and the works on each table and let customers do what they want,” said Tony Maws, the chef at Craigie on Main in Cambridge, Mass. After the death of his grandparents, no one in the family wanted to touch Passover. Then a light went on for Mr. Maws, 41, whose picture of his grandmother stands right above his work station. “I have a restaurant, I am always cooking, why not have a Seder here?” On the first night of Passover, as he has done for three years, he will serve short ribs and flanken braised with prunes, almonds and star anise — a Sephardic reinvention of his grandmother’s tsimmes and brisket — for 16 relatives in the restaurant, which is always closed on Mondays. On the second and third nights, he’ll serve this and other dishes on his Passover menu. Billy Rose, 59, has eaten at Craigie on Main the last three Passovers. “I used to have family Seders at my parents’ house or at one of my siblings’,” he said, “but after my parents passed away, with siblings all over the place, it is hard to get together with 35-plus people.” The logistics of Passover have become more difficult, Rabbi Levitt said, as parents have become busier and people are cooking less. “People feel less able to manage all the details, whether they are logistical or religious,” she said. “It is a real challenge.” Mr. Shaya, 32, said he wanted to respond to that need. “When I opened Domenica,” he said, “I wanted to welcome people to my home, my restaurant, so I have a Passover menu for the eight days of the holiday. “I do this because it is good business but more than that, it means a lot to me,” he added. “In New Orleans with a small Jewish population, there is a cultural demand for Jewish food and a cultural lack of Judaism.” After Robin Barnes moved to New Orleans in 2006, she and her friends started having Seder at Domenica. “We went the first time as a fun adventure to try the food,” Ms. Barnes, 50, said, “and now we have made it our Passover tradition.” (Page 2 of 2) When Joe Dobias, who is Catholic, and Jill Schulster, who is Jewish, opened JoeDoe three years ago, Ms. Schulster knew that the only way she could attend her family Seder was to bring it to their tiny 26-seat restaurant. Tony Maws fine-tunes a dish of prune and almond braised short ribs at his restaurant, Craigie on Main, in Cambridge, Mass. This has grown into three nights of Passover menus with traditional melodies played on an iPod, a hidden afikomen (a ritual matzo) with prizes, Haggadot from Seders past, and the door opened for Elijah the prophet. “I’m not Jewish, but everything for me is the holiday and memories,” said Mr. Dobias, 32. “My idea is not to knock traditional foods, but some do go bland over time. Believe me, I can’t compete with Jewish moms. I’ve spent my whole life competing with my Italian mother.” Mr. Dobias’s Passover menu this year will include a quirky Jewish-Italian wedding soup with kale and tiny chicken dumplings and matzo balls, and deep-fried matzo with a sprinkling of spices on top placed on a Seder plate with chicken liver pâté, haroseth and horseradish. “Matzo doesn’t absorb a lot of fat,” he said. “Frying just gives it an outside crisp texture.” Ms. Herrmann approves: “I’ve eaten matzo my entire life and have never tasted it so good as he prepares it.” Mr. Shaya fiddles with old favorites, too, by substituting Moscato wine and hazelnuts for Manischewitz wine and almonds in his mother’s Bulgarian haroseth, which has a pleasant tang of onions and vinegar coupled with the sweetness of figs, apples and dates. But in making his own matzo out of normal bread flour, Mr. Shaya does not observe the strict rules for Passover. “If I could get kosher for Passover flour, I would use it,” he said. “But I make this matzo without leaven in my wood-burning oven under the prescribed 18 minutes from start to finish.” Such fiddling with tradition would shock many Jews, but others enjoy it. “My favorite part of the meal was the homemade matzo and the haroseth,” said Ms. Barnes, who called the meal surprising. “The menu had the Italian influence but also a bit of New Orleans with the matzo beignets with lemon curd and fresh mint.” And when the Seders are all done? “I know how much goes into preparing for a Seder and entertaining,” Ms. Herrmann said. “It is too much responsibility for me at this point in my life. I am very happy to go to a restaurant, enjoy the meal, live up to my family’s tradition and not worry about cleaning after the meal is done.”
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