Jeremy Rosen
Passover: Is it Worth the Fuss?
Jeremy Rosen - Passover Is it Worth the Fuss?
- All right, Jeremy, I think over to you. Thank you.
- Okay. Hello, everybody. The subject of Pesach or Passover is such a massive, massive subject that I’m going to have to be very selective in what I talk about today. It’s really going to be in three stages. Stage number one is to look at the evolution of the festival itself. Secondly, I’m going to look at the Seder night and how do we make sense of it and all its strange, weird customs. And finally, I want to examine Pesach neurosis. Why does everybody go wild about the specific details on the house cleaning and the diet and what is supervised and what is not? So let’s start with the first issue. All Biblical festivals are of a harvest nature, Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot. They function on three different levels. Level number one, of course, is the agricultural. They all derive from earlier pagan festivals that looked at the natural world with both fear as well as appreciation, source both of wealth and food, and also the fear that if everything went wrong, the sun was too hot or the rain wasn’t there, their life would come to an end. And so harvest festivals celebrated the link between human beings and nature.
There was Pesach, which was the beginning of the harvest, the barley harvest. There was Shavuot, which was the wheat harvest. And then in the autumn, you had Sukkot, which gathered in all the fruit and the remnants of the second harvest together. And the harvest, in a way, in Judaism was to say, “Don’t worry about all these pagan gods and fear of the sun and the moon and the rain and everything like that. First of all, we can condense it into one. And that one is essentially empowering you to find the way to deal with life around you without having to rely on hocus and pocus and magic. But in addition to that, each festival also had a national element, the element of how do we come to be who we are? Why are we different to all the other groups of people around? It had nothing to do with we are better so much as we are different. And so exploring difference was a very important feature. So our national history is a story that starts off somewhere in Mesopotamia, moves to Egypt, comes out of Egypt, and settles within the area of where Israel is today. So this national freedom to make our own choices, freedom to run our own affairs, a right to self-determination, this is one of the core features of what Passover is about. We then move on to Shavuot, which then, if you like, focuses more on the Constitution. And then the third feature is what we would call the spiritual feature. How do I use this opportunity to relate to God?
And these are to be found within the Passover of the Bible. The Pesach and the Passover of the Bible is a unique experience because it describes having to be ready with our travelling gear, our sticks, and our purses and our shoes on our feet to eat everything, that nothing’s left over, and to be ready at midnight to get out of town in a mad rush. So it was the Passover of , a rush, a hurry. And there’d already been the, shall we say, daubing of the doorposts with the blood of the little sacrifice, poor little sheep who had to be offered up. And this had to be eaten in the family. So you have the emphasis on family as well as sitting down to a meal, even though it’s a rushed meal. And wherever the Torah talks about Pesach, as it goes three, maybe four times, that’s an argument, it also introduces a remarkable statement, a statement which says, "When your children ask you, ‘What’s this all about,’ you must give them an answer.” So right from the very beginning in the Bible, you establish these two important religious elements.
The family, which is more important than the temple, more important than the tabernacle, more important than the synagogue. And then you have relationship to your children. And the relationship to your children is that you have to be able to educate them, to answer their questions, but you must validate their questions. Don’t just tell them, “Shut up, and this is how we’ve always done it.” And therefore the Torah says, you should be able to say to your children, “This is my history. This is who I am.” So it is in a way a form of definition of your identity. And so throughout the Biblical period, what you would do at Pesach time is you would go along to the tabernacle and temple where you would make your little sacrifice of your little sheep as an offering to God. But not within the temple, outside, and then take it home to eat and eat it , and invite people to come in and join you in this celebration.
What’s interesting when you look at the Bible is it seems though were large periods of time when people, they say, didn’t celebrate Passover. But what they mean by that essentially is there were times when the temple was out of action or being taken over by Pagans, but the home still remained the centre of Jewish life and Jewish continuity. Now, that’s how it was right up until the period of the Persian, Greek empires and the Roman Empire. And that is when we have the introduction of what we call the Haggadah. The Haggadah literally means the narrative, but it’s more than just the narrative. It is a format which is designed to create out of the meal, the Seder night, something unique in terms of education and experience. The context is that in the Greco-Roman world, there were two vehicles for education and passing on your tradition to the next generation. One of them was theatre.
The element of theatre, of catharsis, of experiencing, getting the pain out of you, who you are, what you are, acting plays a very important part in post-biblical Judaism. We act, for example, on Yom Kippur and pretend that we’re standing before God and being judged. What is it like to be judged? Here, Pesach suddenly introduces the idea. Imagine. Imagine you yourself have been a slave. You’re coming out in Egypt. You are experiencing freedom for the first time. What does it feel like? Do you really appreciate how lucky you are to be free? So theatre is introduced into the idea of this Haggadah, this menu of ideas that was written down somewhere 2,000 years ago, and it includes the element within it of theatre. And this theatre will vary from community to community. We’ll talk about it a bit later on, when we come to the customs. But in addition, you have the idea of the symposium. What is a symposium?
Well, a symposium in the Greek and the Roman way was a way of educating everybody. You would sit down to a lovely meal. Your servants or whoever would bring in the food. You would then raise a topic for discussion to talk about. You’d talk about it, interspersing it with cups of wine, and then there’d be dancers or a song or entertainment. And you would take a break and then you’d go back to a bit of eating, a bit of discussion, a bit of argument. And that is what the Haggadah is based on. But the Haggadah is based on more than just that. It is also a microcosm of Jewish study, culture, and civilization as they saw it at the time and how they felt that this was going to keep the tradition alive. And that is why, included in the Haggadah, you have this important element of children asking questions. What are we doing this for? Why is all this here? Of the rabbis then introducing strange little customs that were different to the norm, that would lead them to say, “Why are we doing things differently now?”
And as the Talmud itself says, if you come up with your own questions, actually you don’t even necessarily need to stick to the questions we are putting down in the Haggadah for you as a kind of a menu of ideas that we’d like you to talk about and discuss. So the Seder night starts off like any religious festival. Every religious festival or every Shabbat, every Friday evening, you start off with a glass of wine which says, “Thank you, God, we’re here. We can celebrate, this as a special occasion. And the occasion is either Shabbat or a festival or something of that kind. Then having done that, normally in the traditional way, what you do is you then go out and everybody washes their hands and then they come down and sit at the meal and start with bread and carry on with the bread. This time, this night, you make your wine, you drink your wine this time. Because Pesach will start on Saturday night, you’ll also combine wine with , taking Shabbat out and bringing the festival in.
And then what you are going to do is one person is going to wash that person’s hands, not everybody else. So we’re not going down to the main meal. And having washed their hands, what they’re then going to do is to eat some unusual greens of some sort, dipped in salt water, and a divide up of the matzo, one of the three matzos, and one of them is going to be in a piece. Now, this is something so unusual that’s intended to get people to ask, "Why we doing this? Why are we not sitting down to the meal we normally do? And why are we going through this process?” And the Talmud says, the purpose is to get kids to ask, “Why, what’s going on? Why is this night different from all other nights?” The division of the matza is because the matza is described as , the bread of poor people, the bread of affliction, the bread that you discuss. All these are included in the word , which has double, triple meanings.
So the matza is brought in, it’s split into little pieces to remind us that poor people can’t eat whole meal properly, very often don’t have enough food. And we are reminded that we must invite people in. We must be aware that everybody should be able to participate. That when it comes to providing food for the community, this is an obligation on us. And we have to be aware of hunger and suffering everywhere, not just in our little area. And then having then carried out these strange little rituals, which I’m sure most of you are familiar with, we then turn to what is called , the recitation of the Haggadah. Now, as we know, most people, when it comes to the Seder night, they want to get as quickly as they can to the food and spend as little time as possible on the Haggadah itself. And so the result is that most people rush through the Haggadah because they think they have to finish everything in detail. And it’d be nice if you can, but the Talmud says that the important thing for anybody to say is that, “I am now free.” But of course, the question is, what does freedom mean?
Does freedom just mean I’m no longer a slave or does it mean I am now free to choose the way I’m going to live? And it’s choosing the way that we’re going to live that is the core message of of the Haggadah. And what the Haggadah in effect does is it replicates the three tools of education that you find in the Talmud. That is to say, there are laws and rules and rituals, , Jewish law. At the same time, there’s midrash. There’s looking at our holy text and seeing what morals we can learn from them to guide us how to lead our lives. And finally, there is Aggadah. It’s the same route as Haggadah, but with Haggadah is the narrative and Aggadah is a narrative. And the narrative includes going back to history and seeing how our history has developed over the years and where we’ve come from. And so when you open up the Haggadah and when you’ve made your wine and you’ve split your matza into a piece that we call afikoman. And the purpose of this afikoman is to have a piece of matza that in addition to everything else we are going to hide so that the kids are going to spend time looking for it and it’s going to be the last thing we’re going to have to eat at the end of the evening, but it’s something to get them involved.
Who would’ve thought that playing games would be such an important part of a religious festival? Or who would’ve thought that we would have the rabbi saying, Give out nuts and cookies and candies to the kids during the course of this so that they don’t get bored, and so that they do feel involved.“ It’s a little bit of a game. It’s back to the acting and involving everybody, not just another boring religious ritual. Which is why I’ve always believed that if you have a large number of people around and they’re not all involved and they don’t understand what’s going on, it pays to take less and explain more. The one thing the Gibrah says that you have to do is ask these questions. So we start off with , why is this night different from all other nights? But as the Talmud again says, "You can make up any other questions you want to. You don’t have to be stuck to those. And if you don’t want those questions, skip those questions and go on to dealing with answers.” When it comes to answers, the Talmud, the Haggadah, rather, gives two kinds of answers to the question of why are we here tonight?
One of them is the historical. Our history tells us that once we were slaves and we had no say in how we were going to lead our lives. Now that we are free, we can choose how to use our freedom. And we hope that we will choose to use our freedom by preserving our specific traditions and cultures. The other answer is no, it’s not that. It’s that we were once idol worshipers. Once we were pagans. This isn’t a history of national identity. This is an issue of spiritual identity. Both these elements play a part in defining Jewish life. And as we know, there are some people who are Jewish through history, some people who are Jewish through spirituality. We all find our own different levels of spirituality. And then the text goes on to talk about these four major rabbis who lived at the time of Roman occupation. And they were different on two levels. On one level, each one of these rabbis is different, one is rich, one is poor. One comes from a priestly family, one comes from a Levite family.
So they’re a kind of a cross section of a whole of the Jewish people, in terms of their position in the community. But they were also very different politically. Rabbi Akiva was all in favour of war against the Roman occupation. He was all in favour of supporting the Bar Kochba revolution. Whereas Johanna ben-Zakiam and the others said, “No, better to negotiate, don’t go to war.” So they will be sitting there all that night discussing politics as much as discussing Torah and the details of the tradition. Which in one way permits us to discuss politics. If discussing politics will help people define their identity, that’s also part of the educational programme of the Seder night, of the Haggadah. Having decided to talk about these four rabbis, we then move on to another strange rabbinic analysis. And this is the question of why do we have to talk about this all together at nighttime? Shouldn’t it be something we talk about it all the year round? And that goes into a theological debate. When the Torah says, “You should talk about this all your days,” does it really mean all your days? What about your nights? And maybe some people will say, “No, it doesn’t just mean about days now, it means days at some later date.” In other words, you have a typical Talmudic debate on two issues. One of them is, what is the law?
Do we really have to do this? And the other one is, what is, theologically, our life about? This world or the next world? Is there a next world? Is there not a next world? And all told within the context of the Talmudic tradition. So you have already introduced the idea again that there are different types of topics to discuss on different levels. So that when we come to from then, the four sons, we have four types of questions that the educationalist is going to be faced with. That the parent’s going to be faced with. You are going to have the person, shall we say, the good son, who’s committed. I know what this is about. I’m here, I’m on board, I just want more detail, I want more information. I want to know what the variables are. Then you have the son who says, “This doesn’t mean anything to me. This is utterly pointless. This is a complete waste of time.” Then you have the other character, the character says, “I’m neutral. I don’t know the son who doesn’t know where he stands.” And finally you have the child who doesn’t even know what’s going on altogether. So that pedagogically, there are different kinds of questions, different kinds of answers, and we need to recognise the different kind of answers.
Don’t just try and say, “This is it, shut up and don’t ask any questions.” This pedagogical system, again, is the core of the Talmudic tradition. So you have four different kinds of questions. There are variations between the Talmuds as to who the four sons are. For example, the Jerusalem Talmuds says one of the sons is a , is an idiot. Well, we’ve excluded that one from our text nowadays, but it’s still there if you go back to the Talmud. So you have these people asking questions, recognising there are different answers. And having done that, you have the first break in your symposium, you have a song. All right, enough of the intellectual argument, let’s break it up. Let’s have a song, let’s be happy, let’s be clappy. Sometimes there’s a custom in which people will get up and dance around the table, anything to give a break and not be stuck on your seat for too long. Then having done that, we return to the same three-part sequence. We start off with the idea of who were our forefathers? What kind of people were they? Abraham, Laban, where did they see themselves in the world?
What was their function? How was it that they actually came down to Egypt? Was this all part of a plan or was it an accident? How did we come to be living in America or in Israel or in London or Australia, South Africa, wherever we are? Our history is full of accidents. And yet throughout all these accidents and throughout all these journeys, we’ve managed to preserve our tradition. This tradition which started biblically, which comes to us now through the Talmudic period, and we’re still with it. The texts go back thousands of years, and there they are in front of us and we’re still there. We’re no jumped up , this is part of a continuity. And then we move onto the 10 plagues. And this is fascinating because this raises another issue. The 10 plagues in Egypt, as you know, we dip our finger into the cup and we tip out or pour out a little bit of wine for each plague. And everybody says, “Why are we doing that?” And of course the tradition is to say this, “Look, we got our freedom. And we celebrate our freedom.
And we celebrate the fact that to get our freedom, people unfortunately had to be forced to let us go.” But nobody can ever be satisfied with the idea that other people suffer in order that we are free. We’re fortunate that we are, but we have to give a thought for those who suffered not through any fault of their own. Perhaps they were misled by a bad politician or by a bad Pharaoh. And therefore, we reduce our pleasure at the thought of people suffering by dropping out some wine. Which is also why on every festival, we sing the Psalms Hallel, which are also going to be included in the Haggadah. Praise God, glory, hallelujah. And there are two Hallels, a big one with more quotes from Psalms and a smaller one, an abbreviated one. On the intermediary days of Pesach, we only say the intermediary one. Not the main one, which we say on major festivals. And the Talmud says, “Why?” And the Talmud says, “Because you know that when the Egyptians were drowning in the Red Sea, the angels turn to God and they said, ‘Let’s sing praises.’ And God said, ‘No, my creatures, Egyptians are my creatures too, and they’re drowning in the sea.” You’ve got to limit your rejoicing or at least recognise that there is pain and suffering elsewhere. Now, that doesn’t mean to say we shouldn’t fight for our own survival, of course we should. Self-preservation is the core of our tradition, but it also means we should be aware of others.
And it’s this idea of being aware of others that started off in part one when we said, “Anybody who’s poor and needy should come in. We should think of those who need us. Now in part two of the Haggadah, it’s saying we should recognise that there are people suffering outside and beyond, and maybe as a result of our freedom. But we have to recognise that and that’s an important issue. And then we go back to some more textual analysis. Most of this textual analysis seems strange to us. Why do we bother about whether this means oppression or suppression? What does it mean when the Torah talks about the finger of God as opposed to the hand of God, as opposed to the arm of God? Why do these things matter? And the answer is they are merely vehicles of education, getting people to look at the text, examine the text. This is part of what good teaching is. And then having done that, we have another song. We have a break. , let’s have fun and be satisfied, and again, get up and walk around or have something more to drink. Whatever it is. Then we come to part three of this narrative.
Part three of this narrative comes back to what are the core ideas? Rabbi Galile says, if you talk about three things, you’ve fulfilled your obligation, no other obligation. What are the three things? Pesach, matza, and maror. What is Pesach? Pesach, originally simply meant the lamb we sacrifice in gratitude for God passing over us. So pass over, if you like, is God passing over us when he went to kill the Egyptians, but it also means, if you like, recognised who we were. But matza, Pesach also means that we passed out, we came out of Egypt. And so on every level, there is our involvement as well as the divine involvement. There are these different tracks. But this also was the importance of family, because it was a family meal, the family Seder, and that’s what keeps us together. Then we have matza. And matza, in effect, is both. The food of slaves. Everybody had matza in those days. It was the food we had as slaves. It’s true that when we came out, we hoped we were going to have this nice big fluffy bread that only the aristocrats had, but we didn’t have time. So that’s why we have it. We have the matza that poor people had. We had the matza that hurried and rushed, didn’t allow us to have something else. And we have the matza, which represents simplicity and poverty.
There is nothing else in the matza other than flower and water and no other condiment or anything like that. So matza, in that sense, recognises how privileged we are, even though sometimes we may go through difficult times. And finally, the third factor is maror, the bitter herbs, the bitterness. And this represents the fact that life is bitter. Life often throws terrible things at us. We all suffer in one degree or another, to one sense or another. It comes sometimes from outside of ourselves. Sometimes a mad driver or a mad shooter will kill. And so we have to recognise history, we have to recognise our own experience, but we also have to recognise that there’s a dimension beyond our control. And life involves trying to balance all these three. Then we praise God and come to the blessing about redemption. Now, redemption, in Hebrew, does not mean what it means to us normally. Somebody intervenes from on high and gets us out of a mess. literally means being able to reach a higher level, being able to hear things more clearly. In the Bible, when I want to reveal something to you, I say, "I want to reveal it to your ears or reveal it to your eyes.
I want to show you something.” So this is essentially the message that God, so to speak, is giving us, that we can hopefully improve things to the point where we make the world a better place. And there we have the second cup of wine, and we go into the meal. And the meal, as you know, starts off with washing hands. Everybody washes hands. We eat the matza, we then have the matza with maror. We nowadays add , which isn’t mentioned in the Torah, but it’s to take away some of the harshness or the bitterness, of the maror, of the bitter herbs. So we remember the other side. And then having done that, and a little sandwich to remember what Hillel used to do to combine it all into one, we sit down and we have a nice meal. When the meal is over, last thing we eat is the Afikoman, The little children have to come and produce it and give it to you from wherever they found it. And then having done that, we end with more songs. There’s the cup of Elijah, which is a question of do we understand how privileged we are? This extra cup, because originally the traditional was to only have four cups.
Some people said we have five cups. So in typical rabbinic tradition, they said, “Okay, we stick to four, but we’ll add an extra one for Elijah, who solves all these problems.” And so the fifth cup over Elijah reminds us. And this is one of the most controversial points of the Haggadah. Pour out your anger against those nations who despised you and want to destroy you. It doesn’t say pour out your anger against the nations. It just says, “Stop these people who are trying to beat us up.” And because Elijah was supposed to be the person who would intervene to stop all this, that’s why we call on Elijah to help. So why do we open the door? We open the door for Elijah to come in. Or do we open the door because during the Spanish Inquisition, when Jews had to pretend that they were Jewish, sorry, pretend that they were Muslim outwardly, but privately carry on with Jewish rituals, they were constantly being spied upon. People were always seeing if behind the closed doors, they were actually betraying their commitment to be good Christians under the Inquisition. And so the idea of opening the door to see who’s outside is also reminiscent of the fact that there was a time when we had to do this secretly, both under the Spanish Inquisition and under certain Islamic rulers. We had to do these things secretly. And so our freedom is when we don’t have to do it secretly anymore, we come out into the open. And these songs we have at the end, many of them are adaptations of mediaeval folk songs, adapted to a Jewish theme.
So, or who knows one, “Green Grow the Rushes,” these are nice songs that add to the celebration. Now, having given you this historical background, we now need to look at what Pesach has become today and what Pesach has become today seems like a kind of an excessive state of neurosis. It starts off with its idea of having to clean everything away, clean every corner of one’s house. And the Talmud talks about even having to clear little mouse holes where mice might have gone down with their . Why is this so necessary on this occasion, as to any other occasion when you clean your house? Well, there are two reasons. Reason number one is this. The term , which means leavened, as opposed to matza, which is unleavened, in Hebrew, is almost the same word, the same letter. The “ha” sound, the “ma” sound, the “t” sound. But the difference is, between the letter and the letter , which is very, very small. Of all the differences between the letters of the alphabet, this is the smallest letter of the alphabet. And therefore, when you treat symbolically, as the mystics did, as something that is forbidden as opposed to matza, which is something that is permitted, this becomes both physical and metaphysical.
On the physical side, the rabbi said, “Look, is so significant on Pesach, that we must not only not eat it, we mustn’t have it in our homes. We must not even be able to see it. We want to remove it completely from our eyesight.” Why is that? Because mystically, they saw that was our equivalent of the devil. We don’t believe in devils, never have officially, or any of that nonsense. But we do believe that there is negativity, there is bad things. And so this idea of , essentially is is what you have to flee from. And flee from evil, flee from bad. Now, it’s not intrinsically bad, 'cause after all, we eat bread all the year round. So it’s a mystical idea that represents evil. And that’s why we have to clear as much of it out as we possibly can, and why we have to take it very seriously. Because the challenge of evil, challenge of doing the bad thing is such a powerful element in our lives. So removing is unlike any other removal system we have throughout the year. Throughout the year, it’s just don’t do it. Don’t eat the forbidden fruit. But it’s not get rid of. Getting rid becomes very important. Not only do we need to get rid of, but in addition to that, we need to make sure that whatever we do bring in to eat has got no ingredient that could possibly be . And there the question is, well, what could possibly be wrong with most of the matters that we eat, like coffee, like tea? Fruits don’t have any.
Vegetables don’t have any . Why do we make such an issue of whether there’s any ingredient? And the answer that’s usually given is, well, in the sort of processes that went on in mediaeval times, people were mixing in grains and others, ingredients all the time. And we never knew for certain what the ingredients might be. You might even argue now with all the different names that different chemicals have and all the different ingredients we see in the foods when we look at the ingredients, how do we know what they are? How do we know what an A or a B before a chemical involves? We’re not experts in this. And therefore, the custom has developed to only accept food that we know has been checked to make sure there’s nothing in it. But that, although it might make sense on one level, has been taken to a ludicrous extreme. To such an extreme that, for example, what ingredient could that possibly be in coffee? At what stage? Ah, well, I say maybe you know when it went through the pipes or the machinery, we got in the machinery. And that’s possible, it might do. But in general, it’s unlikely and not logical. Milk is milk, coffee is coffee, tea is tea. Butter is butter? Why should we bother to do these things? And essentially, there are two kinds of answers. One answer is that it’s clear that you can, as a general rule, tell what has got any ingredient in it or not. But because we want to be extra special on Pesach, we try to be a bit stricter.
And there’s nothing wrong with being stricter, so long as you’re reasonable about it. I, for example, in general throughout the year, always take a lenient point of view when it comes to Jewish law. On Pesach, I choose to be stricter. I want to up my game, if you like, for a week in the year. So I am prepared and willing to be stricter on Pesach because is stricter than any other kind of forbidden food. But what about those people who are poor, who can’t afford the fact that kosher for Pesach food costs a lot more? They shouldn’t have to pay it. Now, if they’re very wealthy, jetting around the go world on their their jet planes, by all means let them do what they like or go to a hotel or have a special kitchen in their homes for Pesach. Neither meaty nor milky or a double meaty-milky. Whatever it is, if people want to choose to do that, there’s nothing wrong with it that’s there. Hardly a harmful thing to do, but it’s not necessary. And therefore, this whole fuss that people are making, for example of kosher for Pesach mineral water, what could possibly be wrong with mineral water? “Ah,” they’ll say, “That the plastic bottle it’s made in, you don’t know what went into the plastic bottle.” Well that’s illogical from any normal point of view. So having to abide by these additional rules, essentially, in fact, is an economic factor. It gives jobs for the boys.
It enables people to up the prices and make more money, and make more money by providing on Pesach so that they can take it easier during the rest of the year. Just as palm branches and citrons on Sukkot time cost an enormous amount, beyond any reasonable logic, because a lot of people live off the profit they make on Pesach. And particularly in our day and age, where so many Orthodox people, ultra-orthodox, don’t have a secular education, and the only opportunity they have for a job is doing something in the religious facilities business and in the supervision business of one kind or another. It gives jobs for the boys, which is very, very necessary for their functioning. But it doesn’t mean that you have to be enslaved by it to do things that are completely illogical. However, it does, to be fair, require some knowledge of food and food ingredients in order to be able to make a reasoned judgement . And therefore, if you don’t have that expertise, it does make sense to get something that’s supervised. But otherwise, just as you don’t for fruit and vegetables or for fish, indeed, or indeed for meat, if you only can get something that in itself presents no problem.
So this neurosis that we have has gone a long way, but there’s an even bigger neurosis. And the bigger neurosis is over what is called , which is beans and seeds of certain kinds which were forbidden in the Ashkenazi world, in the Western world, and not in the Sephardi or the oriental world. And if you look at most of the literature in the mediaeval years, you find that most rabbis said this is a nonsensical custom. It doesn’t make any sense. Why was it banned? It was banned for one of two reasons, either because in the sacks of grains they used to have in Eastern Europe, they used to mix up wheat and flour and barley and pulses and beans and you might come to eat the wrong stuff by mistake. Or alternatively because in a wet climate in Eastern Europe, things began to sprout and they thought sprouting meant that this was fermentation and this was and that’s why they didn’t have it. But none of those things applied in the Oriental world, they don’t apply now. And the truth is that the only reason that the Ashkenazi world still don’t have what is called beans is out of loyalty to a custom. And so loyalty to a custom, it’s not the end of the world.
And interestingly enough, according to Jewish law, custom tends to go by the man of the house. And if you’ve got somebody married to a Sephardi, an Ashkenazi and a Sephardi, then normally the custom goes according to the Ashkenazi, to the head of the house. But the fact is that you can still eat in the house of a Jew who does eat , even if you don’t. So you have all these strictnesses that have added on, even to the point that some people are so worried about whether water added to a grain may turn into , may turn into fermentation, that they will only eat matza over a bag to make sure that nothing falls onto the floor and it gets mixed up with water and then it can ferment. Now, these are all ridiculous successes, but my opinion has always been if people want to be stricter, what’s wrong with that? So long as they don’t impose it on other people. And the same thing goes for cleaning up one’s house. What’s wrong with a good spring cleaning once a year? No reason why not, it’s a very good idea. All these things have utilitarian functions, but they can also have spiritual functions. It depends on how you treat them. It depends on whether you try to see the positive as opposed to the negative.
But in the end, Pesach is about a massive celebration of Jewish identity. And because we are all so different and because our Jewish identities are so different, the opportunity to get together and to talk about this in a reasoned way, and the emphasis on studying and knowledge that will inform your decisions is why this is, has turned into this, if you like, excessive jamboree of neurosis, which at the root of it is one of the pillars if not the pillar of our religious tradition. Which is why, after Yom Kippur, the Seder night is the most kept phenomenon or ritual in Jewish life throughout the Jewish world, wherever it is. And at that point, I’ll now move into question time.
[Shauna] Jeremy, we actually have a question that was sent to us via email, if I could read you that to start off, if you don’t mind.
[Jeremy] Go ahead. Q&A and Comments:
[Shauna] Okay, all right. So we have a question from Lori Mannoiam.
Q: So she writes, “Passover is mentioned four times in the Torah. In the Haggadah, there are four ways that God took us out of Egypt. In the Haggadah, there are four questions. In the Haggadah, there are four glasses of wine. In the Haggadah, there are four sons and there are four mothers. Could you please explain what the meaning of four is for Passover? Is it a coincidence? Is it referring to the four corners of the world or of the ? Or is it conducted in the home? And can the process therefore be done by a woman, hence the reference to the four mothers and the creation of the afikoman from the three matza creating four pieces.
A: The simple answer is that all of those are correct. That is to say, every number you have in the Torah, whether it’s three, seven, four, eight, has multiple interpretations. And every generation adds its own level of interpretation onto it. And so it’s true you have four languages of redemption, although some people say there are five. It’s true you have four sons and four answers, and it’s true you have four mothers. And I think every one of these has a significance. And I think the whole point of having something like this is another feature of getting people to ask why. So you are right, all those things are right. I noticed from Robert Sacks’s opening question, I should have told you where you can get hold of a Haggadah if you don’t have one. I should have done that right at the beginning, and I regret that I didn’t. But there’s a website called sefaria.com, S-E-F-A-R-I-A. And on there for free, you can get every Jewish text. And if you open the website and you turn on the question on the menu to liturgy, under liturgy, you’ll be able to find the Haggadah. So if you get hold of that website, open up liturgy, you’ll be able to follow that menu that I’ve been presenting today in this presentation.
Q: Alaine Stake asks, "Am I the Jeremy Rosen related to Sybil and Henry Shaw of Woodside Park, London?”
A: Yes, I am. He was my uncle.
Q: Thank you for asking. Romaine, Jews in the family celebrating, getting educated, important. But why again is the story motivated by the presence of persecution and flight?
A: That’s a very good question. Because persecution and flight have always been a human condition. We have them today now as much as we had them then. And the question therefore that the Haggadah tries to answer is, freedom in itself is not enough. It’s what you do with the freedom that matters. It’s how you turn it into something positive rather than negative. Not just looking back at how horrible it was, but looking about how fortunate we are now to live in a different situation. But meanwhile around the world, there are people still being persecuted, still suffering, and therefore we need to recognise that.
Q: Did Seder, Abraham gone, fix the order of the four questions? Where did he get the idea of reclining?
A: The Romans had left a long time earlier. Joe Cohen. Yes, I mean the… In fact, the the core of the four questions is in the Talmud. sort of produced the first kind of structured liturgy, but he’s basing himself on the Talmud. The Talmud talks about the four questions. They’re slightly different and there are variations. It also talks about reclining, at the time of the Roman Empire when the Haggadah was written.
Q: Jeffrey, Hi Jeffrey. In Exodus 12, God tells Moses that the Sea of I… Oh, tune of Israel. And on 10th day take a lamb, prepare a meal, , instructs God to make matza, explains God will cause the Egyptians to let the people go out to pray, very explicitly for one. Why when this happened, did they take the children of Israel by surprise so much they didn’t have time to make bread, as we are told the symbol of Pesach itself?
A: Well that’s a very good question. And the simple answer is obviously, they were not told until the last minute. They were not told until the actual plague of the firstborn took place. The plague of the firstborn took place somewhere around midnight. And it was only as a result of that that at the last minute they were told to get out. The three day preparation of having lamb, in a sense, was a provocation to the Romans. But the information to leave only came at the last minute.
Q: Ronnie, how can we be free truly in Judaism when there’s so many rules in the , we can’t really do what we want?
A: Well it depends what you mean by freedom. In fact, the word for freedom in the Torah is not in fact the word we use… The word in the Torah is, which means engraved. And the Talmud says, "Why, what’s the difference?” And the answer is because freedom can simply mean lying on your backside on a desert island doing nothing. But freedom is meant to get you to be a better person, to have rules, to have regulations, to have disciplines, to have morality. A really free person is not somebody who does whatever he wants, but does what the right thing is. And so it’s an invitation to discuss what we mean by freedom.
Q: Elia asks, the source of the word Afikoman is a Greek word and there are two Greek origins of afikoman - literally means dessert, but it also means clubbing at night. And so the Afikoman, as described in the Talmud, it means don’t go out clubbing after the Seder night, which is what they used to do in those days and what many people do nowadays. It’s, in other words, “Let the matza remain in your mouth with the last taste of the evening.”
Brenda Lee Martin, “It’s always a pleasure to listen.” Thank you very much. Oh, let’s see, you have time with my father, my father’s an exceptional man. I’ve never come across anything quite like him, so you’ve made my day, thank you.“
Stephen, the matter also represents the sacred loaves that Abraham gave his visitors, and for whom at the start, Moses and Aaron addresses Pharaoh, they request to leave God to will and answer for three days.
Anything’s possible. Nobody says that in the actual text. The text of the Torah doesn’t say it. But all the interpretation that comes on after the Torah, through what we call Midrash is creative and inventive. And the purpose of its creativeness is to get us to go back to look at the text and see what the text really says. My late father was responsible for founding Jewish day schools and your dear late father stayed with us while speaking in the positive Jewish education.
Ah, thank you very much. I’m glad my father’s… Brenda, that’s sweet, very sweet. Thank you, my father was really special. Pesach , and thank you.
Thank you very much. Marion.
Q: Jill, what evidence exists the Exodus took place, surely the Egyptians would not have permitted hundreds of thousands of their labour force to leave were they not aware of the plan of the Israelites to flee.
A: Well, there are two kinds of answers. One of them is, in the third century BCE, there was an Egyptian priest called Manatheo. Manatheo wrote that the Jews were a diseased bunch of slaves who existed in Egypt and they were driven out in order to stop them rebelling and causing trouble. So there’s some earlier reference in Egyptian tradition that there were slaves called the Israelites who were driven out. The only objective sort of evidence we have is that we do know that at the time of the Exodus, there was upheaval in Egypt and the Middle East. And a group of people called the Hapiru, some people say were the Hebrews, or they were known as, there are different other names as well, invaded and came down into Egypt and kicked out the old dynasty and moved in a new dynasty. And that was overthrown and they were kicked out. And so that idea of being kicked out afterwards would seem to indicate that it does coincide with the Biblical story of Exodus. We have no evidence. I mean, sometimes I hear people say, "Oh yeah, they found dead chariots in the Red Sea that prove that this was the Egyptians who got lost in the Red Sea.” People like to prove that Biblical events happened. I’m not certain that they did and I don’t think it matters that much. What matters is the message. And so that is, if you like, a possibility. The other issue really is, again, Freud brought it up in his famous book of Moses and monotheism and he claimed that there was a king called Aknatan in Egypt who overthrew the old system of many gods and brought in one God, or that was a sun God. That Moses was one of his inner circle. When Aknatan was overthrown and Moses was out of a job, he had to find something to do. And so he found these Jewish slaves, took them out of Egypt, then he gave them the law. They weren’t very happy with him for giving the law. And so in good Freudian terms, they killed him and that’s why they became so strict and neurotic. But that’s Freud. It’s fun, but nobody takes it too seriously.
Q: Have you not rather glossed over the meaning of throwing out your anger?
A: Yes, I didn’t say all I should have done because it’s interesting that the reform church, the reform synagogue in Germany took this out. They said, “We can’t say, 'Pour out your wrath against the nations.’” And in America, the American reform also removed it. And then came the Nazis. Now it does not say, “Hate everybody.” It says, “I don’t like people who hate us.” Nobody’s forcing people to hate us. If people hate us and they’re irrational and illogical and dangerous, why shouldn’t we say, “Get rid of them?” There’s a debate, however, in the Talmud, with Robbie Mayer says, “You should never say, ‘Get rid of them,’ you should get rid of evil.” And therefore, there are people who’ve changed the wording of , to pour out your anger, to mean what it really means, which is pour out your anger on evil. And that’s how I understand it.
Q: Why can’t we keep me up where the Sephardis do?
A: I mentioned that earlier, simply because a custom developed artificially in Europe not to eat beans and pulses, everybody agrees, Halachically, it is an custom and it’s a custom that has no logic and that we adhere to it basically because that’s what our parents have done. It’s either respect to tradition, or respect to our parents, and if we can, we should. And if there’s a problem, well, you deal with it, but it’s not one of the core issues. But it has been turned into one, as has indeed something called which is a Yiddish expression for not having matza that’s been mixed in with fruit juice or other things, which is perfectly permitted according to the Talmud, but they decided to be stricter. There’s a fashion now in Judaism for being stricter and stricter, by adding layer upon layer upon layer. My guess is it’s a reaction to the permissiveness of the outside world and of society in general. But nevertheless, it is a custom. It’s no more than a custom. I don’t think lightning’s going to strike you from heaven if you had some beans or rice or whatever it is. In fact, originally in the some people argued that rice did not count as , and was perfectly like anything else. You can even make a matza out it.
Significance of egg and salt water, that’s another custom that comes in. The egg has two meanings. The egg, in one sense, is a symbol of life. That’s why the circle of life. It’s a custom that comes from outside Judaism, which is why we tend, when we come back from burying a relative, the first thing we eat is egg. And salt water is a symbol for tears, and that’s why we have it a nice…
Q: Another strange custom to get people to ask why and what are we doing it for?
A: Thank you, Myrna, or your servants or whoever would bring in the food. Take you up on… Yes, in Roman times, they had servants. And the Talmud actually mentions the fact that it was the servant who brought in the tray, the table, they had a table. Each course was a different table. They’d take the table in, take the table out. And there were usually servants who did it. That there were also Jewish servants, they are just like we have in the wedding, you have Jews who come and serve. It’s a generic term. It doesn’t mean literally a slave, but it could include slaves. It could include the husband or the wife serving other people equally, could include the children. It’s a general term.
Mother deserves a mention.
Mother does deserve a mention. But it’s interesting, in the Talmud, the Talmud says that , the bread of poor people, is the bread not of poor people but of husbands and wives working hard together to make it ready for Pesach. So the Talmud emphasises the idea that the man’s going to do a lot of work, as much as the woman, and the ideal relationship is when they both do the work together. So it’s not male chauvinist, even though it was an era of male chauvinism. I’m not arguing about that.
Q: Is there a relationship between the rules of Persian New Year, cleaning the home same time as Pesach.
A: Yes, I’m sure there is a parallel. It’s again, that time of the year, many of these festivals were influenced. Most of my Persian community celebrate no rules in their way. And whether it is fire, which is part of Zoroastrianism, or clearing out the house, these are common customs to Judaism and to other traditions, as well.
Q: What is my view of Orthodox being denied a secular education?
A: I think it’s terrible they’re denied a secular education. I do accept the priority of a Jewish education. I do think that should come first. Because later on in life, you have so much more access to so much more secular education and secular cultural, secular books and secular programmes, and therefore I believe in a strong fundamental Jewish base, which comes from the home and good early education. But secular education is absolutely necessary. And indeed, you see from the Talmud that they regarded it as necessary to have a career, to have a job, to be able to get a job and be self-supporting. And they did not approve of vast numbers of people depending on charity.
Q:Why are lentils forbidden, but rice, barley is okay?
A: Well, rice is not all together. And again, it’s a matter of custom. And if no beef is around, and only lamb, why can’t it be eaten on Pesach? Again, this is a matter of custom. The custom is not to eat roast lamb on the Seder night, because that’s kind of imitating the temple. But not everybody has that, so why do we eat roast meat and not everybody doesn’t eat lamb. There’s no reason, it’s just a custom not to. But no more than that. And in the same way, I prefer vegetarian food, so I avoid meat altogether. And I’m not breaking any laws doing that.
Q: Why is whiskey not kosher for Pesach?
A: It’s distilled, yes, but it’s distilled out of grain. And grain is corn, which is vodka, which is usually distilled out of potatoes is okay.
Q: And why, sort of, again, wine is all right?
A: That’s also distilled, or at least liquors are.
Q: What separates glass plates on Pesach?
A: That’s a good question. The, the Jewish law says very clearly that the plates and knives you can’t have on Pesach are plates and knives or eating utensils that absorb during the year and it’s built in or grained, absorbed into the walls. And that’s because in those days, by and large, they had ceramics. And ceramic is highly absorbent. And therefore it was very difficult to clean. Whereas glass was incredibly smooth, it didn’t absorb anything. And that’s why you can have glass for meat and for milk and you can have it, it’s washed properly and soaked properly, you can have it for Pesach. And the truth of the matter is, I’d go even further. Because nowadays stainless steel is less absorbent even than glass. And if there are no cracks in it, there’s no reason why you can’t kosher them, if they’re been used for meat during the year, clean them, boil them in water and use them on Pesach too. And ceramic also. Ceramic now is glazed, it’s a strong glaze.
There was a time when ceramics cracked, and therefore food could get in the cracks. But nowadays that ceramic tends to be pretty much like glass so long it’s not cracked or chipped, there’s no reason why you can’t have, use that for on Pesach Although officially, they’ll tell you, “No you can’t, you’ve got to have two sets of this, two sets of that, two sets of the other.” And again, if you could afford it, why not? But if you are a poor person who can barely afford one set of dishes, get glass and you can use it for everything. Or one set of knives that you clean properly.
Karen, thank you very much, that’s very nice of you.
Q: Where’s the word matza come from?
A: Literally, matza is something that grows from the ground. It’s the basic food. It’s basic food coming from the ground.
Q: Is it true that was a Roman dessert and that’s why there’s no blessing for it?
A:There’s no blessing for it because it’s not an obligation, it’s a kind of an adjunct to the maror. And it might well have been a Roman dessert. But the truth is that the Oriental Jews make an oriental kind of, the Europeans make a European kind of, each community creates its all. So yes or no? I stick to it ‘cause it’s the custom for my family. But if it creates problems for you, don’t. It’s a matter of your choice.
If we have to ride, where are we? Where are we?
You got to know roof if, yeah… If you have to write…
Get rid of before Shabbat this year, what do we eat on Shabbat? How do we make?
Well, straight answer to that is you save a little bit of… You clear out the house on Thursday. You clear out the house on Thursday night. You then have stuff ready for Pesach But you keep a couple of mini rolls for the Shabbat meal in the morning and Shabbat in the afternoon. And then when you’ve had it, you put to keep it separately and you get rid of it by either putting it outside, putting it down the toilet, or the disposal unit, whatever it is. And if you want to eat, you eat. Eat cooked in your Pesach utensils, where whatever it is that you can have on Pesach. So it shouldn’t be a problem.
Thank you very much, Judith.
Q: Is straight gin kosher for Passover?
A: Do you know, that’s a good question. I don’t know what gin’s made of. If gin’s made from grain alcohol, you can’t. But if it’s not made from grain alcohol, I think tequila, for example’s, okay.
Q: Please, why do I have to get rid of hamates as opposed to just not eating it?
A: Well no you should eat as much as you can. But it’s if there’s anything left over and you can’t give it to anybody else, then you have to remove it from your house because the Torah says that, not the Torah but the, it should neither be seen or had.
Q: Do you know what happened to her son?
A: Yes, aunt’s alive. I have no idea. I’ve always wondered what happened to their adopted son. His name was Ricky and I’ve never come across him, never heard of him. Henry never mentioned him again. I wish I could find out, but I know nothing.
Q: Why is milk purchased before Pesach, so the ’s energy’s nullified.
A: Again, this is excessively strict. There’s no reason, there’s no way any hammit can get into milk which is sealed in a bottle. But if you want to get supervised milk, that’s an extra refinement of why not.
Q: How do we reconcile the story of the death of the first born to our Jewish value system?
A: The answer is we can’t. The answer is this is what parents do. If parents put their children in a difficult position because they don’t want to take advice from a doctor, you can’t blame God for that. And so in the same way, unfortunately, children suffer. It’s not a question of punishing, but children suffer if their parents are bad parents.
Where are we next? Can we still carry on, Shauna? Where are we?
[Shauna] Yes, you can take a couple more questions, if you’d like. Wendy’s not going to join to wrap up, so you can wrap up when you-
Okie-dokey.
[Shauna] Are done with the questions.
Q: Okay, so Natalie Baskin, why is it required to change the China?
A: Only because China, made up of clay and other absorbent material absorbs during the course of the year and you can’t get it out. But stuffing that doesn’t absorb, like metal, you can cleanse by putting through boiling water or something that raises the level to above the level at which it absorbed. It’s very scientific. In other words, if you could get something to be hotter than at any stage when it’s absorbed, then you can make it ready for Pesach. It’s only things you can’t. And an old fashioned crockery and cutlery and so forth would crack and so you couldn’t do that.
The , what was that? The… Sorry, I’m trying to get the right question.
The website sells all the prayer books and records for genealogy can be found in Google-linked Spanish or audio.
That’s very helpful, thank you.
I’m originally from Dublin, where my late grandparents lived, approximately the end of the '50 when discovered the carbon dioxide used mineralizing water came from Guinness fermentation. And that year we had no mineralized water.
That’s a very good point. Very, very good point. Which is a strong argument for checking. Nowadays, we have much more efficient checking. And the checking, in the same way that nowadays checking for milk under government regulation is very strict. But where you hear of something, you do something about it. But if you make a mistake and it is not your fault, nobody punishes you. According Jewish law, somebody who does something by mistake is not guilty.
Q: How can we make children of Israel being brought out with silver and gold? How do we get them silver or gold?
A: Well, one answer, the famous answer is this was their payment for 300 years of slavery. The other is that the Torah says people were just so clean to clear, happy to get rid of them that they gave them and lavished them. Others say, actually some of them were, if you like, able to make a living under slavery as contractors with middlemen, after they also went out with lots of herds of sheep and flocks. So some of the Jews in Egypt were doing okay, which is why so many of them wanted to stay.
Q: Frieda, can you kind of give more accurate time in history for the writing of the Haggadah, did they write at the era of Christianity or before?
A: So many of the texts in the Haggadah are kept texts, which are certainly earlier than the Roman period, probably from the Babylonian, the Greek Persian period. The Mishnah itself was written down in the first century, and it’s the Mishnah that already mentions the Seder and the main ingredients in it, which is then, in the subsequent centuries, expanded by the Gemara, and then by customs that come later. So yes, you can certainly date the core of the Haggadah to the first millennium before Christianity.
Q: How do we explain a child that God hardens Pharaoh’s heart?
A: Depends what you mean by hardening a heart. Many of the words and terms in the Bible are metaphorical. It might just be saying, by nature, he was a stubborn man and his stubbornness came from either his inequalities or from his confidence that this society, Egyptian society, was superior to Israelites society.
Q: Why should he make any concessions?
A: They’re all possibilities of interpreting. You shouldn’t take the Torah literally. It doesn’t make sense. Otherwise, you’re going to ask, “Oh the finger of God, does God have fingernails? Or the hand of God, how many fingers does he have?” Whereas the next one…
Thank you, Elizabeth.
Your father stayed with my father’s stone. Anton, which stone? I know lots of stones. You’ll have to email me and tell me which stone that was.
Can we come to your Seder? Ah, you are lovely, wish you could. Not this year. Thank you, Karen.
What else am I getting? Questions down. Significance.
We’ve dealt with significance of salt water. A Spanish person, we always had a piece of Afikoman before we went to sleep. That’s an interesting custom. But there are all kinds of interesting customs. For example, Persians on some spot, you have the custom of taking the Seder plate and walking around. Others have a custom of taking leeks and onions and whipping the backs, to remember the task masters. There are lots and lots of different customs. Don’t have time to mention them all.
Q: How many Hebrews lived in Mitzrayim when they were told to leave? How many remained?
A: Look, it’s difficult to tell. One tradition says that only a fifth of the Jews came out of Egypt. Another says they were 600,000 males between the ages of 18 and 60. So there would’ve been double that for females and even more for children. We don’t know. In the end, I don’t think it matters that much. But the answer simply is that we don’t know. Elijah is a very interesting character. It’s a very interesting character because he is mentioned, of course, in the Bible as the one person who went up to heaven in a chariot of fire. And therefore, he is the symbol of mysticism. But he is also the person who, if you like, sits in when a child is born. So we have the chair of Eliahu. He is there at the Seder night. Eliahu is there too. He figures, as the precursor of the Messiah, and therefore he is the precursor of a period where we won’t have to suffer anymore, when we’re all if happ ily together ever more. And so for all those reasons, Elijah is considered, if you like, the equivalent of the Messiah, the equivalent of the symbol that we can make this world better.
Thank you, thank you.
Your niece explained pour out your warmth.
Well, that’s a lovely idea. Pouring out warmth on your nations. That’s a very nice idea. I don’t think it means that literally, but I like it very much.
I don’t know if you’re aware, your father saved my father, Boren.
Yeah, I remember hearing about the Borens, very much indeed. So, thank you, and let’s exchange memories.
Q: Austin, how do you come to terms with Biblical criticism and no evidence to support the Exodus?
A: Biblical criticism is a theory. I’m not saying it’s right, I’m not saying it’s wrong. You can come with as many theories as to who wrote Shakespeare. Let there be as many theories, I welcome them all. And in the end, we want to have an explanation that satisfies us. To me, the history, whether it’s fact or not, is not as relevant as the message. It’s the message that comes together. But I read Kaufman and Katsto and other Biblical scholars. I’m interested to hear what they say. There are big problems with Biblical criticism. Inconsistencies, total inconsistencies, it’s by far 100% accurate or scientific. And some Ashkenazi authors play the rabbi and two witnesses, they were henceforth . I haven’t heard that custom, may be. The Haggadah, showing five questions dating to 1000 CE. Yes, there were different variants of the Haggadah. The Haggadah wasn’t finally… Like there were different variants of the text of the Torah until the Masoretic text combined them into one. So there are lots of different versions.
Q: Answer live, was Carmel ever open on Seder night?
A: We always had the break. Yes, we were never up there for Seder night. Sometimes some visitors came down, but we were never open.
Q: Was the sold for the school?
A: Yes, it was sold for the school. I personally sold it in my day for the school.
Trevor Femmer, hi Trevor, good to hear from you.
Q: Why do we say Hanukkah? Well, that’s a very good question. Why do we say ?
A: Technically speaking, people suffered as a result of this. But the main reason that’s given is because Hanukkah was a miracle that happened in the land of Israel. And because of that unique position of a miracle in the land of Israel, that’s why it got special treatment. Yes, thank you.
Q: Any problems having a Seder on other than the first two nights?
A: You can have a Seder anytime you want to. There’s nothing to stop you having a Seder. One would argue you shouldn’t make the blessing that is an obligation. But short of doing the blessing, you can eat everything and do everything. So I’ve spoken about Elijah, Messiah and Pesach. Well yes, the Messiah and Pesach is, that’s when we were taken out of mess once. So hopefully, it’ll be taken out of the mess a second time.
Okay, everybody. So I’m afraid I’m going to have to stop there now. But I hope that we will meet again some other time. And again, if anybody has any questions they want to take up with me by email, I’d be happy to answer either at jeremyrosen@msn.com or Jeremy@JeremyRosen. Let me know and I’ll be happy to speak to you privately. So goodbye everybody. Happy Pesach, and I hope to see you again soon.