This year’s Seder won’t have a crowd but will feel extra relevant
“I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you.”
— Exodus 12:13
When my wife told me we would not be hosting Passover this year, my immediate reaction was a pout almost presidential in its historical inaccuracy.
“But they had Passover in Auschwitz!” I complained.
Meaning that holding the Seder in tough times is what Jews do. Jews don’t cave. We don’t throw tradition to the wind just because there are Crusaders or Cossacks or coronavirus or whatever prowling around outside. Because there’s always something trying to get us. We persevere. We must do Passover, which begins Wednesday evening, or else COVID-19 wins.
In my defense, this was a historical age ago — so very mid-March 2020 — before almost everybody wrapped their heads around the enormity of this crisis. Before my wife said, in essence: We are not killing our aged relatives for a festive meal. Before I checked history and found that while a few mumbled prayers might have been said in a few camps, it wasn’t like they were ladling out the chopped liver in the Nazis’ main death factory. A nice story, but, like the Exodus itself, only a story.
Besides, we are having a Seder. We just aren’t inviting anybody, no relatives hullooing into the house hauling trays covered in foil. No Bob handing me cigars. No Alan leafing extra prayers and readings into the Haggadah.
No crowd in the foyer, no logjam in the kitchen. No clatter, no crash, no strangers invited by a cousin. No babies to coo over nor any kindergartner to emerge beaming from beneath the dining room table, like a mermaid up from the depths, face aglow at her own naughtiness.
None of that. Just us. The Steinberg Nuclear Family Seder.
“Should we mark our doorpost with blood?” my older son quipped. So the Angel of Death passes by. I frowned. No, no . . . hard to clean.
This Seder will feel extra relevant, with the plagues and wondering why is this night different from all other nights. Then again, Seders always are. Freedom from slavery is forever current, alas: Someone is always enslaved by something. Only the tyrant changes.
Back in the 1970s, there were prayers for Soviet Jews. In the 1980s, feminism pushed back against the patriarchy with an orange on the Seder plate. I seem to recall one wisenheimer — OK, me — wondering aloud why we didn’t include Palestinians among the long list of downtrodden peoples whose freedom we yearn for.
Much stays the same, the virus be damned. My wife is still making matzo ball soup — albeit much less. There will be macaroons and those sugar fruit slices I wouldn’t touch 363 days a year. In the morning, matzo brei, egg matzo, a once-a-year delicacy.
Speaking of matzo. A package of shmurah matzo — made under watchful rabbinic eye — was delivered to our house. Attached was a form letter from Rabbi Meir Moscowitz, regional director of Lubavitch Chabad of Illinois, and his wife Miriam.
“Well this is highly odd!” it begins, accurately. “This is not the first time.” There was the first Passover in Egypt, when we were slaves hiding at home from the Angel of Death. “This year we will recreate that experience!”
Lucky us!
“While we are sitting at home and trying to figure this out let us reflect on the power of one tiny microbe from a faraway place and the enormous impact it is having on so many lives,” the couple continues.
“If that unseen force can wreak so much havoc, think about how much good each of us can do — even while we are sheltered in place . . . we can’t be near each other so let’s be close with one another . . .”
That’s a plan. Though I first read “we can’t be near each other” as “we can’t bear each other,” which shows you where I’m coming from. But I’m trying to improve and reach peak plague performance.
We all are, all getting comfortable living outside our comfort zones, whether leading your first Seder or hosting an Easter egg hunt for one child. Holidays were intended as a pause from the bustle of ordinary life.
Now, with ordinary life itself on hold, holidays become a time to touch the bedrock of our lives, to reassure ourselves it’s still there, to remember a time when things were better and hope for better times to come.
THIS SEDER WILL FEEL EXTRA RELEVANT, WITH THE PLAGUES AND WONDERING WHY IS THIS NIGHT DIFFERENT FROM ALL OTHER NIGHTS. THEN AGAIN, SEDERS ALWAYS ARE.