seder – Page 2 – Jewish Independent

Ancient message of Jewish unity

A model of King Herod I’s renovated version of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. (photo from Ariely via Wikimedia Commons)

Between 19 BCE and 4 BCE, King Herod I renovated the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, enlarging and beautifying it. It is during this same period that we first learn of the Jewish pilgrimages to Jerusalem on what are known as the shalosh regalim, the three pilgrimage festivals.

All of the festivals – Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot – centre around the story of the Exodus in some way. But Passover is the first and foremost of the bunch.

Jerusalem always held a special place in the hearts of the Jewish people, but as the Romans built roads and as Herod expanded the Temple, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem became commonplace and served as a message of unity – “one Temple, one God, one Passover” – for all Jews, said Prof. Jonathan Klawans of Boston University’s department of religion.

Yet, detailed writings about what the pilgrimage festivals may have looked like during Temple times don’t exist. According to talmudic scholar Dr. Joshua Kulp, author of Schechter Haggadah: Art, History and Commentary, most knowledge on the subject comes from the works of the ancient historian Josephus. While later writings (such as the New Testament) describe what it was like in Jerusalem during the Second Temple era, those works were written at a much later time and some scholars doubt their accuracy.

It isn’t known where people stayed or slept when they were in Jerusalem, or how many people showed up (though most assume a large number), or what people felt at that time. What is known, Klawans explained, is that the pilgrimages were a social experience that pulled the Jewish people together.

It’s also clear that, for Passover, pilgrimage participants ate in Jerusalem as family units. A representative from each family would take an animal, bring it up to the Temple, and have it slaughtered. Then, the representative would bring the animal back, and the family would cook and eat the sacrificial meat. During this festive meal, families also drank wine, but not a specific number of glasses. They sang songs – specifically, the Hallel prayers, which is also part of the modern Passover seder.

Put color in your chag

Mix it up this holiday with a colorful orange spice cake. (photo by Barry A. Kaplan)

In honor of Tu b’Shevat on Feb. 3-4, why not try some variety to celebrate the New Year of the Trees? One usually thinks of dates, figs and carob on this holiday, specifically the species of fruits that are listed in the Torah as native to Eretz Yisrael. In Israel today, sometimes we augment that with other in-season fruits, like apples, persimmons, strawberries (though beautiful, they are expensive!) or varieties of delicious citrus. Here are some recipes using oranges.

SYRIAN ORANGE CHICKEN
makes four servings

1 tbsp margarine
1 tbsp oil
1 cut-up chicken
1/2 cup orange juice
1 cup chicken soup
1 1/2 tsp corn starch
1/2 chopped onion
juice of 1/2 lemon
6-9 halved, pitted dates
orange slices

Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease a baking dish.
Heat margarine and oil in a frying pan and brown chicken. Place in a baking dish.
Add orange juice, chicken soup, cornstarch, onion and lemon juice to frying pan and cook, stirring, until sauce thickens. Pour over chicken.
Cover and bake 45 minutes.
Garnish with dates and orange slices, cover and bake at least 15 minutes or until chicken is done. Serve with rice.

ORANGE JUICE SALAD DRESSING
The dressing is good on a salad with lettuce, avocado and grapefruit.

3/4 cup oil
6 tbsp orange juice
1/2 tsp sugar
pinch dry mustard

Combine oil, orange juice, sugar and mustard in a jar.
Shake well.

ORANGE SPICE CAKE

6 seeded, peeled, cut-up small oranges, such as mandarins or tangerines
1/3 cup canola oil
3 eggs
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla
1 3/4 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup non-dairy creamer

Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease a cake pan, two loaf pans or place mini papers in a mini-muffin pan and spray with vegetable spray.
Place orange pieces, oil, eggs and brown sugar in a mixer or food processor and blend a few seconds.
Add ginger, cinnamon, vanilla, flour, baking powder and non-dairy creamer and blend.
Spoon into baking pans. Bake 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean.

ORANGE DROP COOKIES
makes three dozen

1 cup sugar
2/3 cup unsalted pareve margarine
2 eggs
1/2 cup orange juice
1 tbsp grated orange peel
2 1/4 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup chopped nuts

Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease cookie sheets.
Cream sugar and margarine with eggs. Stir in orange juice and orange peel.
Add flour, baking soda and nuts and mix well.
Drop by teaspoon onto cookie sheets. Bake 10 minutes or until golden brown.

Sybil Kaplan is a journalist, foreign correspondent, lecturer, food writer and book reviewer who lives in Jerusalem. She also does the restaurant features for janglo.net and leads weekly shuk walks in English in Jerusalem’s Jewish food market.

Fruits, nuts, traditions

Tu b’Shevat, the New Year of the Trees, coincides with the flowering of the almond tree in Israel. (photo from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shevat)

Tu b’Shevat, which falls this year on Feb. 3-4, marks the end of the rainy season in Israel. Buds are beginning to appear on the trees, and the blossoming almond trees, the harbinger of spring, have begun to dot the landscape. So, on the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Shevat, we celebrate the yearly cycle for the growth of trees in Eretz Israel.

According to Jewish mystical tradition, Tu b’Shevat is the day when G-d renews sustenance and the “life-cycle” of the trees, when the sap starts to rise.

There are many customs to remind us of the meaning of this day, including a Tu b’Shevat seder, not unlike the ritual meal we have on Passover.

On Tu b’Shevat, fruit trees were measured for growth in order to calculate the annual tithe to the Temple. Even long after the Temple was destroyed, this seder was a new way to reaffirm the spiritual bond with the land in celebration of the approach of spring and the fruit of the earth.

This ancient tradition was developed in Safed, the seat of kabbalistic studies in the 16th century. Traditionally, we eat nuts and the fruits for which the Torah praises the Land of Israel, including grapes, figs and pomegranates, olives and dates. The table is set with a snowy white tablecloth, candles, fruit and nuts, and the sharing of prayers, readings and songs.

It is traditional to enjoy four cups of wine, like on Passover. Those glasses of wine can be paired with a corresponding fruit and divided into ascending levels of spirituality.

The first cup, therefore, is often white wine, symbolizing winter, accompanied by a fruit that needs a protective covering, such as oranges or almonds.

The second cup is white wine mixed with a small amount of red, signifying spring, the budding of new life. This glass is served with olives, apples, peaches and dates: the outer layer is eaten, yet the heart is protected and has within it the seed of new life.

The third cup is red wine with a small amount of white mixed in. This is the symbol of summer and a perfect world in which nothing is wasted. With this, fruits such as figs, grapes and berries are eaten. These are considered to symbolize the highest level of spiritual openness.

The fourth cup is red wine only, representing fertility and the bounty of the autumnal crops.

What else happens on Tu b’Shevat? Very little religiously, but a lovely ritual has arisen in Israel, one that’s now been adopted all over the Jewish world. It is a popular observance to plant trees, one of the greatest mitzvot we can perform.

Trees have great significance in Judaism. This Tu b’Shevat, however, we are still in a Shmita (jubilee) year in Israel; the land is resting, so no plantings will take place.

Trees hold a special place in Judaism. It is written in Deuteronomy: “When you besiege a city for many days to wage war against it to seize it, don’t destroy its trees….” In the Midrash Shmuel on Pirkei Avot 3:24, it is written that man is like a tree in that his good deeds are his produce, his “fruits,” and his arms and legs the “branches,” which bear these fruits. He is, however, an “upside-down tree,” for his head is rooted in the heavens, nestled in the spiritual soils of the Eternal, and nourished by his connection to his Creator.

At the end of the Hasmonean dynasty, there lived a holy man named Honi, known as the circle drawer, Honi HaMa’agel, and we read his story in Talmud Ta’anit 23a. One day, Honi sees a man planting a carob tree and asks him, “How many years does it take for the carob tree to bear fruit?” The man replies, “Seventy years.” Honi asks, “Do you think you will live another 70 years and reap its fruit?” The man responds, “I am planting the tree not for myself, but for my grandchildren.”

Although the world may not regard Jews as being tied closely to the land, the truth is that Judaism has close ties to agriculture and ecology. The midrash teaches us that man’s life depends on the tree, and we are forbidden to live in a city that has no gardens and trees. They are so important that Rabbi Yohanan Ben-Zakai declared, “If you hold a sapling in your hand and are told, ‘Come look, the Messiah has arrived,’ plant the sapling first and only then go and greet the Messiah.”

Happy Tu b’Shevat!

Dvora Waysman is the author of 13 books, which are available through Amazon, or from the author at [email protected]. Her website is dvorawaysman.com.

Symbols of New Year

Carrots represent the hope that Israel’s enemies will be “cut off,” or kept away. (photo by Stephen Ausmus / USARS via en.wikipedia.org)

Most Jews, religious or not, celebrate Passover, opening the holiday with a seder – fewer know that a seder is held on Rosh Hashanah, too. Being the year’s first meal, it gains higher importance in Jewish tradition and, therefore, should be special.

In the seder of Rosh Hashanah, a dedicated prayer is said, then a meal with symbolic foods is served, each food representing a different blessing for the people of Israel. Some of these foods have a unique prayer that is said prior to eating them. These foods differ slightly between communities, yet some are common, and are served on both religious and secular tables.

As some of the seder foods may stand for similar blessings, not all of them have been preserved among secular Jews. The most common traditional food served at Rosh Hashanah is an apple, dipped in honey; this custom represents a blessing for the year to be as sweet as honey. Gefilte fish is also served, usually having slightly sweet flavor, for the procreation of the people of Israel like the propagation of fish. On the gefilte fish, sliced carrots are placed, a symbol for Israel’s enemies to be “cut off.”

A fish head is displayed/served, symbolizing a blessing for the people of Israel to be the head and not the tail. This blessing has two meanings: (a) we will be the thinkers, the inventors; (b) we will gain leadership by moving forward, following our own will; not backwards, following other peoples’ will.

photo - Beets also represent the hope that Israel’s enemies will be kept away — Beets also represent the hope that Israel’s enemies will be kept away. *(photo by Jennifer Kleffner / Miles Away Farm via flickr.com)*

Sometimes, a beet or beet leaves are served for the removal of Israel’s enemies. A pomegranate is served, its many seeds symbolic of the many mitzvot that the Jewish people have and hope to continue to have.

Although linguistically not necessarily related historically, some of the foods are traditionally linked to their blessings by their Hebrew roots: the carrots placed on the gefilte fish are called gezer (pl. gzarim, root gzr) in Hebrew. The blessing of cutting off Israel’s enemies that is symbolized by the carrots makes use of the root gzr: “sheig az ru oyveynu,” “let our enemies be cut off.” The beet (leaves) is selek (root: slk); the related blessing: “she-is talku oyveynu ve-son’eynu,” “let our enemies and haters be gone,” is also represented by the same root slk, “remove.”

Other traditional foods either make use of a semantic feature of the original notion, or they have undergone a semantic shift to adapt to the holiday’s blessings. For example, we use the feature of quantity of the schools of fish for the parallel blessing: “shenifre ve-nirbe ke-dagim,” “let us procreate [literally: be fruitful and multiply] as fish.”

The fish head represents the brain, as well as the mind, which spiritually lies in the brain, and leadership, by being the head, the first in everything. This word gains a double meaning, as it appears in the name of the holiday, Rosh Hashanah, as well as in rishon, “first,” derived from rosh, “head.”

I wrote down some of these thoughts from my home shelter during the war. Let us hope to be blessed in the future with real rimonim (pomegranates’ fruit), and not rimone-yad (hand grenade). Let us bless southern Israeli fishermen to be able to continue fishing, and farmers to be able to continue selling their honey, carrots and beets, so that all of us can have a peaceful Rosh Hashanah seder. Happy New Year.

Nurit Dekel is an independent academic researcher of colloquial Israeli Hebrew, and principal linguist at NSC-Natural Speech Communication; author of Colloquial Israeli Hebrew: A Corpus-based Survey. She is based in southern Israel.

“Chad Gadya”: an ecologist’s favorite seder song

Passover is soon upon us, and many Jews will celebrate by singing rounds of their favorite classic Passover songs. “Chad Gadya” is a song that ensnares the singer in an increasingly complex chain of causality. Starting with one’s father who buys a goat that gets eaten by a cat that is bitten by a dog that is beaten by a stick, etc., etc. But “Chad Gadya” is not simply an incredibly fun shanty, it is also a great lesson in food chain ecology.

A food chain describes the complex interconnections that occur in nature from different organisms that eat each other. At the start are plants that absorb energy from the sun. The plants are then eaten by herbivores, that are then eaten by predators, that are then eaten by higher-level predators and so on. Each step up the food chain is called a trophic level, from the Greek word trophikos, meaning food.

One phenomenon documented by ecologists is called a trophic cascade. When you remove a key species from the food chain, say from the top, the effects will cascade down the food chain, affecting every organism along the way. One classic example involves the sea otter, a charismatic marine mammal that lived off the coasts of North America as far south as California. Unfortunately, the sea otter was once prized for its lovely fur and, by the early 20th century, they had become extinct south of Alaska.

Sea otters happen to eat a lot of sea urchins. Sea urchins eat a lot of kelp. When the sea otters disappeared, the effect cascaded down the food chain. Sea urchin populations skyrocketed, and began feasting on the kelp. Entire forests of kelp began to disappear, only to be replaced by barren underwater fields full of spiky urchins. This spelled trouble for the many fish and other animals that depended on the kelp forests for shelter and food. Bald eagles, for instance, would normally eat fish hiding in the kelp forests. Without those fish, the eagles had to search elsewhere for food.

Fortunately, sea otter hunting was banned, and populations from Alaska were shipped in. Those new immigrant sea otters have begun to repopulate our coasts, restoring the kelp forests and returning balance to the ecosystem.

Understanding how ecosystems work can be very helpful. For instance, in Israel, on Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu, they grow many useful crops, such as alfalfa and oats. But voles (a type of rodent) can be a huge pest problem. Thousands of burrow openings can accumulate per hectare, causing severe damage to their crops. Poisons are expensive, can be dangerous for consumption and for other animals, and are often ineffective anyway because more voles can just immigrate from nearby fields. Barn owls eat voles, but they only nest in pre-existing cavities, so farmers began putting up nesting boxes to encourage the owls. The strategy worked, the owls keep the voles under control, and they end up being more cost effective than poisons. Manipulating ecological systems for pest management in agriculture – known as biocontrol – is an increasingly common strategy used around the world to improve yields.

So, when sitting down for your Passover seder, eating your favorite foods, reclining and singing your beloved songs, take a moment to reflect on the complex chains of events that brought that food to your table.

Ben Leyland is an ecologist at Simon Fraser University, a musician and an Israeli-Canadian resident of Vancouver.

A vegan Passover

A vegan seder plate. (photo by Gene Blalok)

Veganism is about much more than dietary choice. It is an ethical philosophy based on the belief that other animals are not ours to use. Like humans, animals are sentient: they experience pain and pleasure, they suffer and they form deep emotional bonds with others in their families and communities. Vegans do not use animals for food, clothing, entertainment or animal experimentation regardless of taste, pleasure or tradition. Being a vegan is also much more commonplace today, as is following a vegan diet for health reasons. This means it might not be unusual to find a vegan at your table on Passover.

For the fourth year in a row, my wife and I will be hosting an all-vegan Passover seder, or “veder,” as we call it. We started this tradition after a group of Jewish vegan friends expressed how alienating it can be to celebrate the holiday in the traditional way. As ethical vegans, it is difficult to sit at a table laden with the body parts of the nonhuman animals that we are working to protect and rescue. Many had stopped attending their family dinners, and one friend was no longer invited simply because others felt uncomfortable when she passed up most of the food on the table. But our hunger for the Jewish tradition of Passover remained.

The Passover seder commemorates our liberation from Pharaoh and the larger issue of the immorality of slavery. As Jews, we have a long history of suffering, oppression and slavery and, as animal activists, this has informed our choices to work to help others end their own oppression – including animals. It’s no wonder Jews have played key roles in other movements such as civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights and animal rights. The liberation of animals is another social justice movement for which the Jewish community should naturally feel empathy. Jews and vegans share common values such as justice, fairness, equality and compassion.

How we as animal activists celebrate the meaning of the Passover seder is to remember the evils of the past and to expand our circles of compassion and justice so that no group, human or nonhuman, need experience the suffering and exploitation of being different or unequal. Passover is a great opportunity to reflect on how we can create less suffering for all those who are oppressed through our personal behaviors and choices.

Simply adding vegan foods and vegan versions of traditional dishes to the table is a way of making a statement that we include the most vulnerable and innocent among us when we celebrate this holiday. These days, it’s as simple as Googling “vegan [whatever dish] recipe,” vegan or “vegan Passover recipes,” and thousands of animal-free options will magically appear. At our veder, we serve all of the traditional dishes we grew up eating – matzah brie, brisket, gefilte fish, potato latkes, matzah ball soup, kugel, macaroons – in veganized versions without meat, dairy or eggs.

With a little effort and creativity, your entire seder dinner can be made vegan. We even have an animal-friendly seder plate. Instead of a lamb shank bone, we use a dog cookie-cutter to make a playful bone-shaped piece of tofu. Instead of an egg, we use a small dab of commercial “egg replacer” used in vegan baking. I encourage all Jews to embrace the meaning and tradition of the holiday while also incorporating new traditions that reflect values of justice, ethics and compassion. When we can celebrate the holiday without doing any harm to others, why wouldn’t we?

VEGAN CHOPPED LIVER

Adapted from The Jewish Vegetarian Year Cookbook by Roberta Kalechofsky and Roda Rasiel (Micah Publications, 1997).

1/2 lb brown lentils
1 large onion, diced
2 tbsp olive oil
1 cup walnuts
salt and pepper to taste

1. Put lentils in a two- or three-quart pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil, partially cover and simmer until tender, about 30-40 minutes. Check occasionally to make sure water has not boiled off, and add water as needed.

2. Sauté onions in olive oil until golden and tender. Allow to cool slightly.

3. Drain lentils and blend, along with the walnuts and onions, in a food processor until homogenized, but leave some of the texture intact.

4. Add salt and pepper to taste. Chill about two hours.

Gary Smith, co-founder of Evolotus, a PR agency working for a better world, blogs at thethinkingvegan.com and has written for many publications. He and his wife are ethical vegans and live in Los Angeles with their cat Chloe and two beagles rescued from an animal testing laboratory, Frederick and Douglass.

(Editor’s note: Some vegan recipes will contain ingredients that are not strictly kosher for Passover. For those who are less strict, the options abound. For more strict kosher diets, incorporate dishes that are heavier on fruits and vegetables, and avoid using legumes, like lentils, or products that contain wheat or gluten. Also, only certain egg substitutes are kosher for Passover, and many Ashkenazi Jews abstain from eating kitniyot on Passover; tofu is made from soybeans, and is considered to be kitniyot.)