PASSOVER REVISITED

Once upon a time a young Jewish man named Joseph was beaten up by his older brothers out of jealousy and sold to a a group of camel herders. This young man went to Egypt, did some jail time, and eventually became an advisor to the Pharaoh due to his uncanny ability to foresee problems and take steps to overcome them. Eventually this man was held in such high esteem he became Pharaoh’s right hand man and the second most powerful man in Egypt, Soon afterwards this man’s brothers came to Egypt to escape a famine and were brought to see the Pharaoh’s number one man.

“Remember me?” Joseph said to the unsuspecting brothers and instead of having them tortured and killed like I would have done, he invited them, their families, friends and sordid acquaintances to seek refuge in Egypt.

Multiplying like rabbits the Jewish people were a threat to outnumber the Egyptians and many years since Joseph had passed on, people who didn’t like immigrants and refuges placed them in a ghetto named Goshen and forced them to toil in building monuments and murdered children to keep the numbers low. Immigration control can be brutal.

Soon a little baby was found adrift in a river by a princess who adopted him into her royal family. He grew and prospered and was greatly revered by the Egyptians until they found out he was Jewish and exiled him. This man, Moses, left had a meet and greet with GOD and came back with a powerful Jewish Lives Matter message. He occupied some public places and eventually got the freedom of the enslaved Jews by releasing plagues on the Egyptians and drowning most of the army.

Being lousy in following directions and the lack of GPS devices back in those days, Moses and his followers wandered in the desert for 40 years before they found their homeland.  Once arriving there the Jews settled down but Moses was informed by GOD that he couldn’t go with them. That really sucked.

This is the short summary of why the Jewish people celebrate Passover. We have expertly made the retelling of this narrative into a two and a half hour filibuster before we are allowed to eat.

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Back in 2012 I wrote a blog entry regarding the Jewish Holiday of Passover and shared my experiences over the years from a wee adolescent to a portly adult.  I enjoy the holidays because it is a time most of the family gets together and spends a few quality hours together. I don’t enjoy the work involved in cleaning for company, preparing the meal and cleaning up after the meal. But all in all it’s always great to see my kids, nephews and nieces and great nephews and great nieces.

My wife, Ilana, really looks forward to these holidays as well. Unfortunately in the past she used to get so stressed out that no one wanted to be near her.  We wondered why stress was omitted as one of the plagues befallen on the Egyptians. Thank heaven she has learned how to deal with that stress which makes everyone in the household breathe a lot easier and we don’t have to fight each other for a hiding place.

Passover, for the two or three people in the world that don’t know what it is, is the celebration of the Jewish escape from Egyptian slavery about 3,800 years ago. We celebrate the holidays by enacting the story of the Jewish plight and eat a meal with symbolic foods that enhance the experience.

When I was a child we went to my father’s family for the Passover Seder as his side of the family were observant orthodox Jews. The story telling portion of the Seder without exaggeration lasted about two hours or so until we could have our first bite of food. As my mother’s side of the family were not religious my brother and I were not raised as observant Jews. Today, while still not an observant Jew and not even a firm believer that GOD exists, I do pray to GOD just in case he or she actually exists and is out there listening. I don’t want to burn my bridges and piss off someone I never met. First impressions are important my old pappy used to tell me.

Needless to say, even though I am not observant, I am proud to be of Jewish heritage and still follow historic traditions. As my wife and I are the now the New York matriarch and patriarchs and have the exclusive family Seder rights of the American Northeast we hold the Seder at our home and have made some slight alterations to the observance. First and foremost we have shortened the reading of the Passover Haggadah to forty minutes instead of the long and tedious traditional two and a half hour reading. We read the Haggadah in English and not in Hebrew because (1) we are living in an English speaking country and (2) I do not speak or read Hebrew. We do some of the prayers in Hebrew and occasionally we have my nephews read the passages in Hebrew as they are fluent in Hebrew. As far as I was concerned the only languages that have any significance in today; world is English, Spanish, Chinese and Pig Latin.

This year we are doing away with the ritual slaughter of the sacrificial lamb because last year when we added that component to our Seder It took days to get the blood off the furniture and walls and everyone was too sickened to enjoy the food afterwards. We should have sheared his wool before ruining it but now we know for next time if we ever decide to go that route again.

For the uninitiated I am including a glossary of pertinent terms associated with Passover:

Matzo/Matzoh: Bread prepared without a leavening agent (yeast). The result is a completely useless carbohydrate with no nutritional value. The Matzoh is flat, hard as cardboard, has no flavors but the Jews absolutely love it. Many supermarkets give it away free with qualifying purchases and we stock up on so many boxes we can eat it for a year. We tried giving it to a food pantry but they didn’t want it. Coincidentally the Hebrew question, “Matzot?” meaning, “What the fuck is this?” has a similar sound to the bread. Coincidence, Hmmmmm.

Charoset: The “ch” has a phlegmy sound like, “chhhhhhhh”. This is a mixture of dried fruits, nuts and wine that symbolizes the mortar used when building the pyramids. Ilana uses 23 different dried fruits and nuts and takes about four hours to chop everything to a fine paste. She will not share this recipe with anyone. Everyone in the immediate family was entrusted with four ingredients and swore an oath never to reveal it to anyone else, She learned that trick from Colonel Sanders.

Malaga wine: No one really knows what a Malaga is but you have to remember to take your insulin before you drink it. At $7.00 a bottle you really can’t claim it is a fine wine, however,  when given to college students and hipsters they thought it was the greatest thing since the Walkman. It’s so sweet that we give it to baby boys just before they are circumcised. We drink four 4 ounce glasses of this stuff during the Seder. I’m not sure how much alcohol is in this wine but after the 2^nd glass some of the women in the family get really rowdy and loud. Party in a bottle without doubt and a party on your taste buds.

Bitter Herbs: Bitter herbs are meant to symbolize the bitter times during the Egyptian slavery. We put out parsley, horseradish and romaine lettuce and to this day we still haven’t been able to figure out which one is the Haroset.

Pascal lamb: A lamb shank that symbolizes the sacrifice of a lamb whose blood was used to mark the doors of the Hebrews so that when the angel of death passed over the city (Passover… you get it?) the lives of the Jewish first born children were spared. The Haggadah we read states that Angel of Death skipped over the homes . If that was the case wouldn’t the holiday be called Skipover? Growing up I always wondered why the lamb had a Spanish name, Pascal, when nobody in Egypt spoke Spanish! Any relationship to Ezra Lamb?

Manna: A food that GOD provided in abundance as the Hebrews fled Egypt. To this day no one actually knows what Manna is. Too bad as it could be the key to feeding starving people who live in desert countries. In my family we believe that Manna was actually marshmallow fluff.

The Ten plagues: Because Pharoah refused to release the enslaved Hebrews it is common belief that they were punished with plagues including flies,  boils, frogs, vermin, river turning to blood, and resulting in the death of the first born children. I read an article several years ago which was trying to demonstrate that the plagues were real and each one brought on the next. It was a convincing argument. In short, the Nile turned red (algae bloom) causing frogs to leave the river, animals who drank from the water died from the algae toxin, rats and mice and flies fed on the carcasses, and bit people who suffered from infected boils which eventually resulted in many Egyptian deaths. The Jews practicing more sanitary food preparation and keeping their homes cleaner were spared from the wholesale deaths brought on by the plagues. I left out a few plagues but you get my point.

A confusing story in the Seder has several renowned Rabbinical Scholars sitting around a camp fire about 1,500 years later discussing the plagues and each one insisted that the plagues were in multiples of 10 and somehow figured there were something like 10,000 plagues not just 10. I am so glad this argument went nowhere otherwise the reading of the Haggadah would have stretched about two weeks. I have no idea why they included this in the reading. Maybe the original writer just wanted to do some name dropping.

When I was a child I didn’t distinguish between plague and plaque. I kept waiting for my dentist to appear in the reading. He probably was old enough to have hung out with Moses and Aaron.

The Four Sons: There are four sons which demonstrate different ways to relate the Passover story to a different personality. One is wise, one wicked, one immature and one challenged. When we get to this section the first thing on everyone’s mind is, “Who gives a fuck lets get on with the meal”.

The Four Questions: This is the cutest and most charming part of the ceremony as the youngest child asks questions, Why? Why, Why? Why? and sometimes as any little kid will do keep asking “Why” to every freaking’ thing you say and you want to kick the little curmudgeon off the chair.

Passover conveniently arrives near the beginning of Spring so it is the best excuse to start the Spring cleaning.  One of the tenets of Passover is to get rid of all food items that are not Kosher for the eight days of the holiday. A cute trick we (the Jews) have developed is that we sell the food to a Rabbi or a non-Jewish neighbor and put it into a cabinet until after the holiday and tape the cabinet shut. Crime scene tape works well in this situation.  It’s a lot of fun to have guests arrive and see the crime scene tape,] stretched across the kitchen. Sometimes it’s fun to draw a chalk outline on the floor to get a better reaction. When Passover ends we buy the food back. How cool is that?!

Another family tradition we participate in, with the exception of my wife Ilana, who is striving to follow the holiday traditions as closely as possible, is the daily sneaking out to get a slice of pizza. My dad came up with that tradition, a man way ahead of his time. For some reason it really pisses her off as it did my mother.  I can’t imagine why.

There are many foods we don’t eat on Passover because the argument is that the Jews didn’t eat these foods when they escaped Egypt. Like Matzoh, the argument is that the Jews didn’t have time to leaven the dough so they baked the bread without letting the dough rise. They had forty years to wander I can’t imagine they didn’t have the time to allow the dough to rise.

One of the most popular dishes during the seder is Briskit. I always wondered how the Jews wandering in the desert were able to find a butcher who sells brisket and when they did the butcher had enough brisket to feed forty thousand people. We also can’t eat any product with corn syrup because corn wasn’t discovered until three thousand years laterbut we can drink milk with Ubet chocolate syrup just like our ancestors did and make Egg Cream sodas, obviously a staple of the escaping Hebrews.

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We read the Haggadah, drink wine, sing a few lively songs, inject some ribald humor into the ceremony because my kids and nephews are crazy, partake in the meal and fall asleep on the couch. Basically the same thing we do on Thanksgiving. But the most important thing is that we get together as a family and retell a story that unfortunately relates to current events in the world and hope that we see peace before things can get worse.