8th Culture Post on Passover

[Dan Cosgrove]

For my final cultural post I am going to talk about Passover. I feel as if this is the perfect time to talk about Passover with it coming up in the next couple of weeks. In fact, I am slated to give my final presentation during Passover on April 18^th.  Passover has been around since the beginning of the Jewish religion. It commemorates the story in Exodus in which Moses instructed the Israelites were told to put lambs blood on the door posts of their homes so that the spirit of the Lord would pass  over these homes and not kill the first born child. Of course the Israelites listened to Moses, but the Egyptians did not and their first child died in the middle of the night. This miracle was just one of the numerous events that God performed in order to convince the Pharaoh to let the Israelites have their freedom. Passover, along with Pentecost and Tabernacles, are the three pilgrimage festivals in which many Jews go on a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem.

A particularly interesting thing I learned about Passover is how they remove all chametz from every dish. Chametz is any form of grain, so bread, most alcohol, corn syrup, essentially a lot of things.  Some Jews are so strict with this Chametz that they have special dishes specifically used for just Passover. They keep these dishes separate so that it does not have any traces of chametz on it. In addition to that they boil the dishes in hot water to remove all traces of chametz. They even do a traditional search the night before Passover for all Chametz in the house. All chametz must be found and rid of or else it is unholy to celebrate Passover.

Since Judaism is still on a Hebrew calendar, the date of Passover is constantly changing. The day is celebrated on the 15^th day of the month of Nisan. Nisan is sometime in the Spring but does not have a set date and is not transferable to say it is always on April 17^th. 

Hopefully all of my cultural posts have been informative and insightful. I learned plenty of things interesting things about the Hebrew language and the Jewish people in all of my culture posts and look forward to learning more in the last few weeks.