Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Passover Trivia and History at the White House

I was very interested to hear that in Washington DC, the Obamas will host the first ever Passover Seder at the White House. It's a nice gesture and I hope it encourages everyone to learn a little more about this holiday, which celebrates events from more than 3,000 years ago.

While attending a Seder tonight I picked up an interesting piece of Passover trivia. The original group of Jews who moved to Egypt was only made up of about 75 people. For many years, relations were very good between them and the Egyptians. About 400 years later, things had changed for the worse and the Jewish population found itself enslaved. Those events resulted in Moses leading the Jewish people out of Egypt. Do you know how large that group had grown to be? Historians now estimate it to have been about 2,000,000 people.

Imagine such a large population having to immediately leave their homes and everything that was familiar and go into the desert for an unknown future. Keep this in mind then next time you feel nervous about some kind of change in your life.

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