It's Passover, Baby
Happy Passover. Gut yuntuv. Chag sameach. Et cetera.
I threw a seder last night, the first time I’ve ever hosted one. My lapsed-Catholic wife spearheaded it all. I was talking with another Jewish friend about our non-existent Passover plans, and she jumped on the opportunity to make a big meal. She cooked everything but the matzoh, and she did an amazing job. Big wife points to her. Also, she used my friend Mattie Lubchansky’s family brisket recipe and it was incredible. Big “Good Brisket” points to Mattie. You can find the recipe here, and while you’re at it subscribe to Mattie’s substack, they’ve got a graphic novel coming out and it looks cool.
My main job was to run the seder. My family used the old Maxwell House Haggadahs, but this all came together on short notice, so I couldn’t order any Maxwells online. Instead, I went to a Judaica store and bought the cheapest Haggadah they had. They were way too intense. It was Hebrew and English, but no transliteration of Hebrew. (The Hebrew had vowels, at least.) The translations read like some Polish rebbe in 1911 delivering a sermon in a lower-east-side basement, lots of “AND ACCORDING TO RABBI ZELIKERIAH, AS IT IS WRITTEN” tossed in. Not a great introduction to Passover for my goyishe wife, or the other non-Jews at our table.
So I wrote some inserts to ease us into the hardcore shit, background on why we were all here without the Talmudic rhetoric. I spent a little time on it, and figured I might as well share it. If you have a similar mix of Jews and gentiles at your seder, feel free to stick this bad boy in your Haggadot.
Matt Chester’s Haggadah Inserts for Secular Jews and their Irreligious Gentile Significant Others
INTRO
Most holiday traditions predate the religious reason for their existence. Easter and Christmas are older than Christianity, for instance. It’s not hard to see why, most people like their holiday traditions more than they like whatever abstract thing they’re supposed to be worshiping. The same is true for Judaism. Passover traditions are older than the Torah, coming from two unrelated springtime festivals in ancient Israel; Pesach and Hag Matzot.
Pesach was practiced by shepherd communities. They would sacrifice a young spring lamb and paint their doorway with its blood to ward off evil spirits. Hag Matzot was practiced by agrarian communities, as a celebration of the spring barley harvest. Barley doesn’t rise very well, and with most grain stores empty after the long winter, people didn’t have leavening anyway. So they’d make a feast with Matzoh, the big crackers you can see on the table.
These traditions were combined into one holiday. No one knows exactly when, but the book of Leviticus, which mandates a combined version of Pesach and Hag Matzot, was written sometime around 500 to 300 BCE, so at least by then. As for why they were combined, no one has any idea.
At some point, this spring festival became intertwined with the Book of Exodus, a story of Jews fleeing slavery in Egypt. Again, no one knows why. Exodus was written around 500 to 400 BCE, so probably around then, Passover traditions were retconned into remembrances of Exodus. Painting our doorways with lamb’s blood wasn't a general good luck thing, it was in remembrance of this one time God killed a bunch of Egyptian kids. Matzoh was no longer unleavened bread served at a harvest festival, it was what the slaves ate as they fled Egypt, rushing so fast they put unleavened dough on their backs in the hot desert. (As if anyone could bake anything that way.)
It should be mentioned, many scholars think Exodus is completely made up. Not just the implausible bits about rivers of blood or seas parting, like, all of it. There’s no archaeological evidence that Jews were ever slaves in Egypt. So if some racist relative is going on about Black people and mentions “Jews were slaves, too,” hit ‘em with that.
In modern times, Jews are supposed to put a red mark on their doorway the first night of Passover, but I literally don’t know anyone who does that. Like, how are you supposed to do that without getting red shit all over your house? Do you use chalk? Tape? Cloth? I don’t know. You’re not supposed to eat any leavened bread for a week, either, which is easier than repainting your doorway, but I still don’t know anyone who does the full week. It’s tough enough finding flourless desserts for one meal. I tried to do the full week once when I was a kid and got insanely constipated. Like, painfully.
So that’s it. I felt it was necessary to ground us in reality before we start doing these prayers, ‘cause they’re gonna raise more questions than answers.
THE STORY OF EXODUS TOLD BY ME, MATT CHESTER, WITH A LITTLE MORE CLARITY AND PRECISION THAN THIS HAGGADAH
In the time of Joseph and Jacob, the Jews settled in the kingdom of Egypt. A Pharoah rose to power who hated the Jews (big surprise), so he enslaved them.
A man named Moses, a Jew raised by the Pharoah’s daughter (complicated story, not important), was chosen by God to free the Jews and lead them out of Egypt into Israel.
Moses appeared before the Pharoah and demanded his people’s freedom. The Pharoah refused. Thus, God sent many plagues to fall upon Egypt; turning the water of the Nile into blood; frogs; lice (or gnats, depending on translation); wild beasts (or fleas, depending on translation); diseased livestock; boils on humans and animals; a storm of hail and lightning; locusts; and three days of darkness.
None of these plagues convinced the Pharoah. So Moses sent the worst plague of all; the spirit of death visited the firstborn of every family in Egypt. Only the Jews were spared, after Moses told them to rub lamb’s blood on their doorposts to signify they were Jews. This finally convinced the Pharoah to release the Jews from bondage.
But as the Jews journeyed across Egypt to freedom, Pharoah changed his mind. He ordered his soldiers to find the Jews and return them to Egypt. Pharoah’s soldiers came upon the Jews at the shore of the Red Sea, whereupon Moses used his staff to part the waters and cross the sea to the Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptians gave chase. When all the Jews had crossed safely, Moses pushed the waters back together, drowning the Egyptians behind them.
Then the Jews wandered in the desert for forty years, Moses received the Ten Commandments, mana rained from heaven, lots of stuff happened. This holiday is not about that part of it.