Birmingham Temple Seder Celebrates Freedom

At sunset tonight, Jews all around the world will gather with their families to celebrate Passover, the eight-day holiday that commemorates the freeing of Jews enslaved under Pharoah in ancient Egypt.

Tomorrow, the in Farmington Hills will hold a second-night seder for about 130 temple members. The event will be "both similar and different" when compared to traditional Jewish services, Rabbi Tamara Kolton said.

"We celebrate all the symbols, but we emphasize the power and responsibility of people," she said. "After all, we're here because people saved themselves and each other."

Birmingham Temple is a Humanistic Judaism congregation. Members are "cultural Jews, who find that Judaism is most meaningful in the context of modern thinking," according to the congregation's website.

For instance, this year's seder plate, which traditionally includes six items that symbolize the bitterness and pain of slavery and sacrifice, will include a piece of bamboo "as a symbol of our affinity with the people of Japan," Kolton said.

"Bamboo is a symbol of endurance, resilience and strength, which is very much in keeping with the Passover story," she added.

There is a Humanistic version of the haggadah, a text read during the seder, Kolton said. In traditional Judaism, the story centers around God delivering Jews from slavery, by visiting 10 plagues on the Egyptians, from hoards of frogs and lice, to the death of every first-born human and animal, except for those who had marked their doorposts with lamb's blood.

Humanistic Jews focus on the way people take action to deliver themselves, looking at the Exodus story from a non-theistic point of view.

"We distinguish history from myth," Kolton said. "We tell the story as myth, and history as truth. We know that in every generation, people have made choices to leave lands where they were not free, and made bold journeys, even across oceans, to make better choices for themselves."

For more information about the Birmingham Temple, visit their website.