Released just in time for Pesach is “The No-Potato Passover” by Aviva Kanoff. Interesting, colorful, and most important, easy-to-follow, the book offers photographs to accompany every recipe, which are not too involved, have few ingredients, and are healthful.

Here are a few dishes sure to be a hit with families and friends.

“Why do we eat matzah on Passover?” asks Rabbi Reuven Kimelman, professor at Brandeis University, author of several books on Jewish liturgy, and scholar-in-residence at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly.

I sense that this is a trick question, and decline to answer.

He presses me.

“Why do we eat matzah?” he repeats.

I reluctantly answer.

A listing of synagogues hosting communal feasts

If you are in need of a seder to go to, the first place to turn is the rabbi of your local synagogue. He or she may be able to help.

There also are a number of synagogues hosting s’darim this year, with reservations on a first-come basis. What follows is a list of those s’darim of which we are aware.

There are fewer possibilities this year because of the difficulties created by the second seder night falling out at the end of Shabbat.

“It would have been enough for us.”

That phrase of the haggadah — in Hebrew, the more concise word “dayyeinu” — reflects the sort of gratitude that Rabbi Henry Glazer believes to be the central message of Judaism, and the soul of every ritual from a funeral to the Pesach seder.

“Freedom can be understood as the capacity to say thank you, to appreciate the giftedness of life,” he says.

With his new volume, “Dayenu: The gratefulness haggadah,” Glazer, who before his retirement served as rabbi at the Fair Lawn Jewish Center, has applied the principle of gratitude to every aspect of the seder.

Meditation on kindling the festival lights:

Closing our eyes, we recall the darkness in the world — hunger, disease, poverty, loneliness, and war — and the human causes for this darkness: greed, envy, hatred, and fear.

We quietly resolve to take the gratefulness we feel at the moment — gratefulness for life, for health, for sustenance, for the love of family and friends, for our home, for the peace we enjoy, for our freedom — and translate these gifts into offerings of chessed, of compassionate generosity, so that our light will bring a ray of hope in the darkness of others.

It is important for children to be involved in the seder. However, at the risk of being labeled a Litvak Grinch, I must state that the seder, like the rest of Judaism, is not primarily a pediatric enterprise. Certainly we want children to participate and, yes, we do many things to stimulate their curiosity and keep them awake for as long as possible. Nevertheless, the memories we seek to create should be more significant than where did daddy hide the afikoman, or how tasty was grandma’s brisket.

As a teenager, I once attended a relative’s seder with many children in attendance. The adult discussions and hermeneutical pyrotechnics — with appropriate digressions and questions for the children — were deliriously and deliciously way above my head. I could hardly follow the give-and-take debates and the learned analyses as each part of the haggadah was dissected and passages were explained with creativity and ingenuity.

Is Moses missing from the haggadah?

Does his supposed absence suggest that the haggadah rejects a human role in the redemption from Egypt?

What is the “Two Powers in Heaven” heresy, and what role does it play in the haggadah and its treatment of Moses?

To answer these questions and one other — was there ever an attempt to deify Moses? — we begin by searching for the allegedly missing main actor in the Exodus drama.

Moses did NOT say “Let our people go make brisket.” However, as a consequence of the parting of the Red Sea, come this time of year, members of our tribe, free from chains, are making their way to kosher butchers and specialty markets everywhere. Brisket is the new manna! We are, as a people, buying tons and tons of it, and seasoning with garlic, wine, ketchup, bay leaves, onion soup, French’s mustard, you name it — my friend Ida Borer uses Coca Cola, and Shana Siegel, president of Gerrard Berman Day School’s board of directors, mixes in beer! Check the Cooking With Beth Blog at http://www.JStandard.com for brisket and other delicious Passover recipes.