Rabbit hunt!

The Passover bunny does not bring us the roasted egg for the seder plate, and we don’t celebrate Passover with a roasted-egg hunt. (If we hunt anything, it’s the afikoman.)

Nevertheless, some traditional haggadot are decorated with a drawing of a rabbit, a non-kosher animal.

The rabbit is a reminder of the special procedure to be followed when Passover begins on Saturday night, when Shabbat is ending, as it does this year. It is tricky to remember the sequence of actions at the beginning of the seder, and so our predecessors devised the [Hebrew] acronym YaKNeHaZ, for yayin, kiddush, ner, havdalah, zman:

• Yayin—the standard blessing for wine, borei p’ri hagafen
• Kiddush—the kiddush (“sanctification”) for erev Pesach, with text and melody different from the Shabbat evening kiddush
• Ner—the blessing for lighting fire after Shabbat, borei m’orei ha-eish
• Havdalah—the prayer separating Shabbat from the day that follows
• Zman—the blessing celebrating the season (shehecheyanu).

The havdalah text is also different from the regular one, because it marks the separation between the holiness of Shabbat and the holiness of the festival rather than between Shabbat and weekdays.

But what does any of this have to do with a rabbit? To a speaker of Yiddish or German, the Hebrew acronym Yaknehaz sounds like jag den Hase, “hunt the hare.” The commentary in The Feast of Freedom, the Rabbinical Assembly haggadah, notes that this is “a double anomaly since hunting animals in unJewish and the hare is ‘unclean’ to boot.”