Passover Begins.

 The Jewish holiday of Passover ( in Hebrew Pesach) commemorates the exodus of the Jews from slavery in Egypt.  The Holiday originated in the Torah, where the word Pesach refers to the ancient Passover sacrifice  ( knows as the Pascal Lamb) and commands jews worldwide to commemorate the events leading up to it. Pesach  is also said to refer to the idea that God "passed over ( Pasach) the houses of the Jews during the 10th plague in Egypt, and the slaying of the firstborn.  The holiday is ultimately a celebration of their freedom and the story of the events leading up to the Jew's exodus from  Egypt and is a really important holiday for people of the Jewish faith.  But it is also but a very powerful metaphor that is appreciated by people of other faiths as well. 

This year The eight-day Passover holiday begins on Saturday 4/27 at Sundown and ends on Sunday 4/4 at Sundown, which means the dates for celebrating Passover and Christian Easter Events ( 4/1- 4/4) overlap this year. (As they do most years.) .This is not really too surprising since Jesus was celebrating a Passover Seder at his Last Supper. But it does mean that we have to be extra careful in the way Bruce and I choose to honor our Christian and Jewish heritages lest we have displays that look like Moses and the 12 tribes were shepherding and a flock of rabbits through the Red Sea. To separate the two holidays we decided to separate the two holidays by placing our secular Easter ornaments in ou front-yard, and decorating our great-room inside of the house for Passover.

As I said Passover is a REALLY important Jewish Holiday, so we decided to treat it as such, by not only having the traditional seder meal, watching reruns of the 12 Commandments on TV, and live streaming Central Synagogue Passover Services but by surrounding ourselves for eight days with visual clues that would reinforce the Exodus story.

We started by separating our great room into three distinct segments of the story: Egypt, The Red Sea, and The Promise Land.

Egypt: was represented on our kitchen breakfast bar at the Northern end of the great room. Two large( cardboard) pyramids flanked each end of the granite-topped bar. Peg-people hand-painted to represent the Pharoh, his wife and children, and some Egyptian soldiers stood at one end, leaving the middle open for dioramas dramatizing the plagues and events leading up to the exodus. As you'll soon see, our plan called for the Egyptian plateau would hit by a new plague each day.

The Red Sea: Was set up on our dining room table which is in the center of the great room.

First, we covered the table with a sand-colored table cloth. Atop the tablecloth, we put another blue-colored table cloth that I had cut and painted to represent the parted sea.

In the middle of the parted Red Sea, marched Moses and all twelve tribes 

with their flags.

I was careful when setting them up to set them out in the order that historians tell us the tribes marched.. ( In truth, there is quite a bit of disagreement about that order, so I had a lot of wiggle room in setting this up).

Like the Egyptians,  family members of the twelve tribes were represented by 2 " peg people which had been hand-painted with a unique set of colors representing their tribe. and each tribe carried with it a flag with its tribal symbol.

Even though there were only 4 to 6  peg people set up to represent each tribe, when all twelve tribes were placed on the table's sea bed, it made a pretty impressive display.  Can you imagine what it would have been if we had 30,00 to 300,000 people assembled?

The Promise Land has been set up in the Southern end of our great room.

If you remember our (10/6/20) Sukkot post, you will undoubtedly recognize our Sukkot tent repurposed to represent the Promise Land. Part of the reason for setting up the tent was because it could act as a reminder of how the Jews wandered in the desert for 40 years before reaching the Promise Land.

We even created a map to show the route the twelve tribes took to reach the Promised Land. Again experts disagree strongly on the route Moses took to reach the Promised Land, so this is only one possible route that they could have taken, and the map was placed there just for us to get our bearings on where some of the major known landmarks named in the journey are situated.

The other reason why we wanted to put up the tent was that both of us had had such a strong sensation of peace whenever we entered the tent during the  Sukkot holiday, and we wanted to see if we could replicate that sense of sanctuary again.  And yes,  we really do still feel a deep sense of serenity when we go into that space.