It's Supposed to Be a Celebration
Fri., April 9, 02:10 PM
As I’ve mentioned, Husband considers Passover more of a nuisance than a celebration. It’s not that he wasn’t taught as a child; he was. It’s not that he hasn’t been married to me for thirty-five years. He just doesn’t want to know. And if a man doesn’t want to know, there’s no way in heaven or earth that you’ll be able to teach him.
I don’t even ask him to help me. All I want is that he doesn’t fool with stuff. He’s not a baby, and I shouldn’t have to watch him. Or so you’d think.
I went to bed early last night, and I woke up to a sink loaded with dirty dishes almost up to the faucet. I could see that he had been “consolidating”; I hate it when he does that. The pot that had held soup was at the bottom of the pile. He couldn’t have finished all that soup, so I checked the refrigerator. He had put the remaining soup into a juice pitcher. Mutter, mutter, mutter: “don’t get married.”
When he got up, he gave me the explanation. It seems that he had left the cover off the soup pot and, when he turned back to it, the cat was drinking it. “Do you have to throw it out?” Sometimes I’d rather not know. It’s not the first time he’s done that this week. All Cat has to do is wait. I don’t need these males in my house!
I was asked what one has to do to prepare for Passover, and I try to answer questions when I can. My mind went back to childhood and my mother’s kitchen, where preparing for Passover required carrying all the everyday dishes – plates, pots, flatware – into the basement, and then carrying all the Passover stuff upstairs. That’s two full sets of everything, because we kept one set for meat and another for dairy. And all that was before we cleaned out all the cabinets and put in new shelf paper…
Fortunately, I’ve sidestepped most of that physical labor and made most of it symbolic, like using different dishes without carrying stuff up and down. For me, the preparation is mental labor, figuring how I’m going to get everything done within the time constraints, wondering what I’m going to feed people, making mental lists. (Consider your favorite meal for company – Thanksgiving, for example – and how you would organize it without bread or flour, or rice or beans – and no quick and easy green bean casserole, either.) I used to start soup on the morning before, clear a corner of the fridge, and then do my last minute grocery shopping. And what do you do for school lunches?
But when I talk about preparing for a Seder, I’m always sure I’m going to forget something on the Seder Plate. This plate of symbolic foods is essential to the ritual, and some of it takes awhile. Some things are only for show:
- the roasted lamb shank. The Reader will point to it and say, “this roasted bone, what does it mean?” And he (or she) will explain that it stands for the animals sacrificed by our ancestors and the blood they smeared on the doorposts so that the Angel of Death would pass over the homes of the Israelites.
- Some people also see the roasted egg as a symbol of the sacrifice. An egg, of course, also stands for the circle of life and death. In addition, it is a sign of spring – a pagan idea, perhaps – but the sort of thing that many people embrace.
Other items are meant to be shared by all the guests:
- the bitter herb reminds us of the abuse and cruelty the Israelites suffered at the hands of the Egyptians. There’s usually some prepared horseradish on the table as a condiment, but for this portion of the ritual we usually use pieces of green onion, or slices of radish. The idea is a piece of sharp vegetable that you can hold in your hand as you say the appropriate blessing.
- a green leafy vegetable, like parsley or cilantro or celery leaves. This is another reminder of spring, but it’s not eaten alone. It is dipped in salt water (last minute, every time, “I forgot the salt water!”), which reminds us of the tears shed by the slaves in Egypt.
- Finally, there is a dish of charoses, a mixture of chopped fruit (usually apples) and nuts, moistened with a little wine and perhaps colored with cinnamon. Charoses represents the mortar used to make the bricks and build the great cities of Egypt. It is a very popular food in our family.
One explanation is that we eat a “sandwich” of matzo, bitter herb and charoses to commemorate the way the prophet Hillel did it. To me, that begs the question; however, if you tell me that mixing the sweet charoses with the bitter herb symbolizes life itself, I can accept that.
Other things you have to have available is a bowl and pitcher (and a towel) for the ritual handwashing. In the days when I was “too old” to ask the Four Questions and prohibited from almost everything else because I was a girl, they let me be in charge of the pitcher.
That was then. We no longer prohibit girls from taking part to their fullest capability. As a matter of fact, we have added something new to the Seder Plate – an orange. The story goes that sometime in the early twentieth century, a young girl asked to be bar mitzvah like a boy, and her father told her that “a girl on the altar makes as much sense as an orange on a Seder Plate.” So now, the orange makes sense too.
