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I'm in hour three of cleaning my kitchen and there's still no end in sight.Crouching on my kitchen floor, refrigerator door open, food stuffs spoiling around me, I wonderIs this what the Israelites did? Did they throw out their moldy jars of pasta sauce and shriveled vegetables, so rotten I'm not sure what some of the things once were?I have taken my kitchen apart in a rather manic fashion.  Pots to scour sit on the countertops, cabinet doors are open, their...

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Oh GodI am almost afraid to look over my shoulderTo see how far I’ve comeThe expanse seems impossibly wideAnd yetHere I amDancingSinging Your NameSurrounded by love and familyBreathing hope in and outI raise my eyes to the horizon and it feels so closeI am giddy with reliefYour sea is calm now at our backsThe line of the brown rocksFrom which we leaptOnly hours agoSeems a distant memoryThis moment is all joy and wonderWe sing and we singCircles within circles of men...

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“Gratitude is the moral memory of mankind. If every grateful action were suddenly eliminated, society would crumble.” – Georg Simmel Gratitude and happiness are intertwined and for good reason. It is no coincidence that positive psychology practitioners and happiness experts state that in order to increase your contentment in life you need to boost your level of gratitude. One of the leading researchers in gratitude is Dr. Robert Emmons. He has brought gratitude into the forefront by demonstrating how simple acts...

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Water is refreshing, cleansing, and clear, so it’s easy to understand why so many cultures and religions use water for symbolic purification. We will wash our hands twice during our seder: now, with no blessing, to get us ready for the rituals to come; and then again later, we’ll wash again with a blessing, preparing us for the meal, which Judaism thinks of as a ritual in itself. (The Jewish obsession with food is older than you thought!) To wash your...

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Break the middle matzah on the matzah plate. We break the matzah and hide one part (the Afikomen). We recognize that liberation is made by imperfect people, broken, fragmented — so don’t be waiting until you are totally pure, holy, spiritually centered, and psychologically healthy to get involved in tikkun (the healing and repair of the world). It will be imperfect people, wounded healers, who do the healing as we simultaneously work on ourselves. The Bread of Affliction Raise the middle...

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"For me, the recent meaning of Passover in my life has been a reclaiming of the seder ceremony away from the patriarchal tradition. My children may remember the seders of their early childhood, conducted by their grandfather entirely in Hebrew, incomprehensible to most in attendance, unvarying from year to year, except for how long it took until the children were sent away from the table for giggling. Before that, there were the Vietnam-era seders when we got into fights with relatives...

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Should we worry about what the price of our food means for the people around us? Does raising the cost of staples by making them into something rarefied and unique add variety to our lives or does it separate us from people who eat to sustain themselves? The Dinner Party Download: The Value of Four-Dollar Toast February 14, 2014 Brendan Francis Newnam:When did the San Francisco toast trend begin? John Birdsall:Really about a year ago, when a place called The Mill...

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There are three pieces of matzah stacked on the table. We now break the middle matzah into two pieces. The host should wrap up the larger of the pieces and, at some point between now and the end of dinner, hide it. This piece is called the afikomen, literally “dessert” in Greek. After dinner, the guests will have to hunt for the afikomen in order to wrap up the meal… and win a prize. We eat matzah in memory of the...

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When we bless the green parsley and dip it in the salty water, we remember the spring, and we remember the long, sad years of our slavery.When we left Egypt,we bloomed and sprouted,and songs dripped from our tongueslike shimmering threads of nectar.All green with life we grew,who had been buried,under toil and sorrow,dense as bricks.All green in the desert we grew,casting seeds at a promise.All green we grew. 

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On all other nights, we get biscuits and rolls, Fluffy and puffy and full of air holes. Why on this night, why, tell me why, Only this flat stuff that’s always so dry. On all other nights, we eat all kinds of greens, And I’m starting to like them – except lima beans. Why on this night, I ask on my knees, Do we eat stuff so bitter it makes grownups wheeze? On all other nights, we dip vegies just once...

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Fresh, crisp greens remind us of spring, of new beginnings, of hope.  Salt water reminds us of the long, sad season of our slavery. As we mix the two together, we remember that we must work to bring the hope of spring to everyone enslaved everywhere.