* A traditional Passover seder takes a minimum of three hours with lots of long readings. If you are with people you love, it’s fun. If you are not with people you love, it is hard time. You won’t eat before 10pm at a traditional seder after two hours of recitation and ritual.
* My secular Jewish friend has this theory that Jews come from space aliens, they were touched by the hand of God, and they were given a task by God to deliver a message to the world so for that they were given extra industry and industriousness. He does not mention anything about a more flexible moral code.
* My secular friends had a seder, 50% Gentile. They spent 30 minutes going around the table saying what they were grateful for and then the hosts said, yay God, let’s eat.
* “Matthew Weiner [of Mad Men] is 5’7″ and looks like a evil little gremlin. I usually look at people’s physical appearance before I evaluate what they have to say nowadays.”
* I let a Jew eat one of my hardboiled eggs and I get the 10th degree from him at high volume down the hallway about how fresh are they, who boiled them, why don’t they peel right, am I going to end up in the UCLA emergency room?
Jews do a lot of complaining in the Torah reading for the seventh day of Passover: They said to Moses: “Are there no graves in Egypt, that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? Why have you done this to us, to carry us out of Egypt?
“Is not this the word that we did tell you in Egypt, saying: Let us alone, that we may serve Egypt? For it would have been better for us to serve Egypt, than to die in the wilderness.”
* “As the children of Israel march forward, the divine cloud which had been leading them moves to their rear, interposing between them and the Egyptians.” It’s important that Jews use lots of double talk to obfuscate what they are up to and let that rhetoric be a cloud between them and the goyim.
* “What shall we drink?” complain the people.
I couldn’t find kosher for Passover diet caffeine-free sodas I like to drink. All the kosher for Passover Coke had caffeine.
* “If you will diligently hearken to the voice of G-d… all the diseases which I have brought upon Egypt, I shall not bring upon you, for I am G-d your healer.”
Yeah, if you abstain from homo sex and sharing drug needles, you’ll be less likely to get AIDS. If you refrain from slutting around, you’ll be less likely to get shot and to get sued and to get nasty STDs.
* “Would we had died by the hand of G-d in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness, to kill this whole community with hunger.”
* Amalek are the bad guys because they picked on the weakest and sickest of the Israelites. Why would they not? If you want to fight a guerrilla war, you go after the vulnerable.
* G-d led them not through the way of the land of the Philistines (13:17)
Chabad: The tribe of Ephraim had erred and departed from Egypt 30 years before the destined time, with the result that three hundred thousand of them were slain by the Philistines… and their bones lay in heaps on the road… G-d therefore said: If Israel behold the bones of the sons of Ephraim strewn in the road, they will return to Egypt…
* From Chabad.org: On the SEVENTH DAY OF PASSOVER we read how on this day the sea split for the Children of Israel and drowned the pursuing Egyptians, and the “Song at the Sea” sung by the people upon their deliverance (Exodus 13:17-15:26; full summary with commentary here).
On the EIGHTH DAY OF PASSOVER we read Deuteronomy 15:19-16:17. Like the reading for the second day, it catalogs the annual cycle of festivals, their special observances, and the offerings brought on these occasions to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. The Eighth Day’s special connection with the Future Redemption is reflected in the Haftorah (reading from the Prophets) for this day (Isaiah 10:32-12:6).
