A Blessing for Salt
Elliott batTzedek & Karen Escovitz

 
At my seder we pretty much bless everything on the table, including the flowers, the water, and the salt. After all, in Jewish tradition, you can’t eat something until you’ve blessed it, so how can we possibly dip into salt water until we’ve blessed both?

 
This is our ritual for blessing the salt, taken from a poem by Elana Dykewoman. I’ll go look for the original poem and post it when I find it.

Blessing for Salt

Reader: Our sage Elana Dykewoman teaches: I had a dream: I spilled a sack of salt in the road.  No matter, my friends said, we don’t need salt.  But I remembered my grandmother sending me little burlap bags of salt from Florida, and I said: that’s the trouble with us.  Salt is an electrolyte, we need it to conduct electricity, the good feelings between us.  No wonder we don’t have the connections we need.  We don’t have enough salt.

Then each person in turn says to the person on their left: “You are the salt of the earth. Pass it on!” until it has gone all the way around the table