Passover Begins Tonight

Beverly Hills (myFOXla.com) - Passover, the Jewish holiday commemorating the deliverance of Israelites from bondage in Egypt, will begin at sundown today, with observant families throughout the Southland holding a traditional feast called a Seder.

Six symbolic foods are served, including matzo, a cracker-like unleavened bread symbolizing the Exodus from the land of pharaoh, when there was not enough time to let the bread rise. Jews are not supposed to eat anything leavened during the holiday period.

Bitter herbs, often horseradish, represent the bitterness of slavery in Egypt; parsley dipped in saltwater symbolizes the tears shed while in bondage; and an apple, nut, spice and wine mixture called charoset represents what the Old Testament describes as the mortar used by Jewish slaves to build Egyptian edifices.

According to the book of Exodus, enslaved Israelites used the blood of lambs to mark the doors of their homes so the Angel of Death would "pass over" their homes and instead slay the firstborn sons of Egyptians -- the 10th and most horrific plague that finally persuaded the pharaoh to agree to Moses' demand: "Let my people go."

During the Seder, people drink four cups of wine or grape juice. As part of ritual, a child traditionally asks "the four questions," the first being, "Why is this night different from all other nights?"

The meal is accompanied by reading from the Haggadah, or "narration" book, which tells the story of the Israelites' deliverance from bondage.

Passover is observed for seven days by Jews in Israel and eight days by many Jews outside Israel because of different interpretations of Jewish law. Seders are held on the first two days of Passover outside Israel.

To Rabbi Laura Geller of Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, "Passover is powerful because it operates on four levels simultaneously" -- historical, political, psychological and spiritual.

"The whole point of Passover is the coming out of Egypt," Geller said. "The Hebrew word for Egypt comes from the word that means narrow place. The exodus from narrow place is what Passover is all about."

The political element is that in "every generation there is story of coming out of a narrow place," Geller said, citing the 1985 book by political philosopher Michael Walzer "Exodus and Revolution" "in which he argues the Exodus story is the paradigm for all national liberation movements since then."

Passover's psychological level is that "each one of us has our own narrow place, our own personal Egypt" and "a spiritual level of what are the resources that it takes to move out of narrow places to a promised land," Geller said.

"At my seder table, people will be telling the story in their own way about what tight spaces they've been in this year," Geller said. "Whether they're aware of it or not, it's a way of telling the story of Passover."

While questioning the validity of the story of the Exodus is anathema to many Jews, many others recognize it as largely symbolic, rather than a reflection of historical events.

In their 2001 book, "The Bible Unearthed," which compares the stories of the bible to the historical and archaeological evidence, Professor Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University and his writing partner, Professor Neil Asher Silberman, assert that of all biblical stories the Exodus is among the most obvious fabrications, part of a narrative created to support the political and territorial ambitions of the rulers of the kingdom of Judah in the 7th century BC.

The Israelites, they write, always lived in Canaan, the so-called promised land.

The concept of the story of the Exodus being apocryphal has come to be accepted by modern Jewish scholars. In Passover in 2001, Rabbi David Wolpe told his congregation at Los Angeles' Sinai Temple that "the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all."