Askmoses-A Jews Resource
What's wrong with cremation?
Browse our archives

The Scholar is ready to answer your question. Click the button below to chat now.


Scholar Online:

Type in your question here:

What is the Karpas on the Seder Plate and what is its significance?

by Rabbi Yossi Marcus

  

Library » Holidays » Passover » Seder » Laws and Rituals | Subscribe | What is RSS?


PRINT EMAIL COMMENT

Karpas is the vegetable (onion, potato, parsley etc) that is dipped into salt-water and eaten toward the beginning of the Seder, before the recitation of the Four Questions.

Why?

It's Childish

One of the objectives of the Seder is to transmit our history and tradition to our children. To do this best we want our children to ask questions. So we eat this strange appetizer (shortly before the time for asking of the Four Questions) to prompt the children to be inquisitive and ask "why is this night different? why is this People different?"

It's Sad

This salty dish is supposed to remind us of the millions of tears shed by our suffering ancestors in Egypt. Freedom tastes better if you have first tasted slavery.

It's Deep

The Hebrew word karpas read backwards (Samech-PeReCH) connotes: 600,000 [suffered] harsh labor.

Maimonides explains that harsh labor in this context refers to the fact that the Egyptians sadistically gave the Jews tasks that were endless and purposeless (like building things that would sink into the ground).

In our own lives, we also experience endless and meaningless labor. When we obsess over work or are consumed with an irrational obsession with whatever it may be we too are suffering from harsh labor.

Ironically, we get this capacity for irrational, unconditional devotion from the soul. The soul is irrational in a good way. Its desire and drive to holiness is not based on any logical cause. It is unconditional and unrestrained.

When we’re in the spiritual Egypt, our soul’s infinity is distorted into an endless drive for material and egotistical ends.

By dipping and eating the karpas we hope to realign things, and allow the soul to dictate our obsessions.


ADD A COMMENT

Please email me when new comments are posted (you must be  logged in).

RELATED CATEGORIES

Holidays » Passover » Seder » The Seder Plate

Maimonides
Moses son of Maimon, born in Spain in 1135, died in Egypt in 1204. Noted philosopher and authority on Jewish law. Also was an accomplished physician and was the personal doctor for members of the Egyptian royalty. Interred in Tiberius, Israel.
Seder
Festive meal eaten on the first two nights of the holiday of Passover (In Israel, the Seder is observed only the first night of the holiday). Seder highlights include: reading the story of the Exodus, eating Matzah and bitter herbs, and drinking four cups of wine.