Why is this plate different from all other plates?
As dynamic and adaptable as the Jewish people, Freestyle’s six walnut triangles can be arranged and rearranged to fit your Passover table and your mood.
It's also the first Seder plate in history (that we know of) to include a dedicated shankbone cradle—at long last!
Newdaica
Playful, modern, heirloom-quality Jewish ritual items
that inspire more relevant and meaningful engagement with tradition.
It all started at the Seder table...
Here were the usual cast of Passover characters: beautiful table settings, bottles of wine, a mostly-matching set of haggadot, family members talking over one another, and at the center of it all, a Seder plate—passive, stoic, static—acknowledged only with sporadic pointing. The Seder plate is symbolism, literally supporting the core expressions of Pesach, yet for all of its ritual weight, this plate was rivaling Elijah for invisibility.
Certainly tradition is at the heart of Judaism—what Jewish practice is based on and how it's passed down generation after generation, l’dor vador. But sometimes, as in a game of telephone, these practices become disconnected from their intent as they move on down the line, and we end up with tradition for tradition’s sake.
And so, as we contemplated the plate, resting there as still and silent as an ancient pyramid, and the shank bone cantilevered over the edge of its tiny dish, we wondered: How might we infuse relevance into the traditional Seder plate to inspire more engagement with the Passover ceremony as a whole?
When ritual becomes routine, when tradition only reminds us what to do, but not why, it’s time to play around with things. It’s time to let the Seder plate go free.
Running through all that we do is a vein of playful disruption, because we’ve found that the surprise and joy, the wonder of encountering the unexpected can prompt re-engagement with any practice, no matter how rote. Interrupting habitual patterns of thought, movement, and relationships opens the door to more meaningful and mindful ways of connecting to ourselves, to others, and to spiritual powers.
So we took the Seder plate, and we took it apart. Then, in its reconstruction, we tried to answer three questions:
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How can we encourage more tactile interaction with the plate?
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How might the plate inspire more engagement around Passover topics?
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What is the ideal way to secure a shank bone?
The result was a moveable plate, whose dynamic triangles call out to be held, formed, and transformed into shapes that allow better access for everyone at the table, that spark discussion (or debate!) about which foods to place where, that evoke imagery from the Passover story or maybe from nature.
And that teetering shank bone? Turns out, all it needed was a little lift from some elegant brass cradles. Which in the end is the very essence of Newdaica: Playful disruption for the sake of uplifting Jewish tradition.
