The Seder Plate
Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great 20th-century Jewish scholar, wrote: "The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted. Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin. Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious [person's] attitude toward history and nature."
As we consider the objects on the Seder plate, they may strike us as very ordinary: an egg, a bone, a leaf. But on Pesach, these objects take on rich symbolic meaning. The objects are the same, but the way we see them has been transformed.
Heschel suggests that recognizing holiness is a matter of seeing, of renewed awareness of the beauty and complexity in even the most mundane acts and objects. The Seder plate is a way of activating our awareness, of helping us see holiness in what surrounds us.
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Passover Guide
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