Passover Bread Burning

I’ve never really understood the rationale behind passover. It’s a celebration of Hebrew emancipation and that’s awesome, but what’s going on with that whole burning of the bread thing? There has got to be more starving-people-friendly things to do with food you don’t want besides burning it. Unfortunately, my pyromania trumps my philanthropy every time, so when an impromptu bonfire pops up on the sidewalk outside of work I get all excited, grab my camera, and watch shit burn for a while.

The legend goes that after getting his ass handed to him by 10 plagues Pharaoh decided to free all of his Hebrew slaves. The amount of plagues Pharaoh was willing to withstand to keep his slaves is pretty impressive. Water turning to blood, frogs, boils, and locusts he could deal with, but the 10th plague was a real mondo slice of God wrath. The spirit of the Lord came to town one night and wiped out the first born of the whole Egyptian population. Moses told the Israelites to toss some lamb’s blood on their front door so that Yahweh would pass over their houses, and that there is the etymology of “Passover.”

Obviously, Pharaoh tapped out after that one and freed his slaves. For some reason the Hebrews were baking up a whole shit ton of bread when they got word of their new freedom, and they left in such a hurry that they didn’t wait for it to rise. There’s probably way more important stuff that they left behind, but it’s the bread we still hear about. In honor of their hasty departure they have a big ass fire and burn a bunch of bread, boxes, plastic bags, plants, eggs–actually, from what I can tell if it’s flammable and can be carried by one or two people it goes in the fire. Here are some photos I took of the blaze.

Apparently they burn Luvs diapers too.

The kids really get into it, and they make sure all the cardboard gets to the fire by prodding the boxes with long walking stick type thingys.

I guess having a three-alarm fire on the sidewalk in the middle of Brooklyn is somehow legal, because the fire department stops by every now and then to make sure everything’s OK, but they don’t shut it down. After making sure the burn zone is safely contained by the flame-retardant police gates, they drive off.

JONATHAN SMITH