Thursday, March 24, 2011

Jewish traditional feasts and celebrations

Walk with Y'shua through the Jewish Year
This is a great 1st resource if you'd like a brief introduction into the Jewish feasts, history and celebration.  We do these with our girls and it brings an appreciation and depth to the Bible stories because we can understand more of the traditions and customs. 

It gives good suggestions for crafts, foods, celebrations all
geared towards children.
We have just passed "Purim" ~ celebrating Queen Esther and the rescue of the Jews from Haman's plot to destroy them all.  We personally read the story of Esther to our girls from "Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories".  It is really good and we have been working our way through the whole Bible that way.
The next celebration is Passover (Easter is the "pagan" celebration name, but for ease of conversations, we will refer to it as either Easter or Passover so as not to confuse others).  Passover celebrates how the angel of death passed over the Israelites and then Pharoah let the people go!  Jesus celebrated Passover (Lord's Supper) with his disciples and then Jesus became the lamb that was slain for the sins of us all. For the Jews, they searched for the "afikomen" instead of eggs...we have celebrated a traditional "seder" meal with a Rabbi and it has forever changed my view point on communion, etc.  The children often search for little gold wrapped coins.  You can easily search "Passover" on the internet and find some great activities that you could add to your own special gatherings in April!

1 comment:

Kimberly Vanderhorst said...

That sounds so fascinating! I remember taking a course on the Old Testament while at University and we learned a lot about Jewish culture because of the insight it gave us into scriptures I'd never understood previously.