I want to welcome you all.

I am very glad to see you – glad that we can join together to celebrate Pesach, in these difficult times. And they are difficult, but I won’t say anything else about that now.

To us the word, Pesach means to pass over, and that comes from the idea that the angel of God passed over the homes of the Hebrews, as our people were called over 3000 years ago, when we were slaves in the land of Egypt. That is why we call this holiday Passover.

But recently I have just learned an interesting thing about that word, Pesach, that Hebrew word. Now I don’t speak or read Hebrew. I sort of know most of the letters in the alphabet and can follow along the Hebrew words in the prayers in the prayer book. But this is what I just learned…The first letter or syllable in Pesach is Pe. And as a word all by itself Pe means “mouth” and the second syllable “sach” means speak. So, the word Pesach, also can mean something like “using your mouth to speak or to tell”. And that is what we are gathered here in this room to do tonight – like Jews all over the world do. Tonight, we will tell the story of the Exodus – the journey of the ancestors of the Jewish people from slavery to freedom. 

And we don’t just tell this because maybe we might feel like it – we tell the story because in the torah we are commanded to tell this story, every year, at this same time of year. We keep telling the story so that every year it gets passed down from generation to generation. We are expected to tell this story to our children, so that they can tell it to their children. But even in places like Jewish nursing homes, they still hold a Pesach seder, even if the youngest person in the room is 75 years old and has heard the story many times. A reform Rabbi named Arthur Green explains “Even if we all know the story, we are commended to tell it again. The act of “Storytelling” for its own sake, you might call it, whether there is anyone “new” who needs to hear it or not.  You might call this the miracle of Pesach.” Says Rabbi Green. 

This year, this night, we are missing a bunch of our second generation of J.A.P.S.  They are off doing other things and cannot be with us this year. I hope they will be with us next year. But as I look around this room, I see a whole new generation sitting here – ready to hear the telling of this story. 

So, let’s begin.