Sunday School March 9: Passover and Hametz

Teacher Barb Hauck-Mah Attendance: 1 Junior High and 3 Elementary kids

On Thursday evening March 20, the Junior High group will be hosting a Seder at Stanley, with a service led by Rev. Shawn. To prepare for this experience, we talked about the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt (Old Testament,Book 2). As I descrbed the ten plagues, each person spilled a drop of water(wine) from his or her cup onto a plate–one drop per plague. The drops symbolize sorrow and regret that any of God’s creatures had to be harmed for the Jewish people to become free. This is one of the rituals enacted as part of the Seder Haggadah.

Next, we talked about the significance of unleavened bread, or matzah, in the Passover celebration. There is a tradition of removing hametz (leavened dough products and their crumbs) from the house to prepare for Passover. “As we sweep the crumbs from the corners of our rooms, we brush away the outside hametz and the hametz or crummy thoughts within us” (From Rahel Muselah’s Why on this Night? A Passover Haggadah for Family Celebration, 2000). We then cleared out some inside crumminess by secretly writing down a few regretful thoughts or acts from the past year. We placed our folded up regrets into a pan and safely set it aflame.

Next Sunday, we will be discussing the Seder plate and other parts of the Seder service–whilst we fill Easter eggs for Stanley’s egg hunt on March 23.