Geeky Cat Miusings

I celebrated Passover for the first time and found it very interesting and very different from any celebration I have ever participated in.

The first thing I noticed when I sat down at the table was the plush toys on the table. I thought it was a fun idea and wondered if it would be part of a game that we might play later on. On closer inspection I noticed that they weren’t typical toys because one looked like a blob of blood. The hostess, upon seeing my puzzled look, informed me that they represent the ten plagues that God inflicted upon the Egyptians to bully them into setting the Jewish people free.

Here are the ten plagues toys:

• A spooky eyed drop of blood
• A Frog for frogs—of course
• A Giant Lice for lice.
• Cow for cattle disease
• Black Locust for locusts
• A white satin lump of hail
• A black cube of darkness
• An icky boil on a piece of flesh!
• A snarling lion’s head for wild beasts
• and last of all a very sad head - for death of the first born.

At the Passover Seder all people drink four glasses of wine. I was very curious as to the reason behind this, but nobody knew. Finally, I have an answer:

Four glasses of wine are poured during the Seder to symbolize the four main stages of Exodus that led Hebrew slaves to the promised land of freedom. These stages were:

* Freedom
* Deliverance
* Redemption
* Release

Before the wine is consumed, the ten plaques are recited while dipping a finger into the glass of wine and dropping a droplet of wine on the dinner plate to symbolize the blood spilled by Pharaoh, the blood as part of the Ten Plagues, and the blood the Jews put on their doorposts. After we completed the finger dunking we licked our fingers and the plates were taken away — how sad, I could have licked the plate clean.

Then we performed various rituals around the Seder plate, the most notable for me was dipping a sprig of parsley into salt water, which represents the tears of the Jewish people, and ate it.

There was also a reading of passages where the speaker was required to not take a breath until the end of the passage. Each person around the table would recite a passage and the length of the passage would get progressively longer until you could hear the person reciting was totally deflated by the end. I cannot find any reference to this on the web, so I don’t know if this is a unique ritual created by the hostess to ensure that we all speak as quickly as possible.

The Seder is a 15 step ritual dinner — It is one of the most central events in the Jewish faith and it involves hours of singing and eating — I can only tell part of the story here… But it was fun I got to play with the plagues.