Dave's Gone By

RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #179 (4/1/2023): Passover Thoughts

airs April 1, 2023 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip:  

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for this Passover week, 2023. 

My friends, we are only days away from Pesach, the Jewish holiday of Passover, when we commemorate escaping from Egypt and making our slow pilgrimage through the desert, into Israel, and later to Miami and Crown Heights. Although we mourn all the Arabs God had to kill to save us, we rejoice in the holiday because it means we are no longer slaves. We get paid for our labor, and we are vassals only to the bank, the mortgage, the car loan, the student debt, and Equifax.

Of course, Passover comes with much labor of its own: you have to clean the house, change out your dishware, cook a big and strange meal, invite people to the Seder, disinvite people to the Seder when one of them is Uncle Yakov, who doesn’t get along with Cousin Malka because of a business deal with her late husband that went south, and now she won’t even be in the same room with Yakov, even though he likes her, in fact, he likes-likes her, which he won’t admit, not even to his therapist, but you can tell.

The cleaning and work of modern-day holidaying remains a chore, but one aspect of Passover has improved significantly over the years. Remember back in the day, when you’d go shopping for Pesadiche food, and the supermarket would allow two shelves for items marked K for P? On the top shelf, you’d see gefilte fish, bullion cubes, and a bag of walnuts. And on the shelf below, dessert! Which meant matzoh smeared with dark chocolate, which is what passed for a snack in 1976; macaroons, which tasted like sponges dipped in coconut and shame; and honey cake, about which the less said, the better. 

But that was the selection. You’d head to the checkout, just hoping the gentile ahead of you wasn’t laying a pork roast on the conveyer belt for your box of matzoh to soak in. 

Yes, if you wanted Jewish food, you’d fry your own matzoh meal pancakes, you’d roast a roast, you’d shred your knuckles making charoset that everybody else would eat at the seder, so by the time the bowl got back to you, you had one speck not even big enough to stop up a bluebird’s tuchas. 

Oh, my chaverim, times were tough. But now? Jewish neighborhoods have entire stores devoted to Passover edibles. You enter surrounded by kashrut. You almost expect them to hand you a tfillin with your shopping cart. And you can barely imagine a food that doesn’t have a Passover hack. Bacon? Fried pastrami. Breakfast cereal? Apple-cinnamon Crispy-Os (that’s a real thing). French toast? Matzoh brei. Shrimp cocktail? Okay, you’re on your own there, but the variety astonishes. 

Let’s say, however, that you don’t live in Cedarhurst. Because you have a life. Your neighborhood is so goyish, they put up Christmas trees in October and leave them up until October. And yet, visit the supermarket, and guess what? Even there, an aisle will be set aside for all these Passover foods Jews don’t want to eat but we have to. And if you’re a shut-in, Amazon has an entire online Pesach portion, where you can buy everything from matzoh-ball soup to nut butter. (Those of you who are laughing at “nut butter,” grow up.) You can purchase Exodus-brand, Kosher for Pesach beef jerky! And Amazon will sell you Manischewitz granola and Lieber’s gluten-free elbow macaroni. Is that almost too secular? Don’t worry. You can still find chocolate lollycones, Joyva ring jells, and a good-ol’ bottle of Gold’s horse radish so red, it’s guaranteed to ruin any shirt sleeve you dip into it.

I complain a lot. Because I’m Jewish. And also because many things in life have progressively worsened: air travel, doctor’s appointments, cost of living, insurance, sitting in a theater with a mask on watching plays designed to make me feel guilty for being me. The world is a little crazy right now, and a little crazy always. So it’s a rare pleasure when something gets better and easier. As a child, by the third day of Pesach, I was so bored and constipated, people mistook me for Ben Stein. A Jewish kid growing up right now could eat a week of Passover food and not even realize it’s Passover.  

Isn’t that what’s great about America? Assimilate or stay insular, but either way, the culture assimilates you. You can roast your own shankbone — which is painful and not recommended — or visit a community Seder, You can celebrate as much Passover as you can take. 

So boil those eggs, gather those haggadahs, and get ready to tell the story one more time of how our ancestors went from enslavement to enfreement. And if the pandemic is still keeping you from spending next year in Jerusalem, load up a virtual background with the Wailing Wall on it, and boom, you’re there. As I said, we can long for yesteryear, but every often, we’re lucky to be living in thisteryear. 

Wishing you all a zissen Pesach, this has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.

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