How To Get Ready For Passover

Here it is, people! Our friends at Tent & Table made these beautiful pics (see below) for you to set up for Passover next week (starts at sundown April 8th). Our Passover video will drop on April 7th for you to have Passover at home. It will be the best #coronaseder ever!

A few thoughts from Rabbi Matt:

With time on my hands, I began watching Ken Burns' documentary on baseball. Bob Costas, the great sports announcer, made a statement about how there are few loves in life that carry through your entire life, from childhood to death. For him, and for me, that includes the love of baseball. This season is like that for me, which we have now begun in the month of Nisan, the first month on the Jewish calendar, known as the season of freedom. It's been that way for 3500 years of the Jewish people celebrating the festival of Passover, counting the 50 days that follow, culminating in the day of Shavuot.

But how can we celebrate “freedom” while people continue to get sick and die during this unprecedented pandemic that the world is facing?

Many versions of a popular meme being shared on social media say it this way: “The most Jewish thing ever, is remembering a holiday of plagues, during a plague, hoping not to get the plague!” Restoration, like many synagogues, was forced to cancel our regular Passover Seders. Technically, you can’t cancel a holy day, as Leviticus 23:4 says, “These are the appointed feasts of ADONAI, holy convocations which you are to proclaim in their appointed season.” These days arrive in the season that they arrive regardless of what is happening in the world around us and for good reason—these days help us focus on the whole picture rather than the small worldview we typically hold.

Remember: we, the Jewish people, are a people of suffering. All the way back to our father Jacob, who when he wrestled with the Angel of the Lord, had his name changed from Jacob to Israel. Israel, in Hebrew, means “struggles with God.” How could we continue to celebrate all God has done for the Jewish people when in 4000 years of history, back to Abraham, we have suffered under kings, emperors, pharaohs, and dictators? We have faced pogroms, holocausts, plagues, inquisitions, and anti-Semitism and yet we are still here. A minority of minorities who always remains a minority regardless of the sick desire of some to eradicate us from this world: here we stand. Not because of ourselves but because of a promise that our God made with us, during these very days, to use us as an example of His faithfulness to anyone who calls on His Name.

We didn’t cancel Passover—no one can do that. We are sad to not celebrate it as we have for the last several years, but we will celebrate and you can too. For that reason, here is a setup guide and some recipes (see below).

Our Passover Seder as a free video will drop April 7, and it's for anyone who wants to celebrate, a gift to you (and your family, friends, anyone you share it with) in this season of freedom.

Like all that has come before us, this too will pass and we will be better for it because God is still God and we are still His people.