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The Exodus: A Personal Coming Out, In Every Generation “In our tradition leaving Egypt wasn’t an historical event alone. In our tradition, it was a personal and existential leaving as well. "בְּכָל דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת עַצְמוֹ\עַצְמָהּ כְאִלּוּ הוּא יָצָא\ה מִמִּצְרַיִם” (In every generation a person must regard themselves as though they personally had gone out of Egypt) Whenever we leave a narrow place, a place of constriction, painful servitude, a place where we are not authentically who we...

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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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We’ve been bound by a hardened heart And our inability to see ourselves in each other. We have been puffed up by ego and pride. Enslaved by how things have always been. And now it is time to go. But fear threatens to paralyze. How can we possibly exist any other way? Our imagination falters The attachment to what we know is so great It doesn’t matter that it causes us so much pain. We dig in. We will not be...

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Pesach is many things to many people. Its customs are familiar and can be viewed with many lenses. The symbols are universal and are subject to almost any reading: social justice, class, the Holocaust, Middle East politics, American politics, agriculture, the environment, the list is endless, and the proliferation of interpretations is evidence that this is fertile territory. A few things – maybe only two – about the holiday are unavoidable, as in, Pesach wouldn't be Pesach if not for these...

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Who can say we’ve actually left? “Wherever you live, it is probably Egypt,” Michael Walzer wrote. Do you live in a place where some people work two and three jobs to feed their children, and others don’t even have a single, poorly paid job? Do you live in a community in which the rich are fabulously rich, and the poor humiliated and desperate? Do you live among people who worship the golden calves of obsessive acquisitiveness, among people whose children are...

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Leader:  We begin with the Passover plate.  The four foods on this plate symbolize the  four years of Beloit.Leader:  The first item is the bitter herbs. All:  The bitter herbs came from the hot sauce tray.Leader:  The second item is the chocolate KarpasAll:  The karpas is some lettuce that we got from the salad bar. It symbolizes prosperity. Leader:  The third item is the fruit. All:  The fruit represents the mortar that held the buildings together in Egypt. It also is...

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“An Invitation to a Plant-Based Meal”  Adam Gorod, Jewish Veg. D.C.  Our food choices during the Exodus were so much simpler. We could subsist on manna alone. Free of animal products, manna was a bread from heaven with a taste like coriander seed. Today the options—even during Passover—are more varied. Any number of Kosher-for-Passover items sit in the curated displays of many supermarkets at the arrival of spring. These options, however, make one fact unavoidable: we are now, at all seasons,...

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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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In 2008, we moved from Boise to Corvallis Oregon. Why did we leave? The job? Were we through with Boise? Did we need to begin a new chapter in our lives? We were uncertain about many things. The economy, tearing ourselves from the place we had raised a family. Our move was very difficult physically and emotionally. There were many things we clung to here in Boise. People, places and things that were familiar to us and gave us comfort. Yet...

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Jews from Spain, Italy, Sicily, Morocco, Tunisia, and Sardinia would bring the Seder plate to the table with ceremony. Sometimes, they would cover it with a nice scarf and sing as it arrived to the table. They would pass it from person to person around the table, and place it on each head for a moment. This demonstrates that we were once slaves in Egypt and carried heavy burdens on our heads. In Hungary, they go even further by decorating the...

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The Partisan Song (or Partizaner Lid) is the name of a Yiddish song considered one of the chief anthems of Shoah survivors. The lyrics of the song were written in 1943 by Hirsh Glick, a young Jewish inmate of the Vilna Ghetto. The title means "Never Say", and derives from the first line of the song, "Never say that you have reached the final road." During World War II, "Zog Nit Keynmol" was adopted by a number of Jewish partisan groups...