This week is Passover and Easter. For many years Passover has been a time of sadness for me. When our kids were young we would gather with my brother and his family at my parent’s house. We were a big crowd and a bridge table needed to be added to the dining room table set up. There were all six cousins, my brother and his wife, my parents, my mother’s brother and his wife and the five of us. But there was always tension around religion and discussions that that were part of the passover seder. My brother and his wife are Orthodox and their children attended very religious schools. They arrived prepared to show off the the work they had done at school relating to the holiday. Although my daughter and youngest son attended Hebrew School neither was particularly invested in the material around Passover.
When I was young my parents were reform Jews. As they aged they became more religious influenced by friends who were conservative-orthodox in their practice. I always got a sense that they had not quite sorted out who they were when it came to religion or why they engaged in some practices and not others. They were inconsistent but also rigid around what rules they chose to follow and what rules they felt they could be flexible with. Often their decisions around how observant they should be seemed arbitrary and based on the choices of others rather than a concrete commitment to religious practice. My children and husband found the strict approach to religious practices intolerable especially since there was very little compromise or willingness to listen to our point of view when discussing the Haggadda (the book Jews read at the formal Seder Dinner). As my children became teenagers the boys discovered atheist and humanist philosophers sealing their belief that there was little value in religious practice or thought. My mother became tired of doing Passover Seders and it was made even harder by the demands my brother’s family would put on her during that week when it came to food, which had to meet very strict kosher guidelines.
One year my parents decided to go to my brother’s in Chicago for Passover thus ending the annual gathering of cousins. There was no way my family could travel to Chicago. My son and daughter were in difficult places and struggling with school and life in general. I confess I felt abandoned that year. In the year’s that followed we attended Seders at the homes of less religious friends and always had a wonderful time. I would take a deep breath knowing I was eating food that would not meet the strict passover guidelines my parents had imposed on the holiday. But I always left those seders feeling “free” and joyful. The joy contrasted with the bitterness I felt about how orthodoxy had soured what could have been a lovely family gathering. Since the kids have become adults and married there were years when we hardly had a Seder at all. There was the year we went to a house of friends of friends of ours in London for dinner on Passover and had a particularly memorable evening. I gave up strictly following the passover dietary rules at some point along the way. These days I might avoid bread and other foods that are specifically not Kosher for Passover during passover week but I am not about to spend a fortune just to buy a product that has been certified Kosher for Passover. And if I have a social event or find myself eating out that is OK as well. More importantly I have grown comfortable disagreeing with my parents and brother about religion.
This year my kids all pushed to have a Passover gathering. It was very sweet. And although Ethan’s teaching schedule meant we had to have our “seder” a night early we managed to pull off a gathering with all three kids and their significant others and the 3 grand babies. My in-laws came. We had traditional and untraditional foods. I even managed to make egg-free matzoh balls for Chris and Nikko. Roen made regular Matzoh balls with me and of course she had to experiment with making them in different shapes, which much to my amazement actually worked!!!! There was a snake and some ball with snake on top of it so it looked like a girls face, which I scooped out for her to eat. And a wonderful time was had by all. The Afikkommen was hidden and I gave each of the girl’s a pretty flower seed packet to plant as their reward. But best of all everyone agreed we needed to work hard to make this a tradition. It is not easy with everyone’s schedules and work but I think the precedent has been set and as long as we can remain flexible hopefully it will happen.