Keeping Passover:

Everything You Need to Know to Bring the Ancient Tradition to Life & Create Your Own Passover Tradition

Ira Steingroot, Harper Collins Canada 1995

If you really want to research, reconstruct, rethink, reconceive, renovate, redo, revitalize and rejuvenate your Passover seder, then you really need to get the book Keeping Passover: Everything You Need to Know to Bring the Ancient Tradition to Life & Create Your Own Passover Tradition, by Ira Steingroot. Mr. Steingroot is apparently some sort of Passover fanatic; I’m not referring to how he cleans his house, but how much he knows about seders, haggadot, customs, foods, and related traditions. This is fun and very useful book, in which Steingroot discusses the structure of the traditional seder in great detail, gives advice on preparing your home and dealing with Passover foods, provides a comprehensive bibliography of different haggadot one might choose, offers helpful ideas about how to keep children involved and happy, brings in recipes from different Jewish communities, and peppers the book throughout with both a pluralistic sensibility and random interesting bits of Jewish trivia related to all kinds of topics.

Although the sheer size of Keeping Passover might seem daunting to newcomers or those not ready to go on an extensive Passover research mission, it’s a very readable book, and one can easily just peruse the sections that seem most interesting. (Not everybody needs to go through a 30 page annotated review of haggadot. ) I would also add that it’s refreshing to find a readable, interesting book, with a pluralistic perspective, that does go into some detail about a specific Jewish topic- after all, people write books about much narrower subjects than Passover, which is a major part of a major religious tradition.

My final thought on Keeping Passover is that even with the level of detail and analysis that this book has, it too might only be a stepping stone for further learning and experimentation. Steingroot’s perspective on the rituals and structure of the seder is interesting, but there are others, across the Jewish spectrum, and one might go from the base of knowledge he provides to looking at other haggadot and commentaries (which he lists) to keep this most ancient ritual fresh and exciting every new spring.

RNJL

Passover Resources

The Women's Passover Companion: Women's Reflections on the Festival of Freedom, and

The Women's Seder Sourcebook: Rituals & Readings for Use at the Passover Seder,

both edited by Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, Tara Mohr and Catherine Spector,
and published by Vermont's Jewish Lights Publishing, both $24.95 U.S.

reviewed by Allan Gould

Passover books put women at the table and back in the Exodus story (and not just in the kitchen)

I developed a joke that I use, when Christian friends ask me what Passover is all about. "It's the Jewish holiday," I tell them, "dedicated to the fact that Jewish women never left Egypt."

Like the best of humour, there's a lot of truth in it: the endless cleaning and shopping, the careful search for chametz, the food preparation, the never-ending crowds of guests, and for traditional Jews outside the Holy Land, those TWO complex, long, hard-to-prepare-for and hard-to-clean-up seders. Yes, Jewish women remain in slavery, if not in Egypt, don't they?

I am so pleased to announce, then, the publication of The Women's Passover Companion: Women's Reflections on the Festival of Freedom, and The Women's Seder Sourcebook: Rituals & Readings for Use at the Passover Seder, both edited by Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, Tara Mohr and Catherine Spector and published by Vermont's Jewish Lights Publishing. And both invaluable.

The former is a collection of essays by women, on women and this essential holiday, some profound, some scholarly, some minor, but most worthwhile and important. The latter book also includes essays, but more often than not, directions, on how to put the women back into the Exodus story, and women back into the Seder, itself. (Chapters on everything from the Candlelighting through the Four Cups, The Four Questions, The Ten Plagues, Maror and more, make the Seder Sourcebook a must-read and must-use in its own right, although I gained more intellectual and emotional pleasure and challenge from the Passover Companion.

So let me turn to that book first, even though the origin of both texts is the same: the rise of Jewish feminism, and the three-decades-long and still growing tradition of women's seders. To quote from the Passover Companion's Introduction, "Passover is likely the most widely celebrated of all Jewish holidays, and the Passover seder has become one of the most significant rituals of the Jewish year. . . . Yet, despite women's central role in the domestic holiday preparations, we have often played a marginal role in the seder itself, unable to lead—or even participate fully in—telling the Exodus story. The Jewish feminist movement has reclaimed women's place at the seder table. . . ."

And so it has. Not unlike the traditional seder plate, the Passover Companion is divided into several parts, each with its own purpose: "Why Women's Seders?" explores the goals and history of those recent, gender-specific traditions; "Reclaiming and Re-creating Passover Rituals for Women" has a number of essays on how women are changing Passover rituals, and not only at all-women seders, but also in their own homes; "Women of Exodus" includes scholarly studies of Miriam, the midwives who disobeyed the Pharoah's orders to throw new-born Jewish sons into the Nile, and more heroes; "Telling Our Stories" echo the themes of the Exodus (oppression, liberation, history, memory); and "Visions and Challenges for the Future" discusses various issues facing women's seders in particular and Jewish feminism in general.

Collections of essays are always hit-and-miss, of course. Reading a self-conscious, self-congratulatory memoir of an early women's seder is hardly as satisfying as scholarly, even profound essays by such Torah giants and Israeli feminists as Leah Shakdiel and Avivah Zornberg.

As a male, I was saddened by Esther Broner's "For Women Only" essay, but not because it was "man-bashing"; no, I was troubled because I knew how true her words were: "None of this [women discussing the pain of lesbianism, being "excluded" from one's own mother's kaddish, and more] would have been possible if men had been present. The men might have commented, contradicted, corrected. We never found out. We were not about to take a chance on sharing our sacred time and space, when so much of this sacred space had already been taken over in our lives."

We all know that history is written by the victors, not the vanquished. It is not by chance that we cannot find any references to the Jews leaving Egypt in ancient Egyptian writings. Yet the Exodus story is flush with righteous women, including Yocheved, the mother of Moses, Pharaoh's daughter, Moses' wife, even the wise Serach bat Asher. As one of the co-editors of these two books, Tara Mohr, writes, "This is an extraordinary group of biblical figures, each playing a key part in the story of our liberation, each nearly invisible in traditional accounts of the Passover story. Exploring and honouring these women, women's seders have offered participants inspiring Jewish heroines, a connection to their foremothers, and, importantly, a sense of women's long-standing importance in Jewish history and tradition."

Are there any surprises among these dozens of essays? Perhaps the biggest one for me was the origin of the orange on the seder plate. My daughter Elisheva, when she edged into her 20s, a few years ago, placed an orange there, telling me excitedly that some rabbi somewhere had mockingly declared that "a woman has as much place reading the Torah as an orange on a seder plate!" Well, the origin was actually quite different, according to the Mother of this very popular, recent tradition, Susannah Heschel, the daughter of the great philosopher, rabbi, and human rights activist, Abraham Joshua Heschel. I was fascinated to read that Ms. Heschel, when visiting a college campus, had heard a story about a rabbi who declared, "There's as much room for a lesbian in Judaism as there is for a crust of bread on the seder plate!" This led to several women placing bread on the seder plate, which offended the religiously-inspired Heschel, who notes, "I couldn't follow it literally. Including bread on the seder plate destroys Passover— it renders everything chametz. And its symbolism suggests that being a lesbian is being transgressive, violating Judaism." So, the original meaning of placing an orange on the seder plate—forgive me, daughter!—was quite different, made out of a protest against homophobia, and not as a purely feminist statement. Ms. Heschel is too bright to ignore the subtext of what had happened to her orange tradition, and how it had been corrupted in the minds of hundreds of thousands: "The transformation of the orange's significance," she concludes her essay, "might itself prompt us to consider how deeply ingrained patriarchy remains in our modern society."

There are some marvelous essays in The Women's Passover Companion, and one of them is worth the price of the book alone: "The Secret of Redemption," by the gifted Orthodox scholar and Torah scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. She is knowledgeable, she is poetic, and she is a feminist, a crucial, holy trinity for Jews today. Here are a few key thoughts from her opening paragraph: "A classic statement in the Talmud focuses on women as the redeeming force in Egypt: 'In reward for the righteous women in that generation, Israel were redeemed from Egypt.' Redemption, says the Talmud, came only because of 'righteous women.' Does this refer to the particular, courageous women singled out in the narrative. . . .[o]r does it gesture toward a more general feminine power that, working at first in semidarkness, finally releases the people from the spiritual paralysis of Egypt?"

A wonderful question, and well answered in her memorable essay. This is an important "companion" to this most important of Jewish holidays, and I have already flagged two dozen quotations to share at my own seders this year. But if you can afford only one of these sister-volumes (pun intended), then perhaps it should be The Women's Seder Sourcebook. After all, this book is the one which truly teaches HOW TO MAKE YOUR SEDERS MORE MEANINGFUL TO WOMEN, and ultimately, I believe, to everyone. So, even before that text goes through the various sections of the traditional seder, there is a crucial "Opening the Seder" section, which suggests the custom—used for years at women's seders—"of having each woman introduce herself as the daughter of her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and so forth, going as far back through her family as she can. This tradition both honors the women who have come before us, and dramatically asserts how this seder is different from all other seders. [Touche!] At this seder, we come together as mothers and daughters; at this seder, when we share our genealogy, we hear the sounds of women's names." (And think of how often women's names are left out altogether in the Torah, from "Noah's wife" to "Lot's wife.")

What a superior idea, and one that can enrich seders for both sexes, as well. There are dozens of such "great ideas" in the Seder Sourcebook, and in the Passover Companion as well. I can hardly wait to try out many of them this April 5th and 6th. at my own seders. I hope you will, too.

Allan Gould is a long-time Kolel student and supporter, who writes frequently in this space. His latest book, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES VS. G.I. JOE, is a political satire on Canada/U.S. relations.