We do it to remind ourselves to make change part of the routine of Jewish life. And we do these things year after year after year in order to focus our attention on the power of change, for our ancestors in Egypt as well as for us in these times. Our children, in their marquee performance of the festival, point out the changes spread out before them on the seder table. We change our dishes and what we eat (much to the dismay of our digestive systems, but we do it anyway). Passover emphasizes change in lasting and literal ways. Amid the darkness, literal and figurative, they could see the light. ![]() They recognized, with the help of strong leadership, that things were indeed changing. ![]() Meanwhile, so the story goes, the Jews were planning for the future. In a time of crisis, the official Egyptian response was to pretend the signs weren’t there, to act as if nothing had changed. ![]() Days, perhaps weeks, went by when the Nile’s waters ran clean, the frogs stayed in their homes and the locusts subsided, when physical and psychological despair would not have seemed so imminent. But however much time the whole thing took, most agree that there were likely intervals during which there was no evidence on the ground of the calamity befalling Egypt. S cholars debate how long the 10 plagues lasted in Egypt, with estimates ranging from one month or slightly less up to a full year.
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