As requested, here is my Passover thread. I’m gonna keep it as brief as possible. If you have questions please feel free to ask.

I’ll put pronunciation guides in brackets, and do a recording of each too. Please bear in mind there are variations to pronunciation depending where you live etc.

First things first. It is called Passover, or Pesach. As with all our ‘ch’ it’s not pronounced like chair. Instead it’s a back-of-the-throat phlegm noise (nice).

The general greeting we’d say to each other, or you might say to us, is either
Chag Sameach (ch- like above, ag-like bag; Sam-like the name, ay-like pay, ach- like ch above with a in front (a-like in bag))

Or just happy Pesach.

On to the story

Years ago, thousands of em, the Jews were enslaved by a Pharoah in Egypt. Non specific Pharaoh, sorry.
This Pharaoh started to worry that the Jews would outnumber the Egyptians (which was apparently bad? idk) so made the totally rational decision to have the firstborn son of

every family killed. Drowned in the Nile if you want specifics.
This one woman (who never really gets named because patriarchy) Jochebed can’t bring herself to kill her son, so she floats him off down the Nile in a basket.

A bit further down, the Pharaoh’s daughter is bathing with her handmaidens in the Nile. And the baby floats on by. Obviously she adopts him, and calls him... Moses.

In the meantime, the Jewish people have been doing some hefty praying to try and get freed from slavery. G0d, in their infinite wisdom, decides to send Moses (who, the bible tells us, is not always the sharpest tool) to tell the Pharoah to let his people go.

Which goes about as well as you’d expect.

So G0d gets ANGRY. And threatens Pharaoh to send ten plagues, getting worse each day, to punish Egypt. Hopefully Pharaoh will free the slaves to save his people (I’m not seeing any parallels with current events, why do you ask?).

Shockingly, Pharaoh tells G0d to get on with it

The plagues are: water turning to blood, frog swarms, lice, flies, livestock pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the killing of firstborn children. To make sure the Jewish children were not killed, Jews painted lambs blood round their doors.

The Angel of Death then passed over (see what we did there?) those homes.

When the final plague kills the Pharaoh’s firstborn son, he lets the Jewish people go. But gives them only a few hours to do so (I’ll come back to that later). They all gather their things and run into

the desert. The Pharaoh then changes his mind, and sends his army after them. They run to the Red Sea, which is when G0d parts the waves for them to keep going. The water floods back behind them, killing Pharaoh’s army. Which, yay? I suppose?

Anyway, G0d told Moses, who was leading the Jews, that there was a promised land waiting for them. But Mo, being a numpty, sent guys off to scope out the land ahead. G0d took this as a lack of faith, and punished all the Jewish people, making them stay in the desert for 40 years

Eventually, the Jewish people were allowed into the ‘promised land’. Much rejoicing

So, that’s what we’re celebrating. We were persecuted, freed, and made it to the promised land. Passover is one of our few fun festivals, lots of food and family. That’s gonna be in part 2...