The Passover holiday arrived on Monday evening. During the seven days of the holiday, or eight days outside of Israel, you must not eat any leavened food (Hebrew: chametz), that is, food in which water and flour (wheat, barley, rye, oats or spelt) are mixed in such a way that the fermentation process starts.
The first (first two outside Israel) and seventh (seventh and eighth outside Israel) days of the holiday are holidays with a ban on work (chág), the days in between are half-holidays (chol hámoed).
On the first (first two outside of Israel) evenings, the seder is held, when four glasses of wine, symbolic food and the story of the exodus are told in a specific order.
In addition to Pesach, the holiday is also known as chág hámácot (the festival of unleavened bread), chág hááviv (the festival of spring) and zmán chérutenu (the time of our freedom). The four names represent four different aspects of the holiday:
- Chág hamátz: this is how the Torah calls the holiday, since the main characteristic of these days is that matzoh, unleavened bread, is eaten instead of bread, both on the Seder and on the other days of the holiday.
- Pesach: the Hebrew word Passover means to skip. It refers to the fact that during the last of the ten plagues of Egypt, the death of the firstborn, God skipped over the Jewish homes and afflicted only the Egyptians. During the existence of the Temples, a special Pesach offering (korbán Pesach) was presented on the Temple Mount, which was baked and then eaten together with matzah and bitter herbs.
- Chág haáviv: the festival of spring. Passover must always fall in the spring. This is the reason why the Jewish sages introduced leap years, which restore the slippage resulting from the difference in the length of the 354-day lunar year and the 365-day solar year. The Jewish calendar has seven leap years every 19 years.
- Zmán chérutenu: this holiday commemorates the transition of Jews from slaves to free people.
Almost everyone in Israel has a Seder evening
The Passover Seder, commemorating the Exodus from Egypt, is the most popular holiday ceremony in Israel.
Rabbi Lévi Yitzchak of Berdichev added the following explanation to the names. King Solomon says in the Song of Songs (6:3):
“I belong to my beloved and my beloved is mine”.
This refers to the love between the Lord and the Jewish people, as they love and praise each other equally.
The Jews call the holiday Pesach, jumping over, in order to praise God and express their gratitude to him for jumping over their homes while destroying the firstborn in Egypt. On the other hand, in his Torah, God calls this period chag hamatz, the holiday of matzah, in order to praise the people of Israel for their trust in him. This trust is expressed by the matzoh, as the people of Israel did not prepare food for the long journey, but simply took the kneaded dough and followed Moses into the desert, firmly believing that God would provide for all their other needs.
The Zohar, the most important book of the Kabbalah, calls matzoh the food of faith.
The term Pesach itself can be divided into two words: pé – mouth and sách – speaks. This expression warns us that although – according to the words of the Torah (Deuteronomy 16:3) – we must remember the exodus from Egypt “every day of our lives”, we must also talk about it in detail and at length on this holiday. This name also expresses the millennial desire for the final redemption to come, for the eternal Temple of Jerusalem to be built and for the mitzvah of eating the Pesach sacrifice to be fulfilled again.
This article was originally published on Zsido.com.
Passover – the holiday of freedom
In Transylvania, in the 16th century, the religious sect of the Székely Jews, the Sabbatists, was established, who celebrated the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt.
