Passover 2015
Rabbi Rose Lyn Jacob
Can you feel
the excitement in the air? It’s SPRING! The forsythia is in bloom. The armies of Chocolate Easter Bunnies and
Marshmallow Peeps have deployed! These
are harbingers of just one thing. PASSOVER.
What?
Passover already? Just like Rosh Hashanah and Chanukah, Passover also comes
either “early” or “late” on the secular calendar. However on the Jewish calendar our holidays
come at just the right time, keeping the rhythm of our lunar calendar.
In 2015 the first Seder falls on Friday night, April 3rd, the second
Seder on Saturday night, April 4th, with Easter Sunday on April 5th. For multi-faith extended families, “mazel
tov”... you’ve hit the Trifecta!
The Passover Seder, guided by its fifteen-point script called the
Haggadah, has evolved into a long but riveting recounting of the Jews’ Exodus
from Egypt; filled with symbolic foods, singing, passages in Aramaic, Hebrew,
and, if you are lucky, English.
But just like Thanksgiving, Christmas, or any holiday where friends and
family gather, you know there is an intangible dynamic; an aura that permeates
the air. This invisible force is called TENSION! Yes, reach back in time to PHYSICS 101, and let’s
apply some of those basic definitions to understand “The Physics of Passover.”
Relativity: Whose relatives are we having Seder with? Yours, or MINE?
Distance: How far
you’ll need to shlep to get to the first Seder!
Speed: How fast you’ll need to drive the next day to
get to the second Seder by 5:00 pm.
Thermal Capacity: The point at which you can no longer shove
even one more aluminum pan into the oven.
Air Pressure: The pressure in the air when both your mother and your mother-in-law enter
your kitchen at the same moment.
Stress: Calculating the weight and distribution of brisket
laden platters to prevent the table from buckling.
Binding Energy: The number of prunes necessary to counteract the binding effect of eating
matzah, matzah kugel, matzah balls, and chocolate covered matzah.
Plasticity: The property that allows, ground carp,
onion, and matzah meal to be formed into gefilte fish.
Surface Tension: The property that causes a thin layer of chicken fat to float on the top
of your soup.
Buoyant Force: The upward force on matzah balls immersed in chicken soup.
Law of
Conservation of Energy: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed,
only transformed from one form to another. Why matzah, matzah balls, matzah
farfel and afore mentioned chocolate covered matzah go directly to your hips.
Density: Used to determine how many people can uncomfortably
fit at the Seder table.
Radiant Energy: Glow emitted by your Cousin Rachel who is eight
months pregnant.
Inertia: The property of a body to resist a change in
its state of rest, used to explain why your teenage children can’t get up and
help serve the food.
First Law of
Thermo-Dynamics: All hot food will be cold by the time it reaches
you.
Kinetic
Energy: The amount of shpilkis produced by children who
are bored, and too old to ask the Four Questions, while waiting to search for
the Afikomen.
Projectile: Item thrown during the recounting of the 10
Plagues. Often, but not limited to, plastic frogs, locust, and ping-pong hail.
Acceleration: The rate of change of velocity with respect to time. Example: Do you have to go through the whole
Haggadah? This can be translated into the formula “Nu? Couldn’t you speed
things up a little? The turkey is drying out in the oven!”
After the Afikomen is found, and Chad Gadya is sung, and before the
final words of the Seder, there are two very serious physics terms to apply to
the evening you have just shared with family and friends.
The first is Reverberation. When we tell the Passover story, the words we say
and the melodies we sing echo,
prolonging the sound of our forbearers
long after the source of their voices
has ceased. This is why we diligently
enact the ritual as instructed, so that future generations, God willing,
will echo our voices, and their Seders will reverberate... sending
the message further into the future.
Our final Passover Physics term is Reflection. As we finish the Seder, we intone the words
that have sustained us and given us hope throughout our history, “Next Year in
Jerusalem.” No matter how your Seder has
been conducted, be it thirty minutes or three hours, walk away with the
knowledge that it is our obligation, our sacred duty, our responsibility, to
reflect on the long Journey of the Jews. God took us from Egypt “with a strong
arm and with miracles and signs,” God delivered us from Slavery to Freedom, so
that Jews who come after us, our children, our children’s children will know
that God continues to hold faith with the Jewish people, even as we journey
into an unknowable and perhaps uncertain future.
Rabbi Rose Lyn Jacob
