Last night, Jess and I made the best of things, setting up a seder for just the two of us on our living room floor:

Though we had longer haggadot, and even some shorter ones, yesterday morning my mother sent along a Coronavirus-updated version of Shoshana Silberman’s A Family Haggadah, which we had used in my childhood.  And, somehow, that seemed like the right choice.

So, occasionally bolstering with prayers (like birkat hamazon) and songs (whether chad gadya, or ‘Take Us Out of Egypt” [to the tune of “Take Me Out To The Ball Game”]) and readings pulled from other books, we made our way through at a moderate pace, stopping to round up the ceremonial items I’d forgotten to bring out initially, or to pull various items out of the oven, or to go off on weird conversational tangents that had nothing to do with Passover at all until we remembered what we were doing and circled back to the seder.

We opted against opening our hall door for Elijah, singing out the open window instead.  And, though uniformly delicious, our menu was a bit less than traditional, working with the abridged ingredients we’d actually been able to round up.  Still, all in, I’d call it a great success.

We’re repeating tonight, this time with my parents (and possibly other family members?) on Zoom. And, yes, l’shana haba’ah and everything.  But, honestly, even in the midst of Coronavirus and lockdown and whatever else, I’d say this year, right here, is already pretty excellent, too.

While I continue to have all kinds of moral angst about online grocery shopping during this pandemic (I’m not in a high-risk group myself, and am therefore just taking advantage of the fact that I can afford to offload my risk to a less privileged low bidder), I nonetheless bowed to COVID worries this week, and ordered a big load of stuff from Fairway using Shipt, the only service I’ve found that currently has even intermittent delivery availability in NYC at the moment.  (Given their business model, it’s worth returning repeatedly throughout the day if there are no current slots, as new ones regularly open up.)

While it’s slated to arrive in a couple of hours (though the delivery window has already been twice pushed back), given the picked-clean shelves of grocery stores, I can’t imagine more than a small fraction of what we ordered will actually show up.  Still, with some creativity, and our already-stocked pantry, I think we’ll be mostly fine.

The biggest questions are around Passover, which kicks off this Wednesday evening.  A month and a half back, when I stocked up to weather this all, I didn’t really take into account the flour content of shelf-stable options, and I definitely didn’t grab any jars of gefilte fish.  So, though my parents have floated the idea of a Zoom seder, it’s unclear whether we’ll actually have any of the ingredients needed for even just the seder plate, much less traditional dinner dishes like brisket or matzo-ball soup.

At the same time, if the point of the holiday is to remember when our ancestors were slaves in Egypt – which, in Hebrew, translates literally to ‘a narrow place’ – then perhaps a quarantined version of the holiday will be as good of a reminder of that feeling as possible, and a success regardless of the culinary details.

Next year, if not in Jerusalem, then at least outside my apartment.

Spent most of today arranging life logistics to weather an extended lockdown.  Realistically, I think this gets worse for at least two more months, unless the government starts to step up in a way that it certainly hasn’t thus far.

So, I suspect, we may not be headed to NJ or Long Island this year to kick of Passover with either of my mother’s siblings as we normally do.  Instead, we’ll be celebrating at home.  With a seder that looks something like this:

[Editors note: I posted this two years back, but was thinking about it again today, so figured it was worth sharing again for my fellow bread-deprived Jews.]

Today is the second full day of Passover, a holiday that begins with two nights of ritual ‘Seder’ meals, and continues for eight days of avoiding ‘chametz’, or leavened bread.

It’s a biblical holiday, celebrating the liberation of the Jewish slaves in Egypt, and their exodus to Israel. And, indeed, the prohibition of chametz is similarly biblical, with Exodus 13:3 ruling out leavened bread made from the ‘five grains’: wheat, spelt, barley, oats (or possibly two-rowed barley, depending on the translation), and rye. 

Subsequently, in the 6th century B.C., the rabbinical Great Assembly came up with the idea of “asu syag latorah,” building a fence around the Torah: they introduced broader prohibitions surrounding the original biblical ones, to prevent people from inadvertently violating commandments. Under the Assembly’s lead, the prohibition spread from leavened bread made from the five grains, to any use of the five grains other than in matzah.

Two thousand years or so later, another traditional passover ’fence’ emerged, at least amongst Ashkenazi Jews, those living in Eastern Europe. That group extended the prohibition to ‘kitniyot,’ other seeds, grains, and legumes that might be made into a flour, such as rice, corn, beans, soybeans, peas, and lentils.

Sephardic Jews, those from around the Mediterranean Sea (in Portugal, Spain, Northern Africa, and the Middle East) never picked up the kitniyot tradition. So those Jews, and most Israeli’s today, will happily eat rice, beans, etc. during Passover.

But my own family lineage might best be described as ‘Eastern European mutt.’ So I have strong memories of, as a child, grocery shopping with my mother for Passover, buying the yellow-capped ‘kosher for passover’ Coca Cola (made using sugar rather than corn syrup), or ruling out the slew of canned and processed foods made with soy lecithin as a stabilizer.

These days, I’d class myself as part of the Reconstructionist Jewish movement. I’m somewhere between atheist and agnostic, so I observe Passover, but not because I believe there’s a big guy with a beard up in the sky who shakes his fist if I eat bread. But I do still very much value Judaism, as a source of tradition, wisdom, ritual, and community. As Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionism explained a century back, one way to make sense of Judaism is as “the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people,” a quest to find ways of living that reveal holiness and godliness in the world, and one that gives tradition “a vote, not a veto in that quest.”

So, up until now, I’ve always observed Passover by avoiding any non-matzah use of the five grains, but also by avoiding kitniyot, too. If the whole point is to honor Passover tradition, and the prohibition against kitniyot is part of that tradition in my family, that seemed as good an argument as any to stick with it.

Still, one thing that I’ve long appreciated about Judaism is that’s it’s a religion based on questioning, analysis, and interpretation. The word Israel itself means literally “he who wrestles with god,” and the centuries of rabbinical writing encapsulated in the Talmud and other works chronicle the thoughtful and rigorous undertaking of that wrestling match.

To that end, this year, I carefully studied up on two recent decisions by Conservative Judaism’s governing Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, and a similar opinion from the Israeli orthodox rabbi David Bar-Hayim. All of which, surprisingly, made for pretty interesting reading.

To summarize:

The rabbis of the Talmud, the group that came up with the first ‘fence’ (of not eating anything but matzah made of the five grains), actually specifically considered kitniyot in about a half-dozen instances, and decided it’s fine to eat during Passover.

A thousand years later, when the custom of avoiding kitniyot first appeared, the rabbis of the time mention it only to say it was a bad idea. They describe it as “mistaken,” “foolish,” and “baseless,” which is about as harsh as language gets in talmudic debate.

So the question becomes: if it contravenes the Talmud, and the contemporary authorities at the time it was instituted though it was stupid, should we still keep up the custom for the sake of tradition?

Fortunately, the rabbis of Talmud gave some guidelines there, too:

First, they explain that all customs should have a rational basis in Torah. If you start observing a baseless custom, they warn, then people might start to assume all the other, more carefully reasoned customs are baseless, too. Thus, we should discard any custom, like avoiding kitniyot, that has no good explanation, especially when it directly contravenes more thorough earlier consideration.

Second, we should discard any custom that’s a ‘humra yethera,’ an unnecessary stringency, lest we reduce the joy of the holiday it’s meant to help celebrate, or emphasize the insignificant (avoiding rice and beans) over the significant (avoiding the five kinds of prohibited grain) aspects of the holiday.

Third, we should discard any custom that causes ‘hefsed merubeh,’ substantial monetary loss for the poor, much as prohibiting inexpensive kitniyot forces people to buy more expensive matzah, fish, and meat for the same calories.

All of which is to say, even for those (like me) who keep kosher for Passover for the sake of tradition should be willing to drop the specific prohibition of kitniyot. 

And now I’m off to eat some rice.

This year, I helped lead the Jewish High Holiday services I attended (on top of blowing the shofar, as I’ve done in a number of past years).  So, more than I would have been otherwise, I’ve been immersed in the Jewish liturgy over the past few weeks, leading up to Rosh Hashanah and then Yom Kippur.

In the midst of that, I learned that one of my friend’s mother had passed away, suddenly and unexpectedly.  Which made the prayers I was practicing, most of which revolve around life and death, judgment and compassion, seem all the more relevant and real.  Even so, I felt unprepared to comfort my friend in his loss, much less to really contemplate how fragile my own life is, like the lives of the people I love.

Though the High Holiday services are built on the same framework as a regular Saturday Shabbat service, they include all kinds of expansions and ornamentations.  Among those additions, there is one prayer that I’ve thought about in particular in the past few weeks, especially in light of my friend’s loss: Unetaneh Tokef.  Since I first remember hearing it some thirty years back, it has always seemed to me the central expression of what the holiday is about.

Though much of the service is considerably older, Unetaneh Tokef was written only about a thousand years ago, by Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, Germany. Apparently, Amnon was a close friend of the bishop of Mainz.  Close enough that the Bishop was concerned for the Rabbi’s soul, and insisted that Amnon convert to Christianity.  To buy himself time, Amnon asked for three days to consider.  But once he reached home, he became distraught about having given the impression that he might be willing to betray his god.  So he spent the three days fasting and praying.  And when the time ran out, he didn’t come back to see the bishop.

Eventually, the bishop had the rabbi rounded up, and demanded an answer.  To which Amnon replied that, not only would he not convert, he’d rather his tongue be cut out for having said he’d even consider it.  Furious, the bishop told Amnon that his sin wasn’t in his tongue for what he’d said, but rather in his legs for not coming back as promised, and he ordered Amnon’s feet to be chopped off, joint by joint.  They chopped off his hands, joint by joint, too, asking after each cut if Amnon might reconsider.  And, when he didn’t, he was eventually sent home, along with his amputated limbs.

When Rosh Hashanah arrived a few days later, the Rabbi asked to be carried to the front of his synagogue, where he recited one of the central prayers of the service – the Kedushah – recited a poem he had composed – Unetaneh Tokef – and then died on the spot.

Three days later, Amnon appeared in a dream to another Mainz Rabbi, the famed Kabbalah scholar Klonimos ben Meshullam, teaching him the text of Unetaneh Tokef, and asking him to send it out to the Jewish world so it might become part of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur prayers.  As indeed it has.

Anyway, even for non-Jews, the prayer itself is kind of amazing and haunting as just a piece of literature, with descriptions of how the great ram’s horn will be blown, how a “still, thin sound” will be heard, how even the angels will tremble. Amnon writes that god will make “all mankind pass before [him] like members of the flock. Like a shepherd pasturing his flock, making sheep pass under his staff, so shall [he] consider the soul of all the living [and] inscribe their verdict.”

But it’s in the middle of the prayer, set to a mournful melody that gives me goosebumps every time, that he really gets going, describing in detail the fates we might face:

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning.  Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted.

Tough stuff.  Though as the rabbi eventually advises at the denouement of the prayer, “through repentance, prayer, and charity, we may reduce the severity of the decree.”

I’ve always been fascinated by that phrase.  Amnon doesn’t say that repentance, prayer, and charity will nullify the decree, just reduce the severity.  Yet when you’re talking about death, it seems like a pretty binary outcome: you die or you don’t.  And as I read the prayer, that’s Amnon’s point – eventually, all of us do die.  Yet by trying to return to our best selves, trying to be our most transcendent, trying to do the greatest good we can in the world, we can at least change the ‘severity’ of our eventual death.  We can change what our life means along the way.  And we can leave a lasting legacy to the people we love.

“God does not tell Abraham his destination, because the goal cannot yet make sense to someone who has not experienced the journey. Arrival is not the essence. The lesson that Abram will pass on to his descendants is that the key to the journey is the journey.” – Rabbi Wolpe

On this Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, I’m wishing a shana tova umetukah – a good and sweet year – to all of my readers, Jewish or not. May you enjoy the journey in the year ahead!

“There is a famous allegory in the writings of Rabbenu Yona:

‘Prisoners in a jail effect an escape – they dig a tunnel under the wall of their cell and squeeze through.  All except one: one prisoner remains, ignoring the avenue of escape.  The jailer enters to discover that his prisoners have flown, and begins beating the one who remains.’

This is a difficult allegory to understand.  Why is the one who remains being beaten?  He appears to be the one who is acting properly; after all, he is the only one obeying the law. What has he done?

The meaning is this: in remaining, he has escaped more profoundly than those who have fled. The escapees have broken jail; it no longer contains them, that is true. But the one who remains has redefined the jail: when he shows that he is there voluntarily, he shows that this is no jail at all. While the cell was intact, he appeared to be imprisoned; but now that it is clear that he has no desire to leave, he reveals the jail never held him. A jail is a place that holds those who wish to be free; those who wish to be there are not held by it. The jailer is angry not because this inmate has done something as simple as escaping, but because he has declared the jailer and his jail to be entirely irrelevant. The others have left the jail; he has utterly destroyed it.”

– Rabbit Akiva Tatz, Letters to a Buddhist Jew

This Thursday and Friday, Jews around the world gathered to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year.  And though there are a slew of customs and commandments associated with the holiday, there’s one that stands above all the rest: the commandment to hear the blowing of the shofar, the simple bugle made from a hollowed-out ram’s horn.  The shofar’s blast is a bracing sound, a sort of primal cry, and it’s meant to ‘wake up’ the soul, in preparation for Yom Kippur, the day of judgment, ten days later.

If you can play the trumpet, you can play the shofar.  So, as in a handful of prior years past, I was asked to be the Ba’al Tekiah, the shofar blower, at this year’s Rosh Hashanah services.

But I was also asked to come in every morning for the month preceding Rosh Hashanah, the Hebrew month of Elul, to play the shofar then, too.  While hearing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah itself is a commandment, doing so for the month leading up is simply a custom – albeit one that’s stood for thousands of years.  Essentially, it’s meant to be a sort of warm-up lap for the main new year’s day event, a way to pre-awaken the soul.

I agreed to help out.  So, for the past month, early every morning, I found myself standing in the synagogue sanctuary, shofar in hand.  It was, without a doubt, the longest stretch of morning prayer attendance I had ever clocked (or considered) in my life.

By the end of the month, I thought I’d be happy to drop that responsibility from my already full morning routine.  But I found myself yesterday evening, as I played the final shofar blasts that brought the Rosh Hashanah service to a close, thinking it now seemed slightly strange that I didn’t need to attend this coming week.

After the service, helping to clean up, I ended up thumbing through a book of Jewish writings, and came across a story I knew well about Rabbi Akiva:

Despite eventually becoming one of the super-stars of the Talmud, by age 40, Akiva was still illiterate.  Then, one day, as he stood near the mouth of a well, he noticed a hollowed out stone that was used to hold drawn water.  How had it been hollowed out, he wondered aloud.  From water falling on the stone, day after day, he was told.  Which led Akiva to famously reason, “if water can wear away a hard stone, then surely the words of the Torah can carve a way into my heart.”  That set him on his late-life learning path, on the way to eventual greatness.

But what I hadn’t seen before was a response to that story, from Rabbi Israel Salanter in the 18th century: “The waters carved the stone only because it fell drop after drop, year after year, without pause. Had the accumulated water all poured down at once in a powerful stream, it would have slipped off the rock without leaving a trace.”

As I’ve written about before, I’m increasingly convinced that anything worth doing is worth doing every day.  So, with my shofar experience fresh in mind, I’ve been thinking about how I might intregrate some kind of daily Jewish practice into my morning routine (even if it’s one that doesn’t involve schlepping to the synagogue every day).

More broadly, between now and Yom Kippur, I’ve resolved to think about my daily practices and habits in general.  About the kind of person I want to be, about what I want to have accomplished, by next Rosh Hashanah.  And, working backwards from those questions, about the small things I need to do, every single day throughout the whole year, to make it happen.

So: shana tova u’metukah – a good and sweet year to you all.  May you grow through it, day by day.