Pesach: Connecting to Our Heritage with a Nail and a Palm Branch

When I was in college, a roommate of mine introduced me to an interesting Jewish holiday ritual. After the festival of Sukkot concluded in the fall, he took the palm branch of the lulav and nailed it to the wall above the door of our college room. Ah, the college years...

Naturally I asked him what he was doing, and soon I was learning about the custom of using the lulav to kindle the fire in which we burn our chametz before Passover. As it turns out, many people save these palm branches for six months, so that they can fulfill multiple mitzvot with the same object, and thereby basically "honor" the lulav more than once a year. I thought it was a pretty nifty custom.So every year since then I save my lulav, hang it on the wall, point it out to people, explain the custom, get myself ready... and then promptly forget to bring it down to burn with my chametz! Some years I forget it for weeks or months, and other times I remember it 24 hours later. The last couple of years, I've been enlisting Ohev's Ritual Committee members to help remind me. So far, so good!

I bring up this custom because of how it connects to the cyclical nature of our lives. Judaism has many rituals that emphasize this:

The full month of Elul used as preparation before Rosh Hashanah and the High Holidays, the ten Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the four (five?) special Shabbatot leading into Passover, and the 49-day Omer period between Passover and Shavuot. We do this a lot. We connect things, and we link together Jewish observances. Even at our Pesach Seder, we talk about connecting one Seder to another across time: "This year we are here, next year may we be in Jerusalem." We reflect on ancient Seders, medieval Seders, Seders from our childhood, and the future Seders where we will celebrate the arrival of the Messianic Era. One cycle after another; one cycle inside another.

At Ohev Shalom, we've been debating quite a bit about whether our Seder should be traditional - filled with all the practices, songs, foods, chants, and lame jokes that we're used to from so many past Seders - or whether it should be innovative - with new questions, modern

challenges, and experimental activities. And most of us answered that it needs to be both. Tradition helps link us backwards, to our ancient ancestors as well as our recently departed family members, and innovation helps propel us forward, inspiring our children and empowering them to keep these practices alive for future generations. This is a really important discussion, because we get so bogged down in day-to-day life, we rarely have opportunities to step back and reflect. Yet more than any other holiday, Passover is the perfect time for some reflection.

How was your Seder different this year from last? Who used to be there every year, always making the (insert special holiday food), but who passed away since last Pesach? Which nephew/niece/grandchild seemed to be an infant two minutes

ago, but now stands proudly on a chair and sings the Four Questions in Hebrew? Or now coaxes a child of his/her own to sing them instead? We compare foods, tunes, and stories to Seders of years and decades past, and we feel, in that moment, deeply connected to our heritage. And that is precisely why we think in terms of cycles. Reminding ourselves about the passage of time helps us appreciate this moment, right now. As we get ourselves (finally!) ready to jump on into Passover, I invite you to reminisce about what this holiday means to you, and how it can serve as a connector and a reminder in your life. To what and to whom is entirely up to you.

Chag Kasher v'Sameach - Happy Passover!

(This post is mainly a reprint of my Passover blog post in 2011. I've updated it and changed a few things, but I'm out of the office this week, so I'm reposting instead of writing something new. The photos are from that previous post as well. See you next week!)