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.
Click above to watch in-studio footage of the entire episode. Click above to listen to the episode.
Here is the 694th episode of the long-running radio show/podcast, Dave’s Gone By, which aired live on Facebook Saturday, April 27, 2019.
Host: Dave Lefkowitz
GUESTS: singer Julie Budd, Dave’s wife Joyce
Featuring: Rabbi Sol Solomon chats with Julie Budd, Greeley Crimes & Old Times, Colorado Limerick of the Damned (Hotchkiss), StoryTime with Rabbi Sol (more Passover rules), Inside Broadway.
00:00:01 DAVE GOES IN w/ Joyce (matzoh man, MetroCard madness) 00:26:00 GUEST: Rabbi Sol Solomon interviews Julie Budd 01:27:00 GREELEY CRIMES & OLD TIMES 01:53:00 INSIDE BROADWAY (news & review (Hadestown) 02:45:00 Friends of the Daverhood 02:52:30 STORYTIME: The Laws of Pesach, pt. 2 03:04:30 COLORADO LIMERICK OF THE DAMNED – Hotchkiss 03:07:00 DAVE GOES OUT
April 27, 2019 Playlist: “My Shining Hour” (00:25:00), “All the Way” (01:11:30) & “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” (03:10:00; Julie Budd).
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of April 24, 2016.
Among the great inventions of mankind are the wheel, the lever, the polio vaccine, and the computer microchip. But let’s not leave out one of my favorite all-time creations. Something so simple yet so perfectly imperfect. Something both great and crummy — pun intended.
You take flour and water, mix them together, roll it flat flat flat—flatter than a ten-year-old’s training bra—poke the dough with tiny holes, and push it into a super-hot, dry oven. After a couple of agonizing minutes, shazam! Matzoh! Somehow, this flour-and-water combo doesn’t turn into pita bread, it doesn’t become olive loaf, it doesn’t blossom into a Pepperidge Farm cookie. It just stays matzoh, and that’s good enough for me. Almost.
See, you can get Streit’s or Horowitz-Margareten or Manischewitz and other commercial brands of matzoh, and they’ll get you through the Passover holiday just fine. You make matzoh brei, where you dip it in egg; you can crumble it and make matzoh-meal pancakes, which iHop would not be remiss in adding to their international breakfasts. Dear God, they make chocolate-covered matzoh, which sounds gross, but hey, if they can do it with crickets and bumble bees, why not the bread of affliction? (Chocolate-covered matzoh is not to be confused, by the way, with chocolate matzoh, which is just a giant chocolate bar made into the shape of a matzoh. In other words, a thousand times better. Chocolate-covered matzoh is to chocolate matzoh as a gold-plated watch is to a Rolex. If you promise your grandchildren chocolate matzoh, but you give them the chocolate covered, don’t expect them to visit you in the nursing home years later.)
But I digress. Matzoh is a tasty, non-nutritional but sustaining food meant to remind us of the bread our ancestors ate when they high-tailed it out of Egypt. `Cuz when you’re leavin’ hasty, you ain’t got time for pastry.
However, my reflection today is not just about matzoh; it’s about a special version of matzoh. The platinum standard, if you will. And I will. When I’m conducting a seder, or kicking back watchin’ baseball during chol hamoed, I want me some shmura matzoh! That’s the stuff! That’s the bread of affection! It’s the same flour and water, the same procedures. But with shmura matzoh, the harvested grain is guarded from the very first second it’s plucked to the moment the Rabbi slides it and its compadres out of the oven.
Shmura matzoh is the ultimate homemade bread. No machines, no slicer cutting the edges into right angles. No opening a box where every piece looks like a ceiling tile in a suburban office. Shmuras are individually mixed, rolled, and baked. And they don’t look beautiful or symmetrical. They’re lumpy, they’re brittle, often overcooked, and the burnt parts are all over the place. In fact, shmura matzohs are so ugly, they could replace Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.
But oy my God, are they delicious! There’s something so real and so pure about them. Everything else you get in the store is machine-pressed, dye-cut, flushed with preservatives, and so far away from actual food, you’re not even sure what the hell you’re eating. With shmura matzoh you taste three things: flour, water, and Rabbi sweat.
Now there’s all sorts of hoo-ha/doo-dah rules about using shmura matzohs. You’re supposed to eat them only at the seder and no other time — not even the rest of the holiday. I’m sorry, but at $17 a box with six pieces of bread in it, I’ll eat it on Christmas if I want to. Also, since the matzoh is utilized during the seder ceremony — including breaking it for the afikomen, the bread has to be complete, unbroken. You think it was tough for the Jews to cross the Nile out of Egypt? Try getting a one-millimeter cracker from a Brooklyn factory to a Staten Island dinner table without having a few oopsies.
Still, it’s worth it because shmura matzohs are the bomb. Yes, they’re impossible to butter, and they don’t actually break in half; they splinter — leaving shards of crumbs everywhere you look. But I don’t care; their deliciousness trumps all. I mean, on Passover, we have to eat raw horseradish, and then we have to take yummy charoset and ruin it by mixing it with horseradish, and then for eight days: no pizza, no pretzels, no ravioli, no danish, no muffins, no waffles, no wafers, no hoagies, no heroes, no oatmeal, no beer. So if I want a piece of homecooked unleavened bread that looks like a manhole cover but tastes like Judaism, I will seek no further than shmura matzohs. Mmm mmm flavorless — and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches, in Great Neck, New York. A zissen Pesach to ya.
click above to listen (video file of audio content)click above to listen (audio only)
RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S APOCRYPHA #3: Pesach
(c)2003 David Lefkowitz.
Shalom oovrachah, everyone! Happy Passover, dammit! A most joyous and happy Pesach to you and yours. I’m Rabbi Sol Solomon of Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York. And I’m happy to be your Passover guide on this segment of Dave’s Gone By.
Last time I was here, we were celebrating Purim, wherein the Jews were saved from extinction by a hot chick and her uncle. This time, the Yehudim were saved from a fate almost worse than death—eternal slavery—by a stuttering little fella named Moses, his faithful brother Aaron, and a little bit of help from You Know Who.
I think we all know the story. After Joseph (the guy with the schmatteh of many colors) did so much good for Egypt, he settled there. And his brothers settled there. And they told two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on—until the Jews made up a significant portion of the population. The new Pharaoh was a bissel nervous about this. But rather than exile everybody, he figured, “Hey, slave labor! There’s no union, no Workman’s Circle — let’s make them slaves!”
So, the Jews were put to hard labor building the pyramids, and the roads, and doing touch-up work on the sinks. But they were cruelly treated: working from morning till night, not enough food, long lines at the bathroom — yet they still found a way to keep multiplying and making more Jews. So, Pharaoh demanded that all male Jewish children be cast into the river—splash. One of those kids was a little baby whose mama gave him a chance. She put him in a tiny waterproof basket and pushed him into the bulrushes. Why the bulls didn’t rush out and trample him, we’ll never know. Instead, he was found by Pharaoh’s daughter while she was bathing in the stream.
She named him “Moishe,” or Moses, `cause he moseyed down the stream into her arms. The Queen saved him and raised him as her own. And he became an upstanding member of Egyptian society. He saw a task-master brutally whipping a Hebrew slave with a cat o’ nine tails. Moishe was outraged at this use of a deformed pet to hurt someone. So he slew the Egyptian. Then he ran away.
While he was gone, he went wandering and came upon a burning Bush. He told Bush to go invade Iraq, he’d feel better. But then he came upon a second burning bush—burning, but it wouldn’t be consumed. For that bush was God who told Moses to tell Pharaoh to tell the children of Israel they could leave. Moses, who had a bit of a lisp, took his brother Aaron along for support. Ironically, Aaron had also seen a burning bush that morning and tried to consume it, but his wife said, “No, you go with your brother. I’ll just use my toy.”
The two siblings arrived at Pharaoh’s palace and were greeted with hatred and derision, which Moses promptly reported back to God. HaShem said, “This guy doesn’t know what he’s fooling with. I’m gonna give you some magic tricks. Go, do the Copperfield thing. Tell me how it comes out.”
So, Moishe went back to Pharaoh and changed his stick into a serpent (that’s not a metaphor) and some other cool things, but Pharaoh had a guy who could sit buried in an ice block for days and another conjuror who could hang from his nipples indefinitely, so he wasn’t impressed.
“That’s it,” said God. “I gave Pharaoh a chance. Now I’m gonna give him ten chances, each one uglier than the last, and he won’t budge for any of them until the last one.”
Moses said, “You know, God, you could have saved me a bunch of trips back and forth if you just did the last one first.”
But God said, “Don’t be a smarty-tunic, Moses, or you won’t see the promised land.”
So, Moishe and Aaron went back to Pharaoh—back and forth to Pharaoh!—visiting ten horrible plagues upon him. We remember those plagues at the Seder, spilling drops of Manischewitz out of our glasses at the misery each affliction must have caused the Egyptian people.
The first couple were manageable. Blood. Frogs (that was probably kind of cute. Little froggies everywhere like the shower in the movie Magnolia). Then lice, flies—weird that He does lice first before flies, since lice sounds a lot worse than flies. Unless you’re Chinese, in which case you’re used to flied lice. But seriously, the plagues sound hideous, even though they sound a little odd to modern-day ears. Like that cattle disease: murrain. Or why the swarm of locusts came after all the hailstorms. I mean, after hailstorms, what would be left to eat?
So, to make the concept of the Ten Plagues more immediate, more tangible to the modern listener, I’ve come up with a different list of pestilences, a new “top ten,” as it were. It’s not meant to replace the originals—chas v’chalil! [heaven forbid]. It’s just a way to get you to imagine how relentless, how blechy, how terrifying this must have been. So, these are Rabbi Sol’s Ten Scourges!
Number one: Roaches. Icky little disease-carrying bugs. They cause emphysema, they may be responsible for this new SARS virus, you kill one and there’s three more to take their place… I know my wife. If she were Pharaoh, and that were the first plague, forget it! The Jews would be out of Egypt so fast, the matzoh would still be dough!
Scourge number two: Paper Cuts. Imagine falling naked into a pile of scattered sheets of 20lb. bond paper, and each time you move, you cut yourself. And then, every five minutes, HaShem pours grapefruit juice on you. Not very nice, hah? HAH?
Plague three: Those little rectangular advertising cards they put in magazines. Every time you open a book, a newspaper, a diary, there’s one of those on every page. Even if you shake them all out into a garbage can before you read, it doesn’t help. Because every other page has those perfume sniff things in it. Every book in your house will stink like the fragrance counter at Macy’s. And the only thing worse than that is the stench of your own vomit because you’re so nauseous you can’t stand it anymore.
Scourge number four: Home Shopping Network. Every single channel on your television dial (I know, we’re almost there already). Not one item under $200, and Joan Rivers on every third program…naked. The only way she’ll put her clothes back on is if everybody buys her grotesque jewelry, so everybody does.
Plague five: Intestinal gas. Not just the smell but the cramping, the bloating. Every single person on the Long Island Rail Road. Every co-worker on the elevator letting off enough gas to put KeySpan out of business. Then everybody starves and freezes to death because no one dares light a match.
Roaches, cuts, inserts, Joan Rivers, and gas — sounds grisly, hah? But those are just the first five, with five more to go! This is the kind of revenge HaShem deals out when He’s mad.
Number six: Freezer burn. All your meat, all your ice cream, all your TV dinners—they all taste like someone basted them with nitrogen. And that’d before your wife cooks them and makes them taste like she burned them with nitroglycerin.
Plague seven: Militant Arabs. Oh, sure. We slew a few in Iraq, and the Israelis are getting tough on Hamas. But imagine walking down the street, and everywhere you look is a kid throwing a rock, a woman wearing a burqa shooting at you, a man with a grenade in his knapsack—and you don’t even live in West Hempstead.
Plague number eight: Prostate cancer. What Jew can’t relate to prostate cancer? Well, maybe the women, but other than that? Imagine your little sack with shrinking matzoh balls and a gland that’s already halfway to the graveyard. And your proctologist is a former professional wrestler with big, meaty hands. He wears welding gloves because his other ones keep getting torn up by his long, dirty fingernails.
The ninth plague: Oh, this is a bad one: never-ending dental work. Every other week for years, that little sucky thing in your mouth going “pffthhhfffhhhh.” And the novocaine. And the picking at the gum line. And every time he finds another cavity, it’s under the filling. I don’t care how much God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, if He gave the Egyptians never-ending dental work, the Jews would have been shipped across the Red Sea and given free chariot service into Canada if they wanted, just to make it stop.
And now, finally, the tenth scourge, the deal breaker. The one to make every father, mother, brother, and sister weep without end: everywhere you go—inside, outside, the kitchen, the bathroom, the courtroom, the park, the subway, underwater, on a mountain—everywhere you go: inspirational music by John Tesh.
I know, I know. What merciful God would visit that even on a hated enemy? But these are plagues, people, not annoyances. HaShem didn’t go, “Hmm, I think I’ll bother Pharaoh with ten nuisances.” No, he gave the ruler and his people ten plagues—including death of the first born—and the Jews were finally allowed to leave Egypt.
They had more adventures to come, but I’m running short on time, so I thought I’d share a little bit of a happier aspect of the holiday. At the seder, where we eat and drink and retell the story of Pesach (much as I have done now), we also sing songs. Hymns of praise, questioning, and delight. One of the tunes that comes early in the proceedings is called “Dayenu.” It means “enough,” as in, HaShem has done so many miracles for us, but even if he’d done only a couple, one or two, it would have been enough for undying gratitude. Normally, we sing “Dayenu” in Hebrew with some Aramaic in it, but I’ve prepared some special English lyrics. So feel free to sing along or clap your hands or pick your nose—whatever you wanna do, but get into the spirit. This is “Dayenu.”
(sings) “Ohhhh,
Even if he had been sleeping
While six million Jews were slaughtered
Even though he watched us tortured
Dayenu.
(Dayenu) Day Dayenu, Day Dayenu, Day Dayenu, Dayenu Dayenu.
Even if the Muslim putzes
weren’t blowing up our buses
Yadda yadda, Intifada
Dayenu.
We’re all crazy . . . about you.
Couldn’t live without you. Who needs happiness?
Even if there was no Hitler
Even if there was no Haman
Why so many snippy gay men?
Dayenu.
We are chosen
So we’re coping
We’re just hoping
You’ll choose someone else.
Even if we have big noses
Even if we’re prone to hair loss
Even if there was no Tay Sachs
Dayenu.
God is looking
God is watching
God is botching
Everything He does.
Even when the goyim tease us
Even when the gulags freeze us
It’s okay, we murdered Jesus
Dayenu.
(Dayenu) Day Day Dammit! Day Day Dammit! Day Day Dammit
Let’s sing it one more time, why don’t we?
Day Day Dammit! Day Day Dammit! Day Day Dammit
And circumcision hurts, oy!”
Were you singing along? Were you bouncing up and down to the spirit of the holiday? Good! Now go out and make this a wonderful Passover. Have a seder, or, if you’re not, find someone who is and go invite yourself. Kidnap a child so they can answer the four questions, read the Haggadah, greet Eliyahu, connect to the holiday and to your fellow man.
On behalf of myself, my dear wife, Miriam Libby, and our children, Nechemiah, Josiah, Shloime, Chanah, Rivki, Yehuda, Moishe, Yechezkiel, Boruch, Avigdor, Yisroel, Hepzibah, Shaul, Aliza, Shimon, Gedaliah, Naftuli, Benyamin, and Fred (by my first marriage), plus one on the way (Baruch HaShem!), this is Rabbi Sol Solomon saying chag sameach [happy holiday] and shalom oovrachah, from every one of me to every one of you.
