Passover Seder

Boker Tov!

(good morning--Hebrew)!

So last week we had a simulated Passover Seder. Passover is still a few weeks away, but as our semester is ending next week (we have finals next week, and then we spend the rest of the time here studying the New Testament and the life of Jesus Christ), and I assume it is more convenient for our professor Ophir to be able to spend passover with his family rather than us, we had passover this past week. ;-) We did everything according to tradition though, and it was really a neat experience! 

"Seder" means "order" so the Passover Seder is a ceremony where everything has a particular order to it. 

Our table :-) 

We all had name cards and we all dressed nicely for dinner.

Ophir, our professor who teaches the Judaism/Israel class, led the whole event :-)

Me, Jessica, Sarah, and Tye

This book is the order of events and also contains all the scriptures and songs and things to be done at passover. 

Ophir leading the first toast (we all drank grape juice)

putting our herbs in salt water to symbolize the tears of the Israelites in Egypt.

This is the general setup of the room :-)

Ophir's daughter Yamima (the Hebrew name for Jemima) helped out by doing the children's parts of the ceremony. (and his kids are SO CUTE!)

Groups of students practiced songs to sing throughout the program 

another group of students narrated different parts of the program. (KC is pictured)

Sarah spilling drops of the grape juice (instead of wine) to symbolize the bittersweet result of Israelite freedom at the cost of the loss of Egyptian life.

Ophir and two of his kids. (he has four children, I met all four of them when we went to the Synagogue with his family a few weeks ago, but I don't have any pictures of our synagogue trip because we didn't take any out of respect for the Sabbath rules of the orthodox Jewish culture)

Jessica loving the matza ;-)

Tye making his Matza sandwich...

Matza, bitter herbs, and some sweet apple paste :-)

One passover tradition is the hiding of a piece of matza to be found at the end of dinner. The children all search for it. Ophir's four year old son, Betzalel, found it :-)

Such cute kids!

pouring the final glass of grape juice...

Lindee didn't like the grape juice so much...

love this.

I had such a great time! This was a really neat cultural experience!

At the end of the night, we broke the serious tone of the evening with a silly song. Ophir said that much of the passover is geared for little children to remain interested, and so it is tradition to end with a silly song. some of the kids in our group (Mikkel, Taylor, Kara, Chloe, and Tori) came up with this rap version of a passover song. It was to the tune of "Ice Ice Baby" and the video of them preforming it is really great ;-) (I can't post videos because our bandwidth here makes it really difficult to post large files.)

Seder was great!

-E