FAMILY ACTIVITIES

For Holy Week

Passover:  Festival of Freedom

Passover, a holiday based on the book of Exodus, commemorates a major event in the long history of the Jews.  It is considered by some to be the national birthday of the Jews.  You don’t have to be Jewish to understand and appreciate this holiday.  It can be full of meaning for everyone, because it has to do with the essential right of an individual to freedom.

Passover starts at sundown on a day in early spring, and lasts for eight days.  It is ushered in by a Seder, a religious service celebrated in the home rather than in the temple.  A Seder is a carefully orchestrated meal, full of stories and rituals and symbols.  Participants eat special foods in a certain order, drink wine, share parables and legends, ask traditional questions and receive traditional answers.  There are benedictions, songs, and chants.

The idea behind a Seder is to endow the events and miracles of the historical exodus with a certain immediacy, to make participants feel the relieved joy of sudden freedom after so many years of slavery.  Christians are often invited to Jewish tables for a Seder during Passover.  If you have the opportunity to attend a Seder, by all means do it.  It will teach, entertain, and inspire you to say nothing of filling you up.

THE STORY OF PASSOVER

Two thousand years before the birth of Christ, the Israelites were slaves to the Egyptians.  Moses, a Jew who had been raised in Pharaoh’s household and who was determined to free his people from a bondage that had lasted 430 years, asked Pharaoh to let them go.  Pharaoh refused.  As punishment, God sent ten plagues upon the Egyptians.

During this time, the Pesach festival was held in the spring, at the time of the vernal equinox.  The night just after Pesach, when the moon was full, was designated by Moses to be the night that the Israelites would escape.  He told his people to sacrifice a lamb and to sprinkle its blood on their door.  This would do two things: show defiance to the Egyptians, who worshipped the lamb as a sacred animal, and show the Israelites’ faith in God.

On this same night, for the tenth plague, the angel of death came and took the oldest son in each Egyptian family, but passed over the Jewish sons.  When Pharaoh learned of this, he ordered the Israelites to leave immediately.  They complied in great haste.  But the next morning, Pharaoh changed his mind and sent his army to bring back the Israelites.  Trapped with the Red Sea in front of the army behind, Moses miraculously parted the sea and the Israelites passed through safely.  However, when the pursuing Egyptians tried to pass through, the sea surged over them and they drowned.  The Israelites then followed Moses to the promised land.

For almost 4,000 years since, Passover has celebrated this event.  Its purpose is to remember the saving of the firstborns and to celebrate the redemption from slavery.  But it is also to teach children that freedom is a great privilege that must be won and kept, and that doing so is not always easy.

The first and the last days of Passover are observed by Jews as holy days.  Matzoh, or unleavened bread, is eaten during this time as a reminder of the long flight from Egypt.  The Jews had no time to let dough rise, so they had to bake their bread without the advantage of his process.  They rolled it into thin wafers and put it on flat boards, then baked it in the desert sun.




Callie Ann Hausman
cah2727@bellsouth.net