HOLIDAYS IN ISOLATION
Improvising Passover and Easter
For Easter Sunday most years, Montrealer Joanne Romanow roasts a leg of lamb flavoured with garlic and rosemary. There are fresh flowers on the table and eight people around it: her husband, their daughter with her boyfriend, some cousins.
But this is not most years. The COVID-19 pandemic has kept many sheltering in place and Easter and Passover, two spring holidays normally observed with family and friends, are being marked in a startlingly different way this year as houses of worship are dark and social distancing precludes gatherings with anyone we don’t live with.
There will be no lamb at the Romanow table this Easter Sunday — their daughter doesn’t want her parents out shopping — and no fresh flowers. Or guests. The meal will be baccala, a salted cod dish layered with sliced potatoes and onion: The fish was already in the freezer.
Romanow had planned to serve it on Good Friday, as she usually does. But nothing is as usual. And so she’ll serve it on Easter Sunday. Her daughter will prepare baccala with her boyfriend at their home and they will share the same meal via Zoom, the Web-based videoconferencing tool.
Romanow is philosophical. “Everyone is safe, and that’s what’s important. We should appreciate what we have.”
Good Friday, which this year falls on April 10, commemorates the death of Jesus Christ. His resurrection, the foundation of Christian faith, is celebrated on Easter Sunday.
At St Jax Montréal, an Easter Sunday was to have been celebrated with an Easter egg hunt, baptisms in a large tank and a big party. But it has been replaced by a family program via Zoom. Still, it’s “a happy, clappy church” in its style of worship, said Reverend Graham Singh, Rector of the Anglican Church, and Easter morning will no doubt bring a good deal of jumping up and down and “dancing before the Lord.”
“What does it mean to dance before the Lord? It is associated with humbling yourself. It is saying ‘I am so thankful for God, for the world,’ ” he said.
“Many Easters, we don’t give thanks for what we have taken for granted.”
This Easter, he believes that will be different.
The eight-day festival of Passover, which this year begins Wednesday at sundown, commemorates the liberation of the Jews from slavery in ancient Egypt. Its central ritual is the Seder, a meal at which the liberation story is told. The Haggadah, a guide featuring blessings, parables, songs and descriptions of symbolic foods, including unleavened bread, or matzo, and why they are part of the Seder, sets out the sequence of the proceedings.
That there will be just a handful of people at many Seder tables “doesn’t mean we don’t have a Seder — it means we have one that looks and feels very different,” said Rabba Rachel Kohl Finegold, director of education and spiritual enrichment at Congregation Shaar Hashomayim in Westmount.
A series of four questions about what makes the Seder night different from all others, the Ma Nishtana, is asked by the youngest capable child at the table. What if there is no child at your table? The Talmud says one spouse should ask the questions of the other. If you’re alone, ask the questions yourself — and answer them.
There is no obligation for the Seder meal to include brisket or chicken soup with matzo balls, said Kohl Finegold. “The question is, ‘What do those foods mean to you?’ If they are important, then prepare them and serve them.”
For some, a festive meal of “delicious smoked salmon and a good brie with their matzo” is enough.
“Tap into what resonates for you,” she said.
For the first time in years Kohl Finegold and her husband, Rabbi Avi Finegold, will have no guests at their Seder: It will be just them and their daughters, Kinneret, Nedivah and Hadar. Because they won’t be with their grandparents, the girls created a series of notes for them to open at specific points during their own Seders.
Their meal will be simpler, heavy on fruits and vegetables. They might sing all the tunes they know from the Haggadah and have the Seder run long. Or they may have a short Seder.
The key thing about your Seder that it be “unique and relevant for you,” Kohl Finegold said.
Some families will be inviting technology into their homes and have Seders via Zoom. “I think the point is to be together in whatever way we can,” said Montrealer Gillian Sonin. “It will be sad not being able to have what we’re used to. Still, I feel fortunate that we have more than we need, and that no one is sick in our family.”
Marcy Stein has created a pareddown Zoom Seder for her family, assigning parts to each participant. “For me, the holidays are all about family,” she said.
“I think about how I can make the Seder relevant: There can be nothing more relevant than the isolation, the slavery we are feeling at not being able to be together — and the freedom I hope we’ll feel when we are allowed back in the world.”