Counting (or Reason #786 why I actually like Passover…)

We’re drawing to the end of the Passover holiday which, according to many, ends this evening. (That in itself is a long story: the holiday is prescribed Biblically for seven days, and many traditional Jews not currently residing in Israel keep it for one extra day “just to be sure.” (That’s over-simplifying it, I know.) In Israel, Passover has already been over and done for about thirty hours.)  I’m looking forward to eating more diversified food than what I’ve been having for the past week — the food certainly isn’t on my happy list.  But there are quite a few things which make it one of my favorite holidays.

And I’ll lump them all together in one broad category: dynamic traditional evolution.

True — there will always be certain Jews (or insert any other group with historically-based traditions) who will remain adamant that this is the only way to engage in [worship / living a moral life / achieving holiness / associating with others.] I believe, however, that the overwhelming majority of humanity is less rigid and, while sometime looking to conserve the traditions of the past, is successful in tweaking these traditions for the future.

It has been said that the Passover Seder was created to mimic the Greek symposium which was popular at the time. And it was created to become (as I’ve mentioned here before) a multimedia experience — not only is there a specific story which is told through narrative and song, but there’s also food which tells part of the story (such as salt water to represent tears, bitter herbs to represent a bitter time, charoset to represent the mortar of the pyramids, etc.), and actions which wouldn’t make sense on all other nights (such as reclining at the dinner table, opening the door for a non-existent guest, and, in some traditions, whipping each other with scallions).  The main purpose is from a Torah-based mandate — Vehigadta l’vincha — “And you shall teach this to your children,” meaning the entire Passover / Exodus story.

The thing is — the story and the storytelling have both evolved. The underlying theme of making the journey from slavery to freedom has evolved when we see real-world struggles of different peoples and apply their experiences to our story. The methods of teaching our children have also changed, as have certain symbols of the holiday.

Oh – and as the Jewish community has evolved, so has the language of the Seder. Our family’s tradition has been to sing the final two wacky songs in Ladino — a hybrid language consisting of Hebrew, Spanish, French and a few Northern African words here and there.

The symbols have changed as well: on Jester‘s radio show I mentioned the newfound tradition of the orange on the seder plate. The story I gave was apocryphal in nature — that its existence came from an overly traditional Jewish guy who stated in public that a woman in a Jewish leadership position is as ridiculous as an orange on a seder plate. And the next year — people responded by putting oranges on their plates.  It’s a fun story, but not quite true in origin.  The actual story, per scholar Susannah Heschel, has the emergence of the orange symbolizing the fruitfulness of a complete community which doesn’t exclude people based on sexual orientation and gender identity.  There is a corollary which has the orange seeds separated from the orange, demonstrating the expunging of homophobia from the community ideally.

And sometime the traditions are just way out there.  At my brother’s first seder he put a banana on the seder plate. He traced this back to a tradition a few decades back from the town of (I think?) Elizabeth, NJ.  The ultra-traditional rabbi at the time was appalled with the lack of knowledge of the Jewish community at the time. Get this — they had been assuming that one would say the generic blessing over fruit before eating a banana rather than an alternate blessing for vegetables! (Yeah, I don’t get it either.) He decreed that for the following year, everyone needed to put a banana on the seder plate in the place of the green vegetable to serve as a reminder that it should be blessed as a vegetable.  Oh — and dipped into salt water. Weird…

The point of this all — is the notion of passing on these teachings with enough leeway to make the traditions one’s own. It’s something that I enjoyed as a kid, and it’s something I’m enjoying passing down to my kid.  And it seems as if he’s embracing these customs and traditions as well. Maybe he’ll be posting the same blog entry thirty years from now when he has his own seders.

One last thing we’re doing — there’s a tradition to count forty-nine days between the second day of Passover until the holiday of Shavuot (loosely translated — Pentecost) as stated in Leviticus 23.  I’ve never been a huge follower of this tradition, but my son, at age five, is the mack-daddy of counting things. Hence, there’s a chart up outside his bedroom for which we “X” off each of the days leading up to number 49.  Last night was number 7. He gets so excited about this — which is a very liberal interpretation of what was originally done (counting sheaves of barley. Have you seen barley prices lately?).   It’s just nice to share in these things with him.

Passover. Almost over. Pizza tonight. Woo!