seder – Page 2

Add culinary flair to Pesach

Grilled salad with chicken is one of the many tempting dishes in A Taste of Passover.

Every now and then, there’s a new recipe book that blows you away with innovative, easy-to-make dishes combined with tantalizing photographs that render you hungry within a couple minutes of flipping through the glossy pages. A Taste of Pesach (ArtScroll, 2014), a project of Yeshiva Me’on Hatorah (in Roosevelt, N.J.), is one such book. It promises to reinvent your Passover menu and inspire you with creative culinary twists and turns during this hungry time of year.

Many schools and communities have tried the same technique of compiling a recipe book and selling it as a fundraiser, and that’s how this one had its genesis seven years ago. But while most of those fundraiser books have a short lifespan before they’re recycled or mislaid, A Taste of Pesach is unlikely to follow the same trajectory. For one, it’s a gorgeous book you can’t wait to page through and one you’d be proud to hand over as a gift to a newlywed child or close friend. For another, it’s chock full of irresistible culinary eye candy, with recipes that are for the most part easy, calling on ingredients that are readily available. Look through the book and you find yourself murmuring, “Hmm…. I can do this.”

The mothers who volunteered the 150-plus recipes for A Taste of Pesach are a diverse group but they all want the same things at the end of the day, write the editors in the book’s introduction. “Food that will get rave reviews, user-friendly, visually attractive recipes with accurate cooking times and yields and recipes that have broad appeal and that work. We’re just like you,” they write.

Most of the recipes don’t require a huge spirit of adventure in the kitchen, but rather call for a minor stretch in their use of different ingredients than you might typically incorporate. The sweet potato crisps salad, for example, is a lettuce-based green salad to which strips of fried sweet potato are added as a garnish just prior to serving. The image of this dish is so tempting, it makes you want to reach in and steal a piece of crisp off the topping. This is true for the majority of the recipes, each one prefaced with a photograph and categorized by chapter into appies, soups, salads, fish, poultry, meat, sides, dessert, cake and cookies, and gebrokts. The recipes are accompanied by handy tips on how to make their preparation easier and faster, or how to plate it most attractively. There are traditional old favorites like gefilte fish, chremslach and kugels, and more modern twists or reinvented dishes like unstuffed cabbage, pastrami and spinach-stuffed chicken and cashew-butter muffins.

Extra eye candy is offered in the chapter headers, which display images of seder plates reflecting different times, styles and tastes. Passover is not a time of year that usually excites Jewish taste buds, but A Taste of Pesach promises to add flair, creativity and innovation to your table – without stretching your culinary skills to their limits.

Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond, B.C. To read her work online, visit laurenkramer.net. This article originally appeared in Canadian Jewish News.

A friend on our long journey

The close relationship humans share with yeast is truly ancient, and predates humanity itself. (photo by Lilly M via commons.wikimedia.org)

During the holiday of Passover, we are told not to eat leavened bread (chametz). The leavening of bread is caused by yeast, a single-celled fungus. The yeast induce a chemical reaction called fermentation, which converts water and sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. The bubbles of carbon dioxide gas produced during this reaction cause the bread to rise and become porous, ultimately resulting in delicious fluffy bread. The close relationship humans share with yeast is truly ancient, and predates humanity itself.

Since fungi lack mobility, it had often been assumed that they were more plant-like than animal-like. But genetic studies in the 1990s revealed that fungi are actually more closely related to animals than to plants. The common ancestor that animals and fungi share would have probably been single-celled, and resembled in many ways our friend the yeast. So we can consider them very distant cousins (not invited to the Passover seder).

Fruit are an important part of the diet of all apes, including humans and their ancestors. A ripe sweet juicy fruit is full of sugar and water, the key ingredients for fermentation. There are many different varieties of yeast that are found commonly all over the world, on the human body, in the soil, and often on the skin of fruits. Fermentation of ripe fruits due to the presence of such yeast is common in nature, and would have inevitably been eaten by the ancestors of humanity for millions of years. Primatologists have observed various species of monkeys getting drunk off such naturally fermented fruit. To explain this puzzling phenomenon, biologist Robert Dudley at University of California-Berkley formulated the “drunken monkey” hypothesis. Fruit evolved as a means for plants to use animals as a method of seed dispersal; however, if the fruit rots before it gets eaten, the seed doesn’t get dispersed. Alcohol is a volatile molecule, which means it floats around the air very easily. If a fruit begins to ferment, the alcohol molecules spread much further and faster than the smell of the fruit would on its own. Animals, such as monkeys and apes, can, therefore, smell from a greater distance that there is delicious fruit, helping them find and eat the fruits, and thus helping to disperse the seeds of the plant. It is an evolutionary relationship that benefits the plant, the yeast and the animal, a win-win-win scenario.

Moderate consumption of alcohol is in fact healthy and nutritional. Alcohol contains more calories than either carbohydrates (sugar) or proteins. Let us remember that calories were integral to survival before the obesity epidemic of the modern age. Alcohol can also protect against many diseases, especially cardiovascular diseases. Studies have even shown that people who consume alcohol in moderation live longer than those who don’t. Despite the many dangers associated with excessive alcohol consumption, the low doses normally consumed in nature ultimately may have provided a survival advantage to the ancestors of humanity.

The first civilizations arose in part due to intensive cereal agriculture. These cereals were used to make bread and beer. In Mesoamerica, they made a beer from corn, in China with rice and, in Mesopotamia and Egypt, they used barley and wheat to make beer and bread. These innovations that played an integral role in the building of civilization were thanks to yeast. The first writing system ever developed was Cuneiform, in Mesopotamia during the third millennium BCE. Among the first written records in history are references to the production, distribution and consumption of beer. Some scholars suspect that the Jews acquired this beer brewing knowledge during their exile in Babylon. The Hebrew word for drunk, shikur, is thought to be derived from the Babylonian word for beer, shikaru. However, if the story of Passover is to be believed, then perhaps the ancient Israelites brought the knowledge for beer making from Egypt.

Wine, an essential component of any decent Passover seder, also has an ancient history. The earliest evidence for intensive wine production can be found at the archeological site of Hajji Firuz Tepe in modern-day Iran, which has been dated to sometime around 5400 BCE. Genetic analysis corroborates that strains of wine yeast originated in Mesopotamia, but put the date back 10,000 years ago. Some archeologists have speculated that the strains of yeast used for making bread and beer originated from wine yeasts, however the evidence for this remains contentious. Wine and beer were both produced in Egypt, and were important culturally, religiously and medicinally, and Egyptians would bury jars of wine in the tombs of the pharaohs. Analysis of DNA found inside ancient Egyptian wine jars from the tomb of a pharaoh from 3000 BCE identified the same species of yeast used to make wine today: Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

If there were indeed Jewish slaves in Egypt, they would have eaten bread and drank beer and wine, leavened and fermented by the same fungus that we use to leaven bread and ferment wine today; a little old friend that has joined us on our long journey through the vast deserts of time. L’chayim.

Ben Leyland is an Israeli-Canadian writer, and resident of Vancouver.

We all were once strangers

A boat of new immigrants arrives in pre-state Israel on Oct. 2, 1947. (photo from the Palmach Archive via PikiWiki Israel)

The Passover seder begins by welcoming anyone who is hungry, an idea that comes straight from the Book of Exodus (23:9), which states, “You shall not oppress a stranger, since you yourselves know the feelings of a stranger, for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Later in the Torah, Leviticus 19:33 says, “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.” Leviticus 19:34 repeats this refrain, “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.”

Over the generations, the Jewish people have been “aliens” more than once. Well-known examples of Jews leaving their perceived homeland include the Jewish exile to Babylonia after the destruction for the first Temple, those who were fortunate enough to escape Nazi persecution for Israel or the United States, expelled Middle Eastern Jews who were moved to Israel after its founding, or residents of the former Soviet Union who left a life of religious oppression.

The immigrant experience is different for everyone, said Aaron Gershowitz, senior director for U.S. programs at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). He told this reporter that the challenges of an individual’s journey often depend on the environment they are leaving and the community to which they are relocating.

Take Inge “Irene” Brenner. She escaped from Nazi Germany on Dec. 28, 1938, for Havana, Cuba. From there, she traveled to the United States, arriving to join her husband in April 1939 at age 19. She immediately took up work at a small factory where she steamed hat plumes. Her employer provided her with the required documentation to book passage for her mother, father and sister to the United States. Due to a lack of funds, the family all lived together in a tiny apartment in New York.

“When I left Berlin, I was 19 and completely single-minded, [telling myself] ‘I must get out and save myself and my parents,’” Brenner said. “We just couldn’t have existed anymore. That is what happened to the rest of my family that didn’t get out – all of them were murdered in the gas chambers. There was nothing else I could do but make it. You just had to make it.”

Gershowitz said that “the economics of surviving” often mark the first several years (or longer) of the immigrant experience. It is only after that period that immigrants become more like others – more focused on family life, a career and a future for their children.

Over time, this was the case for Brenner. Once she and her husband could afford to leave the rest of the family and live on their own, they had two daughters who they raised to be American Jews, as opposed to Jewish Americans. Brenner said she wanted to leave her horrible past behind for a new life, which she feels she received “by the grace of God.”

“She was always proud to be Jewish, but it was always extremely hard for her to talk about how she got here,” said Benjamin Kopelman, Brenner’s grandson.

photo - Lev Golinkin — Lev Golinkin (photo by Diana P. Lang)

Lev Golinkin, author of a memoir on the immigrant experience titled A Backpack, a Bear and Eight Crates of Vodka, noted the irony that Soviet Jews came to the United States in search of religious freedom, yet many of them choose not to practise Jewish traditions, his family included.

“As soon as we could, we got away from the synagogue and Jewish organizations and melded into the secular American world,” he said.

Golinkin, who arrived in the United States from eastern Ukraine in 1989 at the age of 9, surmised that people turned away from religious observance because it was precisely the Jewish faith that made them targets for persecution in the former Soviet Union. Before escaping, Golinkin was being homeschooled because he had been regularly teased and beaten for his Judaism. Religion, therefore, was nothing to celebrate for him.

“I wanted nothing to do with that. I saw being a Jew as a stigma, a disability,” said Golinkin.

But as he grew up, Golinkin’s opinion changed.

“I think it is interesting that the Israelites stayed in the desert and didn’t start over until that generation had passed away. They needed a clean slate, they needed people whose memories are formed in the new land with the new traditions,” he said.

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.)