Exodus

I’m back from Pittsburgh where I got a nasty case of the stomach flu on Friday night. I haven’t been able to eat anything for the past 48 hours which for me is as rare as the Ten Plagues of Egypt. I was so bummed to miss the seder we were invited to last night but I got off the plane and had to collapse for 12 hours. Is this my body’s way of getting rid of all of my emotional chumetz? I guess it is a sort of cleansing—on the day Jews were supposed to be ridding their homes of any leavened bread or foods that rise or swell I was puking my guts out in the bathrooms of the Hilton Pittsburgh. My own personal exodus. Maybe I can start a new trend, perfect for Los Angeles: Passover Bulimia.

We’re invited to a second seder tonight so I have one more chance to celebrate the Hebrew slaves’ release from bondage. Hmm, do you think gefilte fish, chopped liver, and horseradish will work well as my first food in several days? All washed down with four glasses of sweet Mogen David Concord Grape wine?

I have great memories of the seders of my youth, most of them taking place at my grandparents’ Lake Shore Drive apartment. These were the days when we read every word of the Passover story in our wine-stained Haggadahs in English AND in Hebrew so it was sometimes close to midnight when we finally got to the main meal. Because of the long evening, the small pre-dinner offerings, such as the boiled potato and hard-boiled egg in salt water were greeted as rare delicacies. We savored every morsel as if we were the starving Israelites making our way across the desert to the Promised Land. The egg is a standard seder item, representing the sacrifices at the First Temple in Jerusalem, but many families eat parsley instead of potatoes for that part of the seder. I’m guessing this was a regional difference—maybe it was hard to find parsley that time of year at our family’s ancestral village in Poland? I think there must have been grape juice on the table for the kids but my cousin Jerry and I used to secretly chug down full glasses of the real stuff, getting quite wasted in the process. I’ll never forget the seder where Jerry was so drunk he punched me in the nose, just in time to add some realism to the anecdote about the first plague that befell the Egyptians—Blood! Then there was the time my grandmother snuck out just before we opened the door to invite the prophet Elijah into our seder to drink from the special glass of wine set aside for him. As we rose to welcome Elijah, chanting the haunting “Eliahu HaNavi,” my grandmother appeared in the doorway, covered in a white sheet, as our very own prophet! We loved it but I don’t think my orthodox grandfather was terribly amused.

I miss those endless seders, even though as kids we kept counting ahead to see how many pages in the Haggadah were left until the meal was served. Maybe that was the idea—to give us a little taste of bondage, until, like Moses, we wanted to shout to our Pharaoh (my grandfather): “Let My People Go!”

Comments

[david]

Oy. There aren't too many experiences lonelier than barfing in a hotel toilet, alone, in a strange city. (Not being alone is scarcely better.) Hope the speculative dread we both feel on Monday is not accompanied by gastric roilings.

I know: have a Matzah biscotti! Dipped in chicken soup!