This Passover, Greenfield’s Temple Israel is keeping it simple.
When it comes to food that will be served during the seder — the ritual meal that marks the beginning of the Jewish holiday — Rabbi Andrea Cohen-Kiener said each dish will be seasonal, local and easily recognizable.
Passover, which commemorates the story of Exodus in which the Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt, begins Friday evening and ends on the evening of April 30. The temple will hold its seder this Sunday.
“We’re making everything quite simple, just the raw ingredients,” she said. “You don’t have to get the Manischewitz angel food cake mix with this added and that added. You can have strawberries for dessert — just keep the seder simple.”
Local food is important to the many farmers, garden educators and “foodies” in Franklin County, Cohen-Kiener said, especially because it has its own inherent social justice values by helping to ensure the fair treatment of farm workers and eliminate disparity between the rich and poor.
This past weekend, Sunday school students from the temple used an ancient variety of grain to make their own matzo and foraged for bitter herbs, which is a component of the seder plate. Because leavened food is prohibited during Passover, Cohen-Kiener said each batch of matzo had to be completed in 18 minutes to prevent any fermentation from occurring.
“We have to get that water in there, knead it, spread it out, make holes in it and get it in and out of the oven in less than 18 minutes — every single batch,” she said. “We’re being creative, we’re using metal hair picks to make the holes, and the holes are so that it will cook all the way through quickly.”
Cohen-Kiener explained the matzo, bitter herbs and roasted animal, represented on the seder plate by a roasted lamb shank bone, were all part of the original passover meal in Egypt. The remaining items on the plate — typically an egg, charoset (a sweet paste made from fruit and nuts), parsley and lettuce — do not have a biblical precedent and were added later, but one can find variations of each wherever they go.
“It’s still evolving in fact,” she said. “Vegetarians will put a beet on there instead of roasted animal bone. There is a lot of tradition there, but people will really find ways to individualize it and tell the story they want to tell.”
A recent example, she said, is feminists adding an orange to their seder plates. Cohen-Kiener said that tradition began when a woman gave a talk at a synagogue in New Hampshire and a man told her that a woman belongs on the bema (the platform in a synagogue from which the Torah is read) like bread belongs on the seder plate.
“Obviously bread on a seder plate would be completely un-kosher,” she said, adding the story was changed at some point to say “orange,” which is kosher for Passover but isn’t a normal component of the seder plate.
“People do use the seder and they add things like that to tell other parts of the freedom story that are important to them,” she said.
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