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| Last year - changing my kitchen! |
Tonight is the first night of the Jewish festival of
Passover, an eight-day festival in which we celebrate freedom from slavery, the
exodus from Egypt. It is probably the
peak day in Judaism for festival prep.
To recall the rush in which the Jews left Egypt, we do not eat leavened bread for the whole festival. Our houses should be clean of every last crumb. In a usual year I’d have spent the last week cleaning the house, changing all my crockery and cutlery, pots and pan for special ones that live outside in a storage box the rest of the year. I’d have been buying special food, getting rid of kitchen staples such as pasta and flour, and cooking, cooking, cooking in order to host at my parents’ house a dinner/service called a Seder for at least seven people, possibly more.
And then the next day we would do it all over again.
This year - unthinkably, impossibly - it is rather different. My parents (ages 84 and 92) are self-isolated in their home, and are having to manage on their own (something which tears me apart just thinking about it). Shopping and preparing has been difficult. We will have our Seder, just the four of us and video link with my niece, my brother and my cousin. We are being less strict about some of the food rules. The special crockery etc is staying in its box.
But the core of Passover remains the same, and it is a highly ritualised form of story telling. We tell the story of the exodus from Egypt (although with only one mention , in passing, of Moses, its main protagonist). We open the door in case the prophet Elijah has turned up (there is a glass of wine poured for him if he does). We are encouraged to think of ourselves as slaves. It is a time to think about the joys of the freedoms we have, and to set some of them aside for a short period to remind ourselves of the horror of slavery. In Judaism, I think, festivals often act as a vaccination - an injection of history to keep our spiritual immune systems alive to the way our lives can be threatened and change at any time.
On March 14 – right before lockdown – my husband and I went to the theatre. It was the day after my birthday, we had expensive tickets, we drove to the West End rather than on public transport, we took hand sanitiser. Mad, I know. We saw Tom Stoppard’s new play Leopoldstadt, which features a Seder night held in (I think 1905), a family of Viennese Jews. It’s a play about lack of foresight, lack of imagination, about people who think they can ignore history and shed their Jewishness, people who decades later are killed just for being Jewish.
My lockdown has not been quiet and full of leisure time. I’ve been working at my day job (features editor at the Jewish Chronicle) and working on my book (What We’re Scared Of, also very Jewish). So please forgive this very Jewish blog post. Every year at the Seder we ask ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’ This year we will ask as well, why this year is so different, and pray that next year we will be saved to resume our lives of freedom.
To recall the rush in which the Jews left Egypt, we do not eat leavened bread for the whole festival. Our houses should be clean of every last crumb. In a usual year I’d have spent the last week cleaning the house, changing all my crockery and cutlery, pots and pan for special ones that live outside in a storage box the rest of the year. I’d have been buying special food, getting rid of kitchen staples such as pasta and flour, and cooking, cooking, cooking in order to host at my parents’ house a dinner/service called a Seder for at least seven people, possibly more.
And then the next day we would do it all over again.
This year - unthinkably, impossibly - it is rather different. My parents (ages 84 and 92) are self-isolated in their home, and are having to manage on their own (something which tears me apart just thinking about it). Shopping and preparing has been difficult. We will have our Seder, just the four of us and video link with my niece, my brother and my cousin. We are being less strict about some of the food rules. The special crockery etc is staying in its box.
But the core of Passover remains the same, and it is a highly ritualised form of story telling. We tell the story of the exodus from Egypt (although with only one mention , in passing, of Moses, its main protagonist). We open the door in case the prophet Elijah has turned up (there is a glass of wine poured for him if he does). We are encouraged to think of ourselves as slaves. It is a time to think about the joys of the freedoms we have, and to set some of them aside for a short period to remind ourselves of the horror of slavery. In Judaism, I think, festivals often act as a vaccination - an injection of history to keep our spiritual immune systems alive to the way our lives can be threatened and change at any time.
On March 14 – right before lockdown – my husband and I went to the theatre. It was the day after my birthday, we had expensive tickets, we drove to the West End rather than on public transport, we took hand sanitiser. Mad, I know. We saw Tom Stoppard’s new play Leopoldstadt, which features a Seder night held in (I think 1905), a family of Viennese Jews. It’s a play about lack of foresight, lack of imagination, about people who think they can ignore history and shed their Jewishness, people who decades later are killed just for being Jewish.
My lockdown has not been quiet and full of leisure time. I’ve been working at my day job (features editor at the Jewish Chronicle) and working on my book (What We’re Scared Of, also very Jewish). So please forgive this very Jewish blog post. Every year at the Seder we ask ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’ This year we will ask as well, why this year is so different, and pray that next year we will be saved to resume our lives of freedom.
1 comment:
I see that today the Jewish Chronicle announced that it is going into liquidation.
Hope something works out on that for you.
How are your parents getting provisions ?
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