Blessed Be the Food: Difference between revisions

I’ve [[Eat Bread with Joy, Drink Wine with a Merry Heart#Annual Holidays|already written]] about how Passover combines an ancient pastoral festival of lambing ewes and an ancient agricultural festival of new barley. I’ve also written about how this combination was later associated with the Biblical story of the Jews’ supposed escape from slavery in Egypt. But I haven’t yet written about how Jews celebrate the eve of the first day of this seven or eight-day long holiday. On that night, “different from all other nights”, Jews gather at a ceremonial supper called ''seder''. It features seven traditional foods, each charged with some symbolic meaning, of course.

''Matzah'', or unleavened bread, is eaten in memory of the Jews escaping Egypt in haste and thus having no time to wait for the dough rise. ''Zeroa'', or a lamb shank, commemorates the lambs whose blood the Jews used to smear on their doorposts as an identification marker just before the escape, as well as those later sacrificed in the Jerusalem Temple; nowadays, it’s usually substituted for with a chicken wing. ''Beitzah'', or a chicken egg that is hard-boiled and then additionally roasted, is another memento of temple offerings. Two kinds of bitter herbs – ''maror'' and ''hazeret'' – symbolize the bitterness of slavery in Egypt. Ashkenazi Jews (those from northern Europe) typically use romaine lettuce for ''hazeret'' and horseradish (often dyed red with beetroot juice in the style of Polish beet-and-horseradish relish) for ''maror'' – even though horseradish is neither bitter nor a herb. ''Haroset'' is a sweet paste of apples, walnuts and honey, meant to stand for masonry mortar to remember that Jewish slaves in Egypt were mostly used for construction work. Finally, the seventh food is ''karpas'', or some green vegetable (e.g., parsley leaves) which is dipped in salted water, a symbol of the tears shed by the Jews in slavery. All of this is paired with wine.