What does Passover mean to me? Passover means a picture of a cow with its legs in the air.
Nearly all Reform Jews have some familiarity with the Maxwell House haggadah , which the Maxwell House (yeah, the coffee company) has been handing out for free since 1934. When I was a child, our family used an edition printed in the early 70s, with a blue cover and an illustrated version of the seder service that bordered on the cartoonish.
During the seder, everyone at the table ritually chants the names of the 10 plagues with which God afflicted the people of Egypt because Pharaoh refused to free the Jews from slavery. The fifth plague is murrain, or cattle disease, and the 1970s edition of the Maxwell House haggadah helpfully indicates this point with a lovely image of a dead cow lying on its back.
As both my grandfathers raced through the
seder, reading the Hebrew so quickly that none of the rest of us could
follow along, my sister and I would quickly grow bored waiting for
dinner to start. We’d leaf ahead in the haggadah, and one or the other
of us would land on the page picturing the 10 plagues, nudge the other
one and point to the picture of the dead cow. That would start off a
chain of giggles and earn us a reprimand from our mother.
Every
year, my sister and I would engage in this ritual, and even though
we’ve both grown up and moved on to other haggadahs, my mother always
makes sure to place a copy of the 1970s Maxwell House haggadah on the
table.
The point is, Passover is all about family and friends getting together and creating their own rituals for celebrating the joys of freedom and spiritual renewal. If you’re interested in developing your own Passover traditions (with or without cattle disease), look no further than the findingDulcinea Passover Web Guide. We’ll point you to sites that will teach you the Passover story, explain how to set up your seder plate, help you choose kosher-for-Passover wine, cook a meal that no one will forget and even design your own haggadah, should Maxwell House’s version not prove to be “good to the last drop.”
Amy Goldschlager
Editor
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