Why Is This Night Different From All Others?

Tonight is the first Seder of Passover. Passover is the Jewish holiday which celebrates the liberation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt. "For once we were slaves but now we are free men." It's in the Haggodah. The word "bondage" occurs a lot. And then there's the plagues. But I don't need to tell you all this. You're all educated people. And besides, there have been movies about it, The Ten Commandments, Prince of Egypt, and at least a snippet in History of the World: Part 1. And as we all know, those are Jewish stories forced on America by the Jew-run liberal media. There was also a Hilary Swank movie called The Reaping that had something vaguely to do with the plagues. It was fucking terrible.

The name Passover, or Pesach in Hebrew, comes from the 10th plague. In order to save the the first born sons of the Jewish households but allow the Angel of Death to kill all of the Egyptian first born, the Jews painted the signposts and doors of their homes with lambs' blood so that the Angel would pass over them. This is pretty fucked up. It's nearly an endorsement of the partial genocide of a group of people's children. Not sure how comfortable I am with that. It's kind of a strange holiday when you consider it. One the one hand, it celebrates freedom and culture and history. And on the other, it celebrates systematic violent revenge.

The Passover meal is called the Seder. Which is Hebrew for "as good an excuse as any for my father to drink 10 glasses of wine and say inappropriate things to family members." In traditional households, there is an awful lot of wine consumed at these things. The meal instructs you when to drink, and it's quite often. In my house, this means that 6-10 glasses of wine are consumed on top of the 2 or 3 whiskeys downed before the meal. It's really very restrained, very pious.

And then there's the food. OH GOD. The food. If you like Jewish food, which I do, Passover is nothing short of divine. There's gefilte fish, brisket, chicken soup, matzo balls, macaroons (unleavened, of course), charoseth and all kinds of other goodies. I can never get to the final course without unbuttoning at least the top button. Sometimes the whole pants come off. It's like Thanksgiving without the turkey or gentiles.

UPDATE: This has nothing to do with Passover but I can't resist: it's Michael Buble being stalked by a velociraptor. I couldn't be more happy. Clever girl...