Levitt Letter Extra News

Passover begins April 9, with tonight being the First Seder on Passover Eve. 

Where Are You?
by Sara Debbie Gutfreund, www.aish.com

Every year my great grandmother stood by the living room window on Seder night looking for her son. Uncle Leo was always late, year after year. I would stand beside her in my pink and white dresses and new, shiny shoes, and peer through the lattices of the curtains as I glanced into the darkening, deserted street and then up at my great grandmother’s anxious face.

“Don’t worry Ma, he’s coming. Sit down,” my grandmother would always say. But my great grandmother refused to move from her spot. Sometimes she would pace in front of the window and notice me beside her. Then she would smile for a moment and put her hand on my shoulder as we both looked out past the red oak tree that towered in the front yard.

“Where is he already?” she would repeat as the rest of the family finished setting up the Seder table. And when he finally arrived, she would laugh with relief, and her eyes would fill with a kind of peace that I didn’t understand then. This happened so many times over the years that “Great Grandma standing by the window and Uncle Leo arriving late” became as much a part of Seder night as the matzah and the snow white tablecloth.

A few years ago I stood by my own living room window in the mountains of Jerusalem. I watched my children playing on the swing set in the backyard as I set the table for the Seder. And I felt a stinging pang of homesickness and yearning for the Seders of my childhood. I looked around me at the empty chairs, and I tried to conjure up the images of my grandparents, my great grandparents, my cousins running in and out of the rooms of my childhood home on erev Pesach. I could almost hear the laughter that used to float from the kitchen. But most of all I remembered my great grandmother’s face by the window, and I suddenly realized that her face was a reflection of a sliver of the love that God has for us as He waits for all of His children to come home on Seder night.

One year right before Passover, something happened to me that showed me just how powerful God’s love for us actually is. I was in the garden with my three-year-old, and we had a tall fence around the backyard. When the phone rang I ran inside for a minute, and when I returned my daughter was gone. I looked desperately all around me. Where could she have gone? She couldn’t have climbed over the fence.

And then I saw it. A tiny hole near the side of the fence where the ground was lower. But she couldn’t have possibly crawled under there! I unlocked the fence and ran to the front of the house. And there in the middle of the street was my three-year-old on her tricycle. A car was coming around the corner, and I ran desperately into the street reaching her just in time.

 Can a heart break from gratitude? I held my child and sobbed. I almost lost you. I almost lost my child. This is how the Almighty felt when He took us out of Egypt. My children, I almost lost you. I’m never going to let you go.

It took us so long to come home. We were so late we almost didn’t make it. And like a parent who almost loses a child, on the night of the Seder God promises every Jew that He will hold them and protect them no matter how far from Him they may be.

Personal Redemption

There is a custom for people at the Seder to tell their own stories of personal redemption. How many of us have felt stuck in the emptiness, the loneliness and the materialism of this world and thought that we would never emerge? And in the blink of an eye, our lives, our souls come alive again? Or maybe there was a time when you were lost and confused and then you heard the right words or read just what you needed to understand. Or maybe there was a time when you lost someone that you loved and the grief was so deep and so painful that you thought that you would never smile again. And then one day just when you were about to give up, a child’s laughter penetrated your soul and a hint of a smile began to return. The near miss in a car accident. The narrowly escaped diagnosis. The lost job that became a new opportunity.

Our individual stories of redemption are all integral pieces of our joint, unfolding journey towards national redemption. Because on Seder night God is watching all of us through the windows, waiting for us to come home to Him. And He promises us that when life becomes so hard that it looks like we are lost forever, that is when He will lift us up and bring us home.

Author Biography:
Sara Debbie Gutfreund holds a BA from the University of Pennysylvania and a MA in Family Therapy from the University of North Texas. She is currently researching women’s issues and specializing in pre-marital/adolescent counseling. She lives with her husband and children in Telzstone, Israel.

By Ben Lynfield, www.independent.co.uk

When Jaaber Hussein signed an agreement with Israel’s Chief Rabbis last Monday, he inked the only Arab-Jewish accord sure to be meticulously observed by both sides. The deal makes him the owner for one week of all bread, pasta, and beer in Israel – well a huge amount of it anyway. The contract, signed for the past 12 years by the Muslim hotel food manager, is part of the traditional celebrations ahead of the Jewish holiday of Passover.

Jews are forbidden by biblical injunction to possess leavened bread, or chametz, during Passover and ironically an Arab is needed to properly observe the holiday. The agreement with Mr. Hussein offers a way of complying with religious edicts without having to wastefully destroy massive quantities of food.

Jaaber Hussein, a hotel manager, prepares to take control of much of Israel's bread, beer, and pasta.

Through legal acrobatics, the forbidden goods belonging to the Israeli state are simply sold to Mr. Hussein for the duration of Passover and then revert back to the state once the holiday is over. Like the government’s adherence to the Sabbath and to dietary laws, the ceremony sets Israel apart as a Jewish state that upholds religious traditions.

Mr. Hussein, a resident of the Israeli Arab town of Abu Ghosh near Jerusalem, sees nothing odd in the arrangement, believing there are affinities between his Islamic faith and Judaism. He relishes the role the Jewish state has assigned him, one that puts his picture on the front pages of Israeli newspapers year after year.

“I see this as a way to help people with whom I work and live,” he said.

Mr. Hussein was a natural choice for the ritual because he works in a hotel that stringently observes Jewish dietary laws. He even keeps some of the strictures at home.

“There are many things that are close in the two religions. If not for politics, the religions would get along very well,” he explains. One example he cites is the halal slaughtering of meat, which he likens to kosher slaughtering.

Passover, which celebrates the biblical exodus from slavery in Egypt, starts tonight and lasts for seven days, eight outside Israel.

The reason for the prohibition of leavened bread is, according to the Bible, that the Israelites departed Egypt in such haste that their bread did not have a chance to rise and so they ate the cracker-like unleavened bread known as matzo.

Many of their descendants in modern Israel defer to this dictum every spring to the extent that a kind of fermented dough fixation suffuses the country. Housewives become the new slaves, scrubbing and vacuum cleaning to remove every trace of chametz. Religious men scald pots in the streets, making them kosher for the holiday.

For the Orthodox, there can be no half-measures. A single crumb that evades detection could spoil everything for Passover.

Those families who do not want the extra workload simply check-in to kosher hotels and escape the ardor. Even secular Israelis stock up on pita bread and put it in their freezers so that they too have enough supplies to survive the week.

Last Monday, Mr. Hussein put down a cash deposit of $4,800 for the $150m worth of leavened products he acquires from state companies, the prison service, and the national stock of emergency supplies. The deposit will be returned at the end of the holiday, unless he decides to come up with the full value of the products. In that case he could, in theory, keep them all.

At the close of the holiday, the foodstuffs purchased by Mr. Hussein revert back to their original owners, who have given the Chief Rabbis the power of attorney over their leavened products. “It’s a firm, strong agreement done in the best way,” Mr. Hussein said.

But Israelis are divided on whether the state should be enforcing Passover. A law introduced by religious parties in 1986 bans the display of bread in public areas, except in those where there is a non-Jewish majority. But a court decision last year said it was legal for restaurants to sell leavened products during Passover on the grounds that they are not public spaces. The move sparked anger among the ultra-Orthodox Jews.

This year, ultra-Orthodox activists in Jerusalem sent warning letters to stores, telling them not to sell bread or pizza because this could bring divine punishment on the city. And the chief rabbinate called for supermarkets to install a computer program that would enable cash registers to detect unleavened products by their bar codes so sales could be stopped. Supermarkets cover over their chametz with papers, but the rabbis are concerned that some customers lift the covers and buy proscribed foods.

Variations of the contract between the Israeli state and Mr. Hussein are being signed all over the world between selected non-Jews and rabbis, including those in the UK. The ceremony, like the absence of civil marriages in the country, reflects “some elements of theocracy” in the Israeli state, says Menachem Friedman, a sociologist at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv. “Israel is a unique state – very modern on the one hand but with very strong religious traditional elements on the other. Every government keeps this ritual.”

In one final Passover twist, the restaurants of Mr. Hussein’s town, Abu Ghosh, are gearing up for what is always their busiest week of the year, catering to secular Jews who want to get away from the holiday’s dietary strictures.

“It is also nice that you have people who don’t keep Passover, who eat leavened bread,” Mr. Hussein said. “It is good that we are also able to help the people who are not religious.”