To My Seder Guests: poem for a quarantined seder

To My Seder Guests 
Next year we will run out of Passover mixing bowls from cooking for crowds, so we’ll just keep rewashing them.

Someone will ask us if they can join us two days before the seder and we’ll say yes.
There will be a mountain of coats.

Next year we will get that old table out of the garage and clean it off and make it fit in our awkwardly re-arranged living room to make space for you all.
We’ll forget who we asked to bring the extra folding chairs so we’ll scramble with a few wheely desk chairs.

We’ll run around the table during the fun songs.
It will be so loud.
I’ll have to settle you all down to begin the next part.

Next year you will taste the produce of my garden, our local maror.
Next year the table will groan.

You will all jump in with your comments and talk at all once
and I will not moderate, but sit back with delight.
Our elaborations on the story will be worthy of praise.

It will smell like fresh asparagus and flowers
And artificially flavoured fruit slice candies.
and red wine.

Next year we’ll find more typos in our homemade family Haggadah.
And no one’s favourites will be skipped.

Our house will ring with your song.
Then, we’ll laugh at inside jokes in the kitchen as we clear up together.

Next year it will be Jerusalem here for an evening again.
I will greet each of you like Miriam and like Elijah
And I will hold you and kiss you as you enter and as you go.

 

 

 

Notes: This poem makes several references to the Passover Haggadah and prayers.

• “Our elaborations on the story will be worthy of praise” refers to the line at the start of the storytelling in the Haggadah that says, “Whoever expands upon the story of the Exodus from Egypt is worthy of praise.”
• “Taste the produce of my garden” is a reference to the fourth cup of wine where give thanks for “the produce of the field”.
• “Next year it will be Jerusalem here” is a reference to the traditional seder ending, “Next year in Jerusalem”.
• “Like Miriam and like Elijah” is a reference to the prophet Elijah who is a traditionally invited to the seder. Many modern seders invite the prophet Miriam as well.
• “As you enter and as you go” is a reference to the Sh’ma.

All-of-a-Kind Family and the quarentined Passover 

My friend Paula Lewis reminded me of  just how educational All-of-a-Kind-Family by Sydney Taylor was.

Remember that time in All-of-Kind-Family when the sisters got scarlet fever and the family was quarantined and their only contact with others was when relatives dropped off food by the window or Charlie left packages of toys… and they had to have the Seder alone?

Strange Thought: A new take on Loving the Stranger

Crossposted at Jewschool and Reconstructing Judaism

When newspaper style guides started adopting “they” and “their” as singular, gender-neutral pronouns a friend told me, “I get why this should be done. It is the right thing to do. But it is going to be really hard for me to switch. It is not going to just roll off my tongue.” His words reminded me of someone who was on a rabbi search committee who was interviewing a female rabbis for the first time who confided, “I know I should give these women a fair shake, but it is not how I grew up. When I close my eyes and picture a rabbi, I see a beard and hear a man’s voice. If I do this I will be going against my gut feeling and not just now but for years when I will see them on the bimah”. Both these people made a significant effort to adjust their own thoughts and words and what go against what felt “natural”, to do what was difficult and unfamiliar because they wanted to bring forward a more just world.

During the Passover season we hear a lot about the biblical verses commanding us to love the stranger because we were strangers in the land of Egypt (Leviticus 19:33-3 and Deuteronomy 10:18-19). These verses have been used for generations to underline our Jewish obligation to care for the oppressed and marginalized and to advocate for refugees and immigrants.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks discusses how these verses refers not only to our actions but to our words, thoughts and emotions. He writes that God wants us to “fight the hatred in our hearts, “as our inclination at first is not to love the stranger, but to fear or hate them”.

Extending this metaphorical reading of these verses suggests that it is not just “strange” people that we need to accept despite our prejudices, but to create positive change we need to embrace unfamiliar ideas and habits of mind. For justice to proceed, we must allow in thoughts that are unfamiliar and ways of talking and acting that at first seem strange to us.

The ethicist Moses Pava writes that the commandment to love the stranger “challenges the very notion of a static and unchanging community” because it asks us to continually broaden our notion of community, which also forces us to “to transcend our current conceptions of who ‘we’ are.” He observes that to love the stranger we must transgress the status quo. Since the commandment is one that we are always obliged to do, it means we cannot allow ourselves to be comfortable once we have alleviated one form of oppression, but once comfortable with our new reality, push ourselves through uncomfortable ways yet again.

Just as every year the haggadah tells us we must see ourselves as if we personally left Egypt and were personally redeemed from oppression, so every year we must push ourselves out of our comfort zones and try to embrace new and “strange” habits of mind and thoughts. We cannot rely on what was once difficult and brave for us but is now part of our regular internal conversation or behaviour.

It is not enough to have stood with civil rights protests fifty years ago if your community is not supporting Black Lives Matter today. If thirty years ago you began including the matriarchs in your prayers, it may be time to stretch to something like female God language, which might make you feel as uncomfortable now as you did then. If twenty years ago you instituted having men involved in clearing up and washing the seder dishes, it is time to examine the cleaning, shopping, cooking and meal-planning. If you once championed inclusion at your JCC by having ramps and accessible washrooms, it is time to turn your eye to access to programming. Loving the stranger means stretching to new and previously uncomfortable places. For the child of the stranger becomes a native-born and the strange new words that we stumble through with brave intention but slower speech flow easily off the tongues of our children.

The Freedom Seder, radical but not Messianic

As I wrote here before, I  like to get ready for Passover by reading the original Freedom Seder which took place on April 4, 1969, the first anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, the third night of Passover.

Hundreds of people of varied racial and religious communities gathered in a Black church in the heart of Washington DC to celebrate the original Freedom Seder. For the first time, it [explicitly] intertwined the ancient story of liberation from Pharaoh with the story of Black America’s struggle for liberation, and the liberation of other peoples as well.

 

As radical as they were for the time, I noticed something a bit sad this time through:

How much then are we in duty bound to struggle, work, share, give, think, plan, feel, organize, sit-in, speak out, hope, and be on behalf of Mankind! For we must end the genocide [in Vietnam],* stop the bloody wars that are killing men and women as we sit here, disarm the nations of the deadly weapons that threaten to destroy us all, end the brutality with which the police beat minorities in many countries, make sure that no one starves, free the poets from their jails, educate us all to understand their poetry, allow us all to explore our inner ecstasies, and encourage and aid us to love one another and share in the human fraternity. All these! For, as is said, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig-tree, and none shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken. For let all the peoples walk each one in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God for ever and ever.”

* Insert any that is current—such as “Biafra,” “Black America,” etc.—depending on the situation.

 

With all its calls and hope for”Liberation Now! Next Year in a World of Freedom”, it still acknowledged that each year or era ahead would have its own  war crimes or genocide to talk about at the seder. So in this part of the Freedom Seder there is not exactly a vision of a utopia or Messianic future, but more along the lines of

לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמוֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה

It is not your duty to complete the work. But neither are you free to desist from it.

 

Video of the seder is below:

 

 

Enjoy a young Arthur Waskcow and Rabbi Balfour Brickner and Rev. Channing Phillips. Rev. Phillips tells abortion jokes. It was filmed by the CBC. (Yes you have your 1960s era well funded Canadian public broadcaster to thank for this historic footage.)

You can get a copy of the haggadah in pdf here.

Matzah and how authoritarianism is crumby

Shayna Zamkanei has an excellent post on what Matzah used be like. In Why your ancestors never ate matzos she goes over some important points.

Our ancestors never ate “flat, crisp matzah” until the 19th century. What they ate  looked very similar to a pita. She amasses a lot of proof. ( I had only head of the first one- Hillel folding the matzah, lamb and marror together).

We know this to be true for several reasons, the first of which is the “korekh” component of the seder. “Korekh,” which means to roll up or bend around, is what we are supposed to do when remembering Hillel and making the infamous “Hillel sandwich.” Since we cannot roll massa that is crisp, we must assume that massa must be pliable.

Second, the Babylonian Talmud Pesahim 7a suggests that bread and massa could be easily confused: “Rabbah the son of R. Huna said in the name of Rab: If a moldy loaf [is found during Pesah in a bread bin and we are uncertain whether it is bread or massa], if the majority of loaves [in the bin] are massait is permitted [because we assume it to be like the majority].” The massa currently sold ubiquitously in stores, however, never threatens to grow mold, no matter how hard you foster the right conditions. Soft massa, on the other hand, easily does.

Third, later sources also to refer to massa as soft, and Ashkenazi Jews cannot wash away this fact by claiming that soft massa was a Sepharadi custom. For example, the Rama (Rabbi Moshe Isserlis) wrote that massa should be made thinner than the tefah (around 3 inches) recommended in the Babylonian Talmud, while the Chafetz Chaim advised that massa be made “soft as a sponge” (Mishna Berura, Orach Haim 486). In “The Laws of Baking Massa,” the Shulchan Aruch deems baking to be sufficient  when “no threads can be pulled from it.” Rabbi Hershel Schachter, rabbinic dean at Yeshiva University and halakhic advisor for the kashruth division of the Orthodox Union, stated clearly that there is no custom that prohibits Ashkenazi Jews from eating soft massa.

She attributed today’s cardboard matzah to the “its industrial production beginning in the 1800s.” However I think there are other, intertwined  reasons as well.

If you bake your own matzah freshly even with the strict “18 minutes from flour-water contact” to end of  baking rule, it is not hard and cracker like. I know this because our family has baked matzah (when we did it it was with Passover flour) at a koshered outdoor  pizza oven at the annual matzah bake in Toronto. The matzah comes out soft and chewy but turns stale and hard in  few days.

I also noticed  recipes for home made matzah in one of my favourite cook books, The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews, I: Traditional Recipes and Menus and a Memoir of a Vanished Way of Life by Edda Servi Machlin. She also includes stories and cultural information about the Roman Jews (who are neither Ashkeanzi/Sepharadi because they existed before  split). She recounts how everyone used to make their matzah at home. Her recipes also call for using oil or sweet wine instead of water and for the 18 minutes applying to the baking time and not the total contact time. She describes how children loved matzah and loved being involved in baking and eating it.

Even before industrialization, worries about kashrut and strictness lead many Eastern European communities  to allow only the town baker to make matzot. People were not trusted to do it in their homes. This created a situation where the industrialization was possible and its inferior product was accepted by the community because they had already lost contact with the visceral tastes and knowledge of what used to be a home-centred mitzvah. And this is what we lose when we worry more about halacha then the actual mitzvot.

So I say, fight the cardboard and crumbs and take back matzah!!

Make your own. ( At home need a very hot oven, passover flour and speedy hands if you want it to be traditionally kosher. Or commandeer an outdoor bread oven and kosher it). One batch is enough for putting out at your seder and for the experience.

 

 

Getting in the mood for Pesach

My favourite way to get inspired for my seders is  watching the classic Freedom Seder  which took place on April 4, 1969, the first anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, the third night of Passover.

Hundreds of people of varied racial and religious communities gathered in a Black church in the heart of Washington DC to celebrate the original Freedom Seder. For the first time, it [explicitly] intertwined the ancient story of liberation from Pharaoh with the story of Black America’s struggle for liberation, and the liberation of other peoples as well.

Enjoy a young Arthur Waskcow and Rabbi Balfour Brickner and Rev. Channing Phillips. Rev. Phillips tells abortion jokes. It was filmed by the CBC. (Yes you have your 1960s era well funded Canadian public broadcaster to thank for this historic footage.)

You can get a copy of the haggadah in pdf here.

If anyone wants a copy of my current haggadah, let me know.