Next Year in Jerusalem!

For FHE this week we decided to do a traditional Seder dinner for Passover to help the kids learn more about their heritage as children of Israel. I pretended all day to be a Jewish mother bustling around getting things ready for the feast: setting the table, buying the unleavened matzah bread, cooking a real little whole chicken (a stretch for this semi-vegetarian girl!) for the matzo ball soup, and trying to figure out adaptations for the symbolic foods that our kids might actually taste.

Isaac with the two candles the mother lights at the beginning of the Seder, the "wine" (apple juice), and just below that the matzah (unleavened) bread covered with a napkin.

Russell and Elijah's cup of "wine"
(we used apple juice because I wasn't so sure all of the kids would drink grape juice)

I'm not sure if I got the plate set up just right, but here's what it should have:
1. A shank bone (we used a bone we picked up in Kashmir that was probably a goat bone)
2. Charoset--this is supposed to be chopped up nuts, fruits and spices. I mixed peanut butter, almond butter, applesauce, cinnamon and sugar. The kids loved it.
3. Bitter Herbs--I mixed wasabi paste with some plain yogurt since I didn't have horseradish
4. Green Vegetable--I used cucumbers instead of parsley so I was sure the kids would eat it
5. Boiled Egg

We did not do everything strictly as we might if we were Jewish, but we did our best. We used a modified version of BYU professor Victor Ludlow's Passover Seder script. We summarized some of it and used some pictures as we told about Moses and the children of Israel in Egypt, their deliverance, the Last Supper, and the appearance of Elijah in the latter days. Here's a good article from our Church magazine on how the Passover symbols apply to our own LDS religious beliefs. I got the recipes for the matzo ball soup and the (sinfully) DELICIOUS matzo almond bark dessert from Family Fun. I realized as I studied more about the Seder that more than anything it is designed for children, so it should be fun and include songs, laughter, good food and cozy family togetherness. We taught the kids the "Dayenu" song's chorus and we sang it after Rich recited all the things God had done for the children of Israel. Here's a YouTube video with the song and some images that show the Christian connections.

Everybody loved the matzo ball soup. A fair amount of silliness, but they were attentive the whole time. Isaac stole the matzo for the afikomen and bartered with Dad for the delicious matzo almond bark for dessert. Russell said, "I want to do this when I grow up too."