Observant Jews cannot work for two days on Rosh Hashanah, which this year starts tonight. Then eight days later there’s Yom Kippur, two days of Sukkot five days after that, and two days of Simchat Torah another week after that. What’s most troubling for people like Horowitz is that this financial hardship is twice as bad as it needs to be: Only one day of the two-day holidays—yom tov, in Hebrew—is mandated by the Torah; the other is rabbinic tradition from another era. Horowitz has thought about teaching on the second day of these two-day holidays, but the rabbis won’t allow it. “If I started working on yom tov, I wouldn’t feel as much like part of the Orthodox community anymore,” she told me.

***

It started as a clerical issue.

Rabbinic Judaism—that is, the Torah as interpreted by the rabbis, and the mainstream form of Judaism for more than a millennium—follows a lunar calendar. After the destruction of the Second Temple, but before the establishment of a formal calendar, Jews who had left Israel for Babylon, Egypt, and Rome needed to be informed of the new month. This happened via smoke signal or messenger dispatched from Jerusalem, depending on where you lived. Once the start of the month had been determined, you’d know when the holidays would take place.

Of course, even if you had really astute and quick-footed messengers, getting out word of the new month took some time, which meant calculations of holidays’ starts could be off. Everyone outside of Israel accordingly began observing two days of holidays, to ensure that at least one of the days was correct. (Jews in Israel still keep one day; Jews visiting Israel, for the most part, are still required to observe two days, even when in Israel, unless they own property there. Israelis visiting places outside Israel over the holidays observe just one day. The exception is Rosh Hashanah, which is observed for two days everywhere.)

In the United States, Orthodox Jews observe rabbinic law closely; Conservative Jews are more lenient. But both continue to observe the two-day tradition, despite advances in timekeeping and communication that allow us to know with precision when holidays should be observed. (Not that they made so much sense in the first place: Shavuot, for example, is always 50 days after Passover, no smoke signals or messenger needed.) So, why do we continue to observe those two days?

The answer, the rabbis will tell you, is this: because the Talmud, which was written after the calendar was serialized, says so. The writers of the Talmud, in turn, answer the question by warning that Jews should be careful with the customs of our fathers, lest someday there be persecution against Jews and we lose our calendar and our calculation. Rabbis will also tell you that this establishes Israel as the central location for Jews, a reminder that no matter where we’ve set up shop, we should always look to Israel as our homeland.

But what do those things matter to people in 2011, when we’re not really being all that persecuted—at least no more than usual—and we’re all very aware that Israel is the Holy Land? I practice Orthodox Judaism, though I’ve tested observance of all stripes, and so the idea of practicing one day is not as outrageous to me as it is to friends of mine who have been Orthodox their entire lives. And yet I can’t seem to let the second day of yom tov go either.

***

Last year, Alan Brill, an Orthodox rabbi and professor of Jewish-Christian studies at Seton Hall University, a Catholic university in New Jersey, blogged about the problems caused by a two-day yom tov. Those problems are exacerbated in years, like this one, in which many of those two-day holidays line up on a Thursday and Friday, leading right into Shabbat and creating what is effectively a three-day no-work, no-technology yom tov. (This pattern will repeat in 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2017.)

“The past few years there has been a growing tension among those who work in interactive professions about their need to check their blackberries on Yom Tov,” he wrote. “Some fields need daily input.”

Brill’s post was in response to another blog, Jewschool, which predicted that the three-day yom tovs might lead to more people simply abandoning observance of two-day holidays. So far, there’s been no movement by Orthodox or Conservative Judaism to relax observance of that second day. But when I spoke to Brill, he pointed out there’s precedence for relaxing the rules.

“In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, many Orthodox congregants would go to Saturday services, then open their shops,” he told me. “No one thought about it; you had to make a living. Second-day yom tov was the same. You’d have your service, then go to work. Now it seems Orthodoxy defines itself as a total system, making everything complete and total commitment, rather than doing the best you can in a complex system.”

That tradition may be starting to reassert itself among individual observant Jews.

Janet Fuchs, a 44-year-old stay-at-home mother in Los Angeles, sends most of her four kids to Orthodox schools and attends an Orthodox synagogue. But she quietly stopped observing the second day of yom tov two years ago. “My husband announced it first,” she told me. “He couldn’t miss that much work, he decided, and he doesn’t like to daven.” At first the family continued observing the second day without him, going to synagogue and a celebratory meal. “But it wasn’t fun without him, so we stopped going to shul and were just going to lunches,” Fuchs said. “Then we stopped going to shul or going to lunch, and then I let the kids use electronic entertainment on second day.”

I asked Fuchs, a friend, if she feels guilty about giving up that observance. She sometimes does, she said, but over time the guilt has faded in light of the benefits. “When I realized that not keeping second day was making my appreciation of the first day greater, I felt less guilty,” she said. “Mostly, I feel like I know a fabulous secret that no one else knows.”

***

Moderation is something you don’t hear a lot about in the Orthodox community. But in the same way the rabbis have taken interpretation of the laws outside of God’s exclusive control, perhaps those of us who love Orthodox ideas and values might need to take the rules of our practice out of our rabbis’ exclusive control. I wonder how much my kids will be eager to follow any form of observance after they witness my ambivalence and resentment. Perhaps if I practiced moderation, they would be more apt to embrace their faith.

But still, it’s difficult to do. My husband and I have talked about giving up the second day of yom tov, but we can’t seem to pull the trigger on it. A few blocks away from me in Los Angeles, while I hedge, Horowitz remains tempted too, but she doesn’t feel like she will make the move anytime soon. “At this point it’s also about setting an example for my kids, who are now old enough to understand.”

Fuchs, for her part, doesn’t think non-observance of the second day is as big of a deal as I’m making it. When we talked, she encouraged me to look around and realize that she’s not exactly revolutionary as an Orthodox woman observing one day of yom tov. “I have discovered that we aren’t the only ones,” she said.

• Despite a formal Palestinian Authority ban on the practice, 14.2 percent of employed West Bank Palestinians work in settlements—where, on average, they are paid twice as much. [JPost]

• The assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis, the Palestinian-Israeli theater director and political activist, was almost certainly motivated by his art, not his politics. [Guardian]

• Tuvia Geffen: Brilliant rabbi, prescient anti-Nazi crusader, proud Jewish advocate … and the man responsible for the annual miracle that is kosher-for-Passover Coca-Cola. Great piece. [NYT]

• A fascinating history of the Likud Party. Its prime ministers—Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ariel Sharon—have ended up enacting consequential policies that contradict the party’s maximalist ideology. Will the trend continue with today’s Likud PM? [Jewish Ideas Daily]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Justin Vogt reports from New Orleans on how David Simon’s Treme is imitating life—in the form of Simon’s clash with NOLA’s mayor. [Slate]

• Is Syria’s nuclear program still going strong? [TNR]

• At this point, according to experienced negotiator Aaron David Miller, the peace process is, literally, all talk. [Foreign Policy]

• Alfred M. Freedman, a psychologist who was critical to reversing the paradigm that treated homosexuality as a mental illness, died at 94. [NYT]

• Arsonists burned a synagogue on the Greek island of Corfu. [JPost]

Happy Good Friday and Easter to all our Christian readers. Here is one of our own with a tribute to, er, another one of our own:

• What the Obamas ate, complete with recipes (including contributing editor Joan Nathan’s Moroccan charoset truffles). [White House]

• Blowtorch-wielding rabbis! Making a kitchen K for P is hardcore. [WSJ]

• Passover forces the Jewish thirtysomething (in this case, the great Dahlia Lithwick) to wonder: Who should lead the Seder? Resultant, deeper questions ensue. [Slate]

• Is Pharoah correctly perceived as a villain? #slatepitches [Slate]

• The Passover story’s lessons for contemporary military strategy and theory. This is cool. [Danger Room]

• The pedagogy behind the Four Sons. [GothamSchools]

• A dispatch from the Kinky Jews Passover Seder. “Kinky” actually turns out to be an understatement. [Unorthodox Gymnastics]

• From last year, quite possibly my favorite post I’ve ever written on The Scroll. [The Scroll]

Exodus

The flat bread
that scratched

our throats
was not symbolic.

We left too quickly
to bring the symbols.

Neither did the bread
portend of manna.

It was bread.
We left

with the skin
on our backs,

with the imprint
of whips.

The symbols
came after,

finding us the way
a lost dog,

crossing deserts,
pinpoints the master

who can’t
live without him.

—Andrea Cohen

Macaroons

I get it now.
You’re dead.
You can’t do
everything
you used to.
Reruns instead
of new episodes.
I get it.
You can’t send
macaroons this Passover,
those dense confections
without flour, conforming
to the rules
of kashrut, the rules
of engagement, which
in the case of our people,
involved fleeing, trading
slavery for the desert.
The land of milk & honey
was a kind of paint-
by-numbers kit
everybody lugged
in his head through
sandy ditches. It’s
best not to commit
directions to Nirvana
to paper: they could be
stolen or confiscated, or
worse: the place itself
obliterated. Forty
years is a long time
to get where you’re going.
Where are you promised?
In the end you spoke
of a boat ride, of
booking passage second-
class, on a vessel that lacked
a rudder, an engine, a sail.
Kaput, you said.
You were looking
for a solution.
Why now? someone
asked—less question
than demand. You
had to go. I
get it. We prepped
you for a journey,
because the mind
gets stuck on the speed
bumps of Fin, of Finito.
The mind insists
on one more
road, one more hello.
I get it: you won’t
be posting macaroons
this year. No problem,
mom. Just send the recipe.

—Andrea Cohen

Paschal

Easter was the old North
Goddess of the dawn.
She rises daily in the East
And yearly in spring for the great
Paschal candle of the sun.

Her name lingers like a spot
Of gravy in the figured vestment
Of the language of the Britains
As Thor’s and crazed Woden’s
Stain Thursday and Wednesday.

O fellow-patriots loyal to this
Our modern world of high heels,
Vaccination, brain surgery:
May the old Apollonian flayers
And Jovial raptors pass over us—

Those ordainers of suppers
Of encrypted dishes: bitter, unrisen,
Infants as bricks for the taskmaster
Quota. Fruit and nuts ground
In wine to recall the mortar:

On the compass platter, traces
Of the species that devises
The Angel of Death to sail
Over our legible doorpost
Smeared with sacrifice.

—Robert Pinsky, from Gulf Music, (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2007)

Refuge Event

was them in motion
beside the open cart on steel wheels
drawn by a tawny mule in the
modern day having bartered
for cart and animal in
motion beside orchards
bordering the receding town
receding crows on the roof and a boy watching
them above his shovel in his pose
animal poked with a stick
between lurid exhalations and
a finch flicking itself at
gnats in the air
in motion and the crate or cart
mounded with leathers
tools from the workshop
drill press/lathe/iron forms/dyer’s vat
them bartering in syllables
anonymously in August
in wool coats and hats in the
documentary evidence in stiff polished
boots laced high and
unbroken-in
spring rain
had rutted the road
with a gap in motion
in eventual summer
axle needed mending
bucket needed washing
with the wash and the boiling water
(good-bye mother with her bag of wash)
in a surge of details past
slumbering countryside
in a past tense
wing or cargo hold

—Mark Levine, from The Wilds, (University of California Press, 2006)

I never thought that Jews would voluntarily live in this vast, distant part of Russia that extends from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean and north beyond the Arctic Circle. But once when I was giving a talk in Providence, R.I., a woman named Eleanor Elbaum quietly approached me. “Would you like some Passover recipes from a Jewish family in Siberia?” she asked. She said her family had lived there for generations.

I had read about Dostoevsky and others being exiled to Siberia, and now I learned the Jewish Siberian story. In 1632 the first Jews were sent there from Lithuania, after being captured during the Russo-Polish war. In the early 19th century Jewish convicts from Moscow landed in Siberia too, sentenced to hard labor. In 1859, after the Crimean War ended, merchant classes of Russian Jews were permitted to settle outside the Pale, and some found their way to Siberia.

The next time I was in Providence, I stopped by Eleanor Elbaum’s brick home on a quiet residential street. She had made a few dishes that were waiting for me on her table. But first we talked.

“My great-grandparents on both sides came to Siberia after the Crimean War in 1859,” she said. “My great-great-grandfather was in the army and when the war ended he was permitted by the czar to move to Siberia from Lithuania.”

Her father, who was born in Ishim, Siberia, and served in World War I, went into the hotel business. He and her mother, who was born in the old Siberian town of Tomsk, married and lived in Vladivostok, Russia’s biggest port on the Pacific side of the country. In 1922, they  took a leg of the Trans-Siberian railroad to Harbin, Manchuria. Manchuria served as an escape route for Russian Jews after the revolution and remained one during World War II.

Elbaum, who was born in 1932 in Harbin and grew up in Japan during the World War II, knows about Siberia primarily through the food she ate as a child. “There was no discussion about Siberia when I was growing up,” she said. “My mother would make piroshky and pelmeni, the Jewish ravioli, and put them outside to freeze. They told me they didn’t need a freezer. They had a sort of igloo outside for the food.” Because it was practically impossible to buy fresh lemons, her mother would use sour salt when making jams and curing meat like brisket. They also ate typical Russian Jewish fare—cucumber and sour cream salad, cabbage rolls stuffed with meat and rice, borscht, kasha, and sauerkraut.

Sharon Hudgins’ wonderful saga, The Other Side of Russia, A Slice of Life in Siberia and the Russian Far East, gives a vivid account of life there in the late 1990s, when she spent several years in the region. “Now it has changed completely,” she told me. “But when I lived there it must have been like it was in the late 19th and early 20th century.” There were few middle men. You would get what little food was available off of farmers’ trucks. The staples were beets, potatoes, cabbage, onions, and leeks; they were kept in root cellars until late in the season. Berries, lemons, and even flour were scarce. They couldn’t count on having sugar either, and if it did appear, it was often laced with impurities.

After a childhood in the Far East, Elbaum—who speaks Russian, English, and Japanese and understands French—made her way to California for college, then to Toronto, where she met her husband, and they eventually settled in Providence. Now she frequents farmers’ markets, where she buys strawberries, cherries, apricots, and blueberries for her jams. When she was a child, these jams constituted dessert, eaten with a spoon and served with tea. Each time Elbaum puts out her canning jars, she spends a few moments remembering her parents and wondering about their life in Siberia.

Whenever she meets Russians they tell her that the best food is in Siberia. “I really don’t know what they have in mind when they say that,” she said. “I just remember that whenever we complained about having something too often, like chicken, my father would remind us to feel lucky to eat chicken. I tried so many times to get my parents to talk about the past. That generation just wiped out segments of their lives.”

As she told me her story, I looked around her house for more on Siberia—artifacts, books—but she there was little. All she had were the stories from her parents and the recipes her mother made.

On her table was a Passover candy she grew up with, a candy made from Siberian nuts and honey, the precursor to our commercial peanut brittle and fruit-and-nut bars. I have seen similar candies in other Jewish homes made with radishes, carrots, and beets; no matter how different the mixture, it always includes honey and ginger. You can also add cranberries, chocolate chips, chopped apricots, whatever you want. I love old recipes like this; they give a hint at what life before the commercialization of so many food products.

Elbaum served us tea in glasses, and with it she brought out Siberian chremsel. It’s a matzoh fritter of sorts, probably based on a blinchiki, eaten in Siberia and perfect for breakfast during Passover. I have eaten chremsel before, made out of fried potato and matzoh meal and stuffed with meat. I’ve also made a doughnut-like chremsel with nuts that I serve for dessert at Passover. I had never seen one like this before, made from matzoh meal and stuffed with tart blueberry, cranberry, or any other fruit jam, then browned and baked with a little more jam, fresh blueberries or cranberries (it should be a little tart), and honey. It’s delicious—and all the more so for the remarkable journey the recipe took from its birthplace in Siberia (or maybe Lithuania), across Manchuria to Japan, California, Toronto, and then to Providence, Rhode Island.

SIBERIAN CHREMSEL

I recommend making this dish the night before and baking it before breakfast.

1 ¼ cup matzoh meal, about
3 large eggs
5 tablespoons honey
Vegetable spray or oil for frying
1 cup blueberry jam, prune or apricot lekve, or cranberry sauce (you want a little tart and sweet together)
1 cup fresh blueberries or cranberries
1 cup sour cream

1. Bring 1 cup of water to a boil in a saucepan. Put the matzoh meal in the water, remove from the fire, and beat as you would for a gougere or put it in the food processor. Let cool slightly.

2. Beat in or process 1 egg at a time, mashing well to eliminate lumps.

3. Remove  to a bowl, and add 1tablespoon of the honey. Let rest overnight in the refrigerator.

4. Put vegetable spray on your hands and on a board or counter-top. Take a tablespoon of dough and press in your hand into a large circle, keep moving from one hand to the other because it sticks. Put a heaping teaspoon of the jam in the  center. Then, taking a knife, carefully enclose the jam to make a ball, making sure it is completely sealed. As you finish the chremslach, put them on the greased board.

5. Put a little oil or spray a frying pan and heat to medium. Add the chremslach and fry them, adding more oil if needed. Drain on a paper towel and put in a Pyrex pan large enough to hold them in one row.

6. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees and then put ½ cup jam and the blueberries or cranberries, the remaining 4 tablespoons of honey and ¼ cup water in a bowl and mix well. Pour over the chremslach and bake in the oven for 20 minutes. Serve immediately with sour cream on the side.

Yield: about 12 chremslach

NUTS IN HONEY AND SUGAR

¾ cup sugar
5 tablespoons honey
1 teaspoon ground ginger, or to taste
1 pound walnuts, roughly chopped
Matzoh meal for sprinkling

1. Mix the sugar, honey, and ginger together in a large saucepan. When it is bubbling and syrupy, remove from the heat, add the walnuts, and quickly mix to coat the nuts in the syrup.

2. Wet a wooden cutting board slightly to prevent sticking. Spread the nuts on the board in a rectangular shape and use another moistened board to push down on the nuts and pack them tightly. As the bars cool, sprinkle with matzoh meal. Once they’ve cooled, cut bars into 1-inch squares.

Note: The matzoh meal will stop the bars from sticking to each other when stacked for serving.

Yield: about 36 one-inch squares

Joan Nathan is the author of Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, among other books.

• John Galliano was fired from John Galliano. In other news, Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. [JTA]

• The State Department has been financing Syrian opposition groups, according to cables newly made public by WikiLeaks. [WP]

• Palestinian Christians may have trouble getting to East Jerusalem’s holy sites during Easter. [Babylon & Beyond]

• The Cal-Irvine students being prosecuted for interrupting Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren last year pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit a crime and disruption of a meeting. [LAT]

• Tablet Magazine copy editor Siân Gibby discussed her recent article on adapting to Jewish food on The Brian Lehrer Show. [WNYC]

• Forty-first most influential American rabbi Andy Bachman tells of his day at the White House. [Water Over Rocks]

Mmm, Moses.

Had the Times published an article on Passover apps the same day Tablet did, but not published an article on San Francisco’s Distillery No. 209’s kosher-for-Passover gin a day after Tablet did, it would have been enough.

Had the Times published an article on San Francisco’s Distillery No. 209’s kosher-for-Passover gin a day after Tablet did, but not published an article on the Washington Haggadah exhibit nearly a week after Tablet did, it would have been enough.

Had the Times published an article on the Washington Haggadah exhibit almost a week after Tablet did, but not published an article on the debate over whether quinoa is kosher for Passover several days after Tablet did, it would have been enough.

Anyway, the Times piece on the Washington Haggadah, by Edward Rothstein, is actually quite good—give it some of your time. But if you want a more original Haggadah, you might wish to try the version we put together last year with contributors as diffuse as writer Andre Aciman, boxer Dmitriy Salita, and the artist Andrea Dezsö. Our friends at Nextbook Press have posted an interesting excerpt from its latest book, Sacred Trash, about all the different Haggadot structures found among the papers in the Cairo Geniza. And you can find all of our Passover coverage—some of which covers topics the Times hasn’t even subsequently reported on!—at this one handy page.

iPassover [Tablet Magazine]
To Get Easter and Passover Celebrations Right, Use an App [NYT]
Refill [Tablet Magazine]
Gin and Passover: No Longer Contradictory [NYT]
National Treasure [Tablet Magazine]
Put Yourself in the Story of Passover [NYT]
Off the Table [Tablet Magazine]
For Passover, Quinoa is Popular, But Kosher? [NYT]
The Tablet Haggadah

• Syria’s President Assad declared a number of reforms, including his plan to lift the country’s emergency law, in an address Saturday. Which didn’t stop ample protesting yesterday, “a sound rejection of Mr. Assad’s reform package.”
[NYT]

• Secretary of State Clinton accused Iran of trying to co-opt uprisings throughout the Arab world for its own benefit. [AP/WP]

• The teenager critically injured in the school bus attack near Gaza died. [Haaretz]

• Israel prepared for Passover, including its routine closure of the West Bank. [AP/WP]

• Several leftist groups are planning a “Move Over AIPAC” conference/protest in response to May’s annual AIPAC conference in Washington, D.C. Helen Thomas, Stephen Walt, and John Mearsheimer will speak, which—in all honesty—is pretty damning of Walt and Mearsheimer, no? [JTA]

After she went to bed, I opened the package. I’d seen her friend Rachel’s plate at pickup, so I knew what she was supposed to be making. But instead of a plate, Maxie’s foil package held a jumble of gluey interlaced sticks. It looked like a teepee that had been hit by a tornado.

Maxie is generally the most resilient, least perfectionist member of our family. She’s inherently sunny, a people-pleaser, a kid who compensates for her physical difficulties with tons of goofy humor and sweetness. She loves going to occupational therapy, and she’s eager to keep trying when she has challenges. But this time she was stymied. There was a right answer, one proper way to do the project. She saw herself as a failure. And she was inconsolable.

I couldn’t help seeing a parallel. Passover turns a lot of us into tightly wound loons. There are so many rules, and you can wind up becoming a Jewish Alice, tumbling down a rabbit hole of increasingly twisted and exacting standards. Is the house really as clean as it could be? Is that cheddar cheese really kosher for Passover, or does it have a different designation from last year? Do we do peanuts, which, as Leah Koenig points out, are not actually kitniyot (a category of foodstuffs which Ashkenazi Jews are forbidden from eating on Passover) because they’re a New World food our ancients wouldn’t have known about, but no one will actually certify them kosher for Passover because of tradition? Can we (gasp) buy the freakin’ quinoa? And do I have to unscrew the telephone receiver and clean inside it? Shampoo the furniture? Cover up the artwork in the kitchen with a picture of bread in it? How arcane can we get? As a commenter on Leah’s piece said, “We need a frumkeit Olympics.”

I’m not Queen Machmir (a strict constructionist), but I do get very worked up about the Seder. Since my dad’s death, I’ve led it, and I try to add new songs, poems, and activities every year. I try to incorporate wisdom from my mom, a professor of Jewish education, about making it interactive and engaging for kids. I try to anticipate the children’s questions, even the ones they don’t know to ask. I try to prepare for guests of varying levels of Jewish ritual cluefulness, so everyone will feel welcome. And every Passover at some point I freak out and growl at everybody like Dick Cheney.

So, I was very taken with rabbi Joanna Samuels’ essay in the Forward a few days ago, sharing her own shpilkes. “I am sure there are two or three families out there who spend hours having rich discussions,” she writes ruefully, “who strike their own right balance of ritual and spontaneity, where there is not a bit of family tension about who is serving and clearing, and where the evening ends with singing all of the songs. That would constitute the Seder shel ma’alah–the heavenly Seder. But what most of us attend is the Seder shel matah—the (decidedly) earthly Seder. Among the features of this Seder are eye-rolling teenagers, exhausted children up way past their bedtimes, relatives whose religious observance or lack of religious observance is a source of tension to other family members.”

She confesses that even though every year she wants to focus less on cooking and cleaning and more on “undertaking projects that result in real freedom for real people,” every year she falls short of that mark. Been there, thought that. The Seder shel ma’alah is the Platonic ideal of a Seder: No child throws an afikomen-related tantrum, everyone engages in the host’s carefully thought-out freedom-and-slavery-related discussions, no one spills Cabernet on the Marimekko tablecloth. Since humans can never actually achieve a Platonic ideal, we have to live with imperfection all the time. And, as Neil Farber at the Medical College of Wisconsin points out, this can be hard. When we compare the real to the ideal we wind up unhappy, because, Farber says,“One, we are being mindless; not focusing or being actively aware of or appreciating the present. Two, We are never going to be as happy with what we have when we compare it to some mental idea of what is perfect.”

Chasing perfection—as Tal Ben-Shahar of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya writes in The Pursuit of Perfect—only leads to unhappiness. Ben-Shahar makes a distinction between what he calls perfectionists and optimalists. Both have high standards, but perfectionists think the perfect is reasonable, and immediately seek someone to blame when (surprise!) it remains elusive. Optimalists, on the other hand, live in the real world. They appreciate that limited success is still success. And when things don’t work out, well, they can sit with their own discomfort rather than immediately trying to assess blame. To an optimalist, failure is part of a learning process; the journey is as valuable as the destination.

It’s a similar idea to Samuels’ reflections on the chasm between shel ma’alah and shel matah, the ideal and the real. “My apartment,” Samuels writes, “will be a work in progress; our Seder there will be a blessing by virtue of everyone being around the table. I will breathe. I will take it all in. And hopefully, I can use some of the energy getting more serious about freedom—to try to see myself, in some limited way, as an agent of change in the world, casting my awareness and my resources on those whose needs for freedom remain unmet.” Amen.

Last night I had Maxie make the cover for our haggadah supplement. I worried she wouldn’t want to after her unsuccessful ritual art experience, so I told her to draw whatever she wanted. She made “a girl in a headband with a rose on it standing next to the Red Sea praying.” Very cute. Then I asked her to write “Our Seder, 2011” on it. Perhaps anxious about her unsteady writing messing up her picture, she refused. I let it go. Drawing the picture was enough—dayenu. We know what year it is and whose Seder it is. That’s optimal.

• You know how the Last Supper was a Seder? Yeah, it probably wasn’t. [Menachem Mendel/JI Daily]

• Gal Beckerman profiles the left-wing group Jewish Voice for Peace. [Forward]

• Neo-Nazis are marching in Trenton, New Jersey, tomorrow. Enjoy the rain, scumbags. [NYC ANTIFA]

• People are really excited about an Israel slasher film called Rabies, and now I am, too. [Capital]

• Kehinde Wiley—L.A.-born, of Nigerian descent—paints Israelis. [LAT]

• Some 1300 Ethiopian immigrants in Israel will hopefully set the Guinness World Record for largest Seder on Monday. [JPost]

• Unbeatable headline: “Cohen Media Acquires ‘Chasing Madoff.’” [Variety]

• In some Orthodox communities, only immodest women vote, or so they say. [Unorthodox Gymnastics]

• President Obama acknowledges the Lubavitcher Rebbe. [JTA]

Helen Mirren as a former Mossad agent? Yes, please.

• What really gets asked during the Four Questions. [The New Yorker]

• Ten Jewish car writers on the ten automotive plagues. [VF]

• Eli Valley on what the Four Sons ask today. [Forward]

Paschal Lampoon [Tablet Magazine]

The cocktail, for reasons too convoluted to explain but that have something to do with this article, is named the Chuckles, and it consists of Tito’s vodka; the juice of half a lemon; and, sometimes, some ice. It may sound simple. It isn’t. The power of the Chuckles is so great that even Liel Leibovitz—a cantankerous whiskey man who formerly esteemed vodka the simple son of the spirit world—was converted.

But while Chuckles is the world’s greatest cocktail and Tito’s is the world’s greatest vodka (again, fact), Tito’s is, alas, not kosher for Passover. As a public service, then, we set out to find the best Chuckles made with potato vodka for your holiday drinking pleasure.

We tried four bottles: LiV, made in Long Island, New York; Chopin, straight outta Poland; Karlsson’s, the pride of Sweden; and Boyd & Blair, hometown Glenshaw, Pennsylvania. We also experimented both with lemons and, for the benefit of those who like things a bit sweeter, Meyer lemons. We tasted the vodkas straight, and then with each one of the lemons, all in search of the perfect Pesach Chuckles. (There’s very little we won’t do for our readers.) Here are the results:

The Winner: Boyd & Blair vodka with lemon. The vodka has a tremendously appealing grape smell, and a mild flavor that suggests slightly more civilized rye. Still, it’s properly present, with a body that commands the mouth and makes its flavors known right away. Add regular lemon, and you get a wonderful one-two punch: First a thudding base of delicious vodka, and then a stab of tartness. A delight.

The Runner-Up: Karlsson’s vodka with Meyer lemon. Sipping the vodka by itself, we were unimpressed: We found the initial nose much too perfumey, and the taste had undertones of acetone that sent us for the nearest cup of water. But add the sweet Meyer, and all that perfuminess lifts up in one wonderful, liquid, alcoholic popsicle.

Honorable Mention: Chopin vodka with Meyer lemon. This, too, is underwhelming vodka—bitter, we thought, like husks of grain—transformed by the assertive sweetness of the Meyer lemon. This drink is like an ugly guy in a gorgeous suit, which is to say, imperfect, but somehow a boost to one’s faith in humankind.

Local shoutout: LiV. “It’s much too perfumey for me,” said Lawrence native Newhouse, “but that’s Long Island.” Mad props to this big and loud vodka, even if we wouldn’t want to drink it very often.

Finally, if, like us, you’re fortunate enough to know Maya Benton, curator at the International Center for Photography and dear friend of the magazine, you might score a bottle of her stellar, home-made, horseradish infused vodka, more delicious than any liquor you’ll drink this year and more potent than four glasses of wine.

So how do you make a Chuckles? Simple. Using a reamer—a cheap and magical bar tool you simply must have, which lets you obtain not only a lemon’s juice but also its pulp—extract the juice of one lemon into a cup. Add four shots vodka, and ice if necessary. Mix; drink; recall the Exodus. Apparently, it will actually help.

Related: Chuckles [Tablet Magazine]
Can Alcohol Help the Brain Remember? [Science Daily]

Translated by Sondra Silverston

• Craigie On Main, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose logo is literally a pig, is serving a fabulous-looking prix fixe without any pork and with, as could probably be guessed, an emphasis on Sephardic dishes and fat. Because fat is delicious.

• Aaron Israel, sous chef at Mile End, is cooking Seder for the James Beard Foundation’s pop-up restaurant. It’s already sold out, natch.

• Octavia’s Porch, in the East Village, wins for two reasons. First, they are careful enough to be charging $36 for the meal. Second, they are offering two hours of bottomless Manischewitz sangria, which sounds like it will be so good, you’ll taste it twice, if you catch my drift.

Seder for Two, Please: Restaurants Court Tradition [NYT]

Calendars are always complicated and sometimes baffling. Layered with history and ritual, they bind communities together by preserving traditions and erasing the passage of time. My father taught me to observe Passover as if I had been a slave in Egypt: to imagine that I had dragged stones up pyramids and then followed Moses to freedom. Hearing his powerful voice and evocative words, I could see the Exodus, once a year, in my mind’s eye. Yet time does pass, and as it passes traditional calendars develop fissures and contradictions. The long Seder my family celebrated, reclining at table, did not much resemble the Passover prescribed in Exodus 12:11: “And thus shall ye eat it, your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and ye shall eat it in haste.” The Jewish calendar as a whole, with its year count and months that did not match the standard ones, was a mystery to me. It was even more confusing to realize, as a child, that it must have changed in multiple ways since ancient times.

If you’ve ever wondered about the Jewish year and its history, Elisheva Carlebach’s marvelous new book, Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe, has much to offer you. A preeminent specialist on the Jews of early modern Germany, Carlebach concentrates on what became of the calendar in the early modern period. In the 16th century and after, technical literature about time, which had once been treated as an esoteric knowledge reserved for an elite, became widely available to Jews for the first time, and Carlebach traces this process in detail. But as she reaches back to explain the distant origins of early modern debates and practices and sets the calendars into their larger contexts, Palaces of Time provides even more than it promises: a fascinating and provocative introduction, full of surprises, to the Jewish experience of time.

Richly documented and sumptuously illustrated, the book tells a sinuous and sometimes wild story, one in which books of many kinds, in all their grubby materiality, play central roles. Carlebach has long been known as a supremely skillful reader of texts—an approach long central to Jewish scholarship, and one sometimes combined with a reluctance to admit that readers actually encounter texts in the material form of books, where they often leave rich evidence about these encounters. From the 1970s on, historians of the book—Robert Darnton, Lisa Jardine, William Sherman—have shown how to enrich intellectual history by combining textual analysis with the study of books as material objects. Malachi Beit-Arie, Adam Shear, and others have successfully applied this method to Jewish texts. Carlebach too now attends, with great skill and sensitivity, to the material forms of the books she studies, to their sometimes-cheap paper and poor print, their complex and powerful illustrations, and their annotations. Reading in this new way, she can tell us not only what the calendar texts say, but what mattered most in them to the Jewish readers and thinkers who printed them, and copied them, and annotated them, and wore them out.

In the 15th century and after, Jews produced calendars of every kind, from simple wall charts listing feasts for the year to come to ibburim and sifre evronot, technical treatises on the structure and meaning of the year and longer cycles. Like the rabbinic Bible and the Talmud, Hebrew works on the calendar were printed and reprinted, not only by Jews but also by Christians. Johann Froben, the great Basel printer who was Erasmus’ chief publisher for much of his life, brought out the first printed ibbur in 1527.

Yet calendars also continued to circulate in manuscript form for centuries. Printed calendars and treatises often swarmed with typographical and technical errors, as press correctors noted when they produced what they claimed were better editions. Mistakes piled on mistakes could make these technical works too inaccurate to use. A careful reader—like the two portrayed on a page from a Berlin manuscript reproduced by Carlebach, studying their sifre evronot on opposite sides of a table—might well prefer to make his own copy, especially if he could use a sefer yashan noshan (very old book) as his model. In the wake of ritual murder trials, efforts to ban the Talmud, and expulsions of ancient Jewish communities, scholarly Jews in the German world feared that their traditions might disappear. They transcribed ancient treatises on the calendar as zealously as ancient works of Kabbalah. The literature of time spanned a spectrum from smudgy single sheets, mechanically reproduced and swarming with errors, meant to be nailed to the walls of shops and hovels, to quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore, treasured by the learned bibliophiles who had copied them.

Carlebach emphasizes the learning of the Jews in Frankfurt and other centers. But no one, not even the most erudite scholar, could master all the mysteries of the Jewish calendar and its development in this period. The Jewish calendar tries—like other calendars—to square the circle. It follows both the motion of the sun, which passes through the zodiac, determining the seasons, in 365 and one quarter days, and that of the moon, which does the same in 29 and a half days, defining the months. The solar year isn’t evenly divisible into lunar months: how then to know when each Jewish month should begin? In the early centuries of the Common Era, Jews relied on direct observation. Once two independent, sober witnesses had given formal notice that they had observed the new moon, the Sanhedrin would declare that the month had begun and send out messengers with the news. But this system had obvious disadvantages, especially for Jews who lived in the Diaspora. Worse still, because the lunar year was only 354 days long, its months drifted forward in the seasons. Nisan, which is supposed to be the first month of spring, moved into winter. From time to time, accordingly, the Sanhedrin had to intercalate another month, to ensure that Passover took place, as it should, in the spring.

From the 4th century onward, the Jews of Babylon—where astronomy had been practiced in a sophisticated way for many centuries—reconfigured their calendar. An astronomical cycle, 19 years long, at the end of which the lunar and solar years coincided, determined when to add intercalary months. This fixed calendar, traditionally associated with Hillel II, found widespread acceptance. But it was challenged by the Qaraites, who insisted that the calendar, like all other Jewish practices, must rest on the Bible alone. And it provoked fierce debates in the 10th century, when Palestinian and Babylonian communities celebrated Passover on different days.

Two Jews, four calendars. In the 11th and 12th centuries, Jews mastered the new astronomy of the Muslim world. But if Maimonides and Ibn Ezra agreed that these shiny new tools should be put to work perfecting the Jewish calendar, bar Hiyya denounced them and insisted that the astronomy of the patriarchs and ancient rabbis had been more accurate. Only inklings of these fierce arguments—and of the issues they had turned on—found their way into the calendrical texts that were actually printed or copied in Renaissance Europe, and that “winnowed, diluted and mediated the mass of material for the common reader,” Carlebach writes. The great Christian student of calendars Joseph Scaliger may well have been right to proclaim that most 16th-century Jews believed that their fixed calendar went back to Moses himself.

For all their lack of concrete historical information about the Jewish year, the calendrical texts were richly stocked with other materials. Under Carlebach’s skillful hands they yield a flood of new information about Jewish life and thought. Manuscript sifre evronot were often richly and imaginatively executed. Carlebach reproduces many pages, which she explicates with great skill. Like astronomical writers in the Islamic and Christian worlds, Jewish calendar experts equipped texts with volvelles: dials made of layered paper rings, precisely marked off, which could be used to speed up computations. The calendrical works that included these were little analog computers made of paper.

Like Christian illuminators, Jewish ones introduced a rich vein of visual fantasy into many technical books. At the chart for checking one’s calculations, known as a panim ahor (face-back), manuscripts show a man standing on his head or displaying his bare backside to the reader. Puns and plays on words are common. To illustrate the new moon, for example, the illuminator might show a mother rocking her baby in the crib (molad, the technical term for new moon, literally means birth).

Sometimes the symbols are more than idle fantasies. Christian books of hours, designed to help laymen perform their daily devotions, often contained elaborate illustrations of hunts. So did sifre evronot. Mounted and on foot, armed with spears and guns, well-dressed hunters pursued tags and hares, boars and birds across the pages of these technical, largely quantitative books. Sometimes the hunted animal escaped. Pinhas of Halberstadt, in the 18th century, copied hunting scenes directly from Christian models. As their captions he inscribed verses from Isaiah that evoked the eventual triumph of the Jews. For Christians riffling the pages of their prayer books, a hunted hare was just a hare. For Jews reading their calendars, the hare became an emblem of their hope for survival among hostile nations. The calendar really could be a palace of time—or at least a pleasure garden, where Jews found a real if limited refuge from the humiliations and terrors of everyday life in a persecuting society.

Continue reading: saints’ days, chronographs, and “moshi’a.” Or view as a single page.

Appearing every spring in the Yiddish press and in humor journals produced specifically for Passover, these haggadot lampooned the poor, the rich, communists, socialists, capitalists, alcoholics, farmers, lepers, immigrants, loose women, politicians, rabbis, Hebrew teachers, even vacation homes. You name it and there is probably a mock haggadah skewering it.

Some of these spoofs functioned as political propaganda or critical commentary masked as holiday fare. Leftist ideologues, often products of the yeshiva world, took to undermining the traditional texts they knew so well. An early, beloved secular parody first appeared in the London-based Worker’s Friend in 1887 and was reprinted multiple times as the Socialist Haggadah. Lamenting the pitiful situation of the Jewish worker versus the exploitative Jewish capitalist, the author took a text familiar to every Jew and used it to promote socialism:

“Ma nishtane, why are we different from Shmuel the manufacturer, from Meyer the banker, from Zorach the money lender, from Reb Todros the rabbi? They don’t do anything and they have food and drink during the day and also at night at least a hundred times over, we toil with all our strength the whole day and at night we have nothing to eat at all.”

But every parodist had an ax to grind, and if the subject being parodied wasn’t the might of the capitalist bourgeoisie, it was something else. In 1909, a New York satirical weekly, Der groyser kundes, worked a bit of Yiddish-theater criticism into its haggadah:

“Ma nishtane, why is the current theater season worse this year than in all previous seasons? Shebekhol halaylos, every season for the past ten years had chometz and matzah, awful potboilers, but also some good literary dramas, and this season has been only unadulterated crap.”

The characterizations of the four sons in a 1916 Der groyser kundes parody might seem dated in the details, but its underlying dynamics are surprisingly familiar:

“The Wise Son: a shtetl horse thief who escaped from prison, stowed-away on a ship to America where he became a horse poisoner and a gangster until he managed to become a saloon keeper and a politician. Today he’s the president of his synagogue, a fighter for Judaism, in short, a mentsh …

“The Wicked Son: a man who fills his wallet with relief receipts for victims of the war that he picked up off the ground and shows them to volunteers asking for money to prove what a big philanthropist he is. ‘See how much I already gave?’

“The Simple Son: a kid who sits with a girl until 2 a.m. waiting for permission to kiss her.

“The Son Who Doesn’t Even Know How to Ask a Question: a traveling salesman who only comes home on Passover to find his wife about to give birth and doesn’t think to ask how a woman can be pregnant for 12 months.”

By the early 20th century, the haggadah had become the most parodied text in Jewish history. It’s easy to see why: With its fixed structure of four questions, four brothers, and 10 plagues, it is a simple text to manipulate. The vast majority of Jews—from children to the elderly—were at least nominally familiar with the text, a fact that made the gags easy to understand.

The parodies ranged in scope and ambition, from a 1911 advertisement titled “The Eleventh Plague,” which explained how the most horrible affliction of the Passover holiday was hemorrhoids, to longer parodies that took the “Kadesh, Urkhats” Seder mnemonic and played on the various duties required of Seder participants. Some parodies are complete haggadahs unto themselves.

The quality of the parodies often depended on the Yiddish news cycle. Local and international news always crept into these works. A good local scandal often made for the juiciest parody. When, for example, a political scandal surrounding a Jewish beauty pageant in Warsaw exploded in the early spring of 1929, Yiddish satirists produced an unusual amount of beauty pageant-related Passover material.

But politics was always paramount in the Yiddish press, and the roles of the four sons and the 10 plagues were often filled with political figures. The Hitler Haggadah of 1934 is a typical example.

Appearing in the humor section of the Warsaw daily Moment, just prior to Passover, the Hitler Haggadah zips through the main sections of the text with all manner of sarcastic political commentary in Yiddish interspersed with the original Hebrew. The four sons are Mussolini (wise), Hitler (wicked), Austrian Prime Minister Engelbert Dollfuss (simple), and Paul von Hindenburg (doesn’t know to ask a question). The 10 plagues are transformed into the litany of problems facing German Jewry. The parody is a pastiche of bitterness: A cartoon shows a German Jew sitting in front of a huge bitter pile of horseradish. The four questions wonder how long the Nazis will stay in power. Hitler, who ostensibly answers but simply dodges the questions, is compared to Laban the Aramean, a figure considered to be the Deus ex machina of the Exodus by some rabbis. But Pharaoh only killed the first-born males, whereas Hitler “wants to uproot everything: the males, the females, fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, the living and even the dead,” a frightening premonition of what was to come.

If you’re tired of consulting a thick brochure of kosher-for-Passover brands—this year’s edition of the popular OU guide is 92 pages long—free apps from the OU and the OK let you to browse lists of kosher-for-Passover products by manufacturer or product category. A third app, from the Chicago Rabbinical Council, gives the rule rather than the product name (unflavored, caffeinated coffee beans do not require certification) and helpfully incorporates a guide to kashering methods and a directory of hechshers. The search function is a sticking point: Only the OU app makes it easy to find, say, all kosher brands of cream cheese.

When it’s time to search for hametz, the No Chametz (free) app not only gives you the relevant laws and blessings but makes a checklist of hiding places and simulates a candle with your LED flash.

Can your smartphone help you plan the festival meal? Passover Food Street ($0.99) provides 50 recipes in six categories, but you may prefer dishes more modern than chicken in dill sauce (made from nondairy sour cream) and raspberry relish (canned cranberry sauce mixed with raspberry gelatin dessert). The app’s best feature is that it lets you take a photo of your dish to clip to the recipe. Cooking With the Bible: A Passover Meal ($0.99) is extracted from a larger book about how people cooked in biblical times, but its menu is unlikely to surprise: It includes matzoh-ball soup, spinach salad with “bitter herbs,” and coconut macaroons.

Haggadah apps provide an array of multimedia page-turning effects, along with basic blessings and instructions, but sadly little in the way of commentary. Hadar Porat’s haggadah ($2.99) is unusual in combining Hebrew blessings with English instructions and transliterations. Zebrapps’s haggadah ($0.99) and Inbal Geffen’s haggadah ($0.99) can switch between all-English and all-Hebrew modes, but it takes a few clicks. Geffen’s haggadah comes with a bonus feature: synthesized instrumental recordings of nine Passover songs that will take you back to the glory days of the Casio keyboard. Outsite’s haggadah (free with ads) is entirely in Hebrew, with little more than the basic text, but it’s multicolored and has a few illustrations and a memory game to cheer it up.

The Union Haggadah (at $3.99, the most expensive of the group), revives the Reform movement’s 1923 haggadah in digital form, and though it is short on new-media features, it contains the widest-ranging discussion of the Seder and its significance, albeit in archaic terms: “Among the ceremonials which nurtured the Jewish idealism of generations, a place of peculiar charm is held by the Seder.” As a free alternative, you could download the 1907 first edition from Google Books.

The gold standard in the limited field of kids’ Passover apps is the modest-looking iMahNishtanah ($0.99). Kids can read the Four Questions in Hebrew, touching any word to hear it spoken, or listen to a complete rendition in a child’s voice. Flash cards and a matching game reinforce pronunciation and meaning, and you can even record yourself and play it back. Parents will no doubt tire of the app’s voices and noises, but it gets the job done. Masochists should encourage their children to download Plague Audio (free), which turns an iPhone into a 10-sound noisemaker, alternately terrifying (the sound of rushing blood accompanied by a woman’s scream), harmless (serenely croaking frogs), and bizarre (ominous crescendo of TV-style soundtrack to signify darkness). Younger children might enjoy Passover—The Journey to Freedom StoryChimes ($0.99 or free with ads), an illustrated Passover storybook with an orchestral soundtrack and a voice that can read the story aloud. Unlike the haggadah, this story is all about Moses: his appearance among the bulrushes, his discovery of the burning bush, his negotiations with Pharaoh. If your kids prefer writing in books to reading them, Jewish Coloring ($0.99) offers a Seder-plate tableau, among other images, and a box of virtual crayons.

As for pure games, M.A.S.H. Passover (free), the only Passover app with an age restriction, is a version of the classic “mansion, apartment, shack, house” preteen prognostication game, restyled as “matzo, afikomen, salt, haroset.” Answer a series of questions and get a Mad Libs–influenced solution: “At the Seder, Luke Skywalker will find the Afikomen and get Justin Bieber tickets as the prize.” Satisfying only the shortest attention spans, Passover Trucks Game ($0.99) asks players to sort boxes of food coming off a conveyer belt onto two flatbed trucks, one for Passover, the other not. The maker of this game appears to be a mad entrepreneurial genius of the Jewish iPhone app, having also created Kippa Game, in which you move around a boy’s head so that yarmulkes land on it, Kosher Fishing Game, in which you sit in a wooden boat with a fishing pole and try to catch only the kosher fish, and Judaica Store Game, in which you fetch tallises for Japanimated avatars.

How you decide to use your iPhone on Passover is between you, your rabbi, and your conscience. But once you’ve started, you may not want to stop. To carry the holiday feeling into the weeks to come, download an omer-counting app, which automatically updates it with the latest numbered day. The apps are largely alike apart from the backdrop: Sefirat HaOmer (free) has wood grain. CountingTheOmer ($0.99) has burnt-edged parchment and also includes information about the history and rules of omer-counting borrowed from Wikipedia—the Shulchan Aruch of our time. Ultimate Omer 2 ($0.99) claims to be the only app that shifts to the next day at sunset, according to your location. Omer Count (free) is the most colorful, structured around the kabbalistic sefirot. With the help of these, you’ll be downloading Shavuot apps in no time. And perhaps next year—l’shana haba’ah—we’ll get all the Passover apps we deserve.

Until the 1980s, quinoa, originally from the Andes Mountains and now primarily cultivated in Peru and Bolivia, was essentially unknown in the United States, let alone among American Jews. But by the mid-2000s it vaulted to MVP status. Quinoa seemed to have it all: the satisfying heft of a starch, a high level of protein, and enough culinary versatility as a Passover grain to be turned into salads, stuffing, fritters, and a perfectly respectable oatmeal substitute. Less than a decade after being designated kosher for Passover, quinoa could be found in Passover cookbooks and on the ample buffet tables at Passover resorts. A handful of rabbis disagreed with Star-K’s decision, but they found their dissenting opinions largely drowned out by the endorsement of certifying agencies and consumers’ overwhelming enthusiasm for quinoa. As food writer Adeena Sussman put it in a 2008 article for Gourmet, “this grain-that’s-not-a-grain is becoming the belle of the Passover ball.”

But this year, the dissent has finally gained traction. In February, the Star-K released a consumer alert stating that some quinoa fields had been found in proximity to fields growing “certain crops”—by which they mean chametz or kitniyot grains—raising the risk of cross-contamination. As a result, consumers were advised to only purchase quinoa with reliable kosher-for-Passover certification. A few weeks later, the Chicago Rabbinical Council, whose influence and authority extend beyond the Chicago region, released a similar statement approving quinoa for Passover only if it was imported from Bolivia (where no chametz-contaminated fields have been found), packed in quinoa-only plants, and hand-checked for foreign grains by consumers before the first night of Passover. The statement gives Trader Joe’s, Ancient Harvest, and Israel’s Sugat brands the green-light for 2011, at least.

Red and yellow quinoa growing in Isla de la Luna, Lake Titicaca, Bolivia.
twiga269/flickr

If the Star-K’s supervisors found evidence of chametz growing near quinoa fields, the new regulations placed on Passover quinoa-eating this year make sense. But in fact the story does not end with a simple bowl of Bolivian porridge. In practice, it seems that the official approval stamp from the certifying agencies does not guarantee much of anything.

I recently took the subway to Pomegranate, the upscale kosher superstore in Brooklyn’s heavily Orthodox Midwood neighborhood, to stock up for Passover. Last year, along with matzoh, marinara sauce, and overpriced spices, I purchased at Pomegranate two boxes of Passover-certified quinoa. This time I could not find it anywhere. When I asked a store clerk, he gave me a curious look, then walked me over to the tiny kitniyot section where the quinoa sat next to the rice and chickpeas. “You know what kitniyot is?” he asked. “Sure,” I said. “So,” he said, glancing sheepishly at the package then back at me, “the choice is up to you.”

The marginalization of quinoa to Pomegranate’s kitniyot section is not the only indication that things may be shifting. Some catering companies like Boston’s Catering by Andrew and 12 Tribes in San Francisco follow the Chicago Rabbinical Council stated guidelines. Others are ditching quinoa entirely. This year, for example, the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess resort in Arizona will substitute faux Israeli couscous (made from matzoh meal) for the quinoa recipes they have offered in past years. Another caterer, whose client is one of the country’s most prestigious Passover hotels, asked to remain anonymous and refused to disclose whether quinoa would be on this year’s menu. “It is just too controversial,” he said.

The Orthodox Union, arguably the country’s most influential certifying agency, takes a soft-handed approach to the controversy. Quinoa is on its official kitniyot list, cited as a food that “may be kitniyot” and therefore should be avoided. But its Passover guide ultimately punts it, advising customers to consult their rabbis.

When it comes to kashrut in other communities, societal pressure to be the most kosher sometimes trumps common sense, or even Jewish law. As rabbi and food historian Gil Marks writes in The Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, kitniyot was problematic from the start and for many generations was not taken seriously. “In the thirteenth century,” he writes, “Rav Samuel ben Solomon of Falaise called the prohibition against kitniyot … an erroneous custom.” And yet, over the centuries, it has gained an increasingly strong foothold for the simple reason that, once enough people say something is wrong for long enough, it begins to legitimately feel wrong.

Quinoa is the latest in a long line of foods—from corn to peanuts and green beans—that have been designated as kitniyot despite evidence to the contrary. The revered Orthodox rabbi Rav Moshe Feinstein concluded that peanuts are a New World food—something the European rabbis did not know about when the notion of kitniyot began, and therefore not required to be included in the minhag (custom). And yet it is impossible to find Passover-certified peanuts or peanut butter in stores today. Granting them certification would unfortunately bring, as the caterer said, too much controversy.

As for quinoa: While it is not biologically speaking a grain and is unarguably a New World food, past trends would suggest that quinoa is headed for the kitniyot pile, despite its endorsement of the Star-K and Chicago Rabbinical Council. The question is, how much will consumers push back against this? For the last 12 years, Jews have grown used to the idea of quinoa as Passover’s starchy savior. They may not be willing to let go so easily. In the 19th century, there was an attempt to classify potatoes as kitniyot, as Marks writes, “but this was duly rejected by the populace.”

As for me, I decided not to buy the quinoa at Pomegranate this year. They were charging $6.99 for a one-pound bag—nearly double the typical price. I bought it at Trader Joe’s instead.

In Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, new from Nextbook Press, poet and translator Peter Cole and essayist Adina Hoffman recount the history of the Cairo Geniza and the scholars who dedicated their professional (and sometimes private) lives to its holdings. Cole and Hoffman spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about how such a remarkable collection of documents came to exist, the many characters—from Schechter to a woman from the Middle Ages known as “Wuhsha the Broker”—associated with it, and what its contents reveal about historical celebrations of Passover. [Running time: 25:54.]

I became a Jew at age 39, in 2005. All my life I have been a religious person, and the fact that my parents deliberately gave their children no religious training did not dampen the spiritual enthusiasm in me. My journey toward my faith was more deliberate, intense, and sustained than most.

From about the age of 18 onward, I lived reasonably happily as a Quaker. However, after many years, and alongside a growing pull toward Judaism, Quakerism’s stolid serenity began to look like passivity. I wanted more vigor in my worship and faith life.

After decades of timidly reading Jewish books and asking Jews about Judaism, I wound up by accident at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and no sooner had I seen how the rabbis prayed there than I knew the little voice I had been ignoring for years couldn’t be shut out any longer.

Religiously speaking, my conversion a little more than a year later was a cakewalk. Moving from one culture to another turned out to be more of a challenge. And as I made my way from the placidness of the Quakers into living my life as a Jew it became more and more evident where the source of my feelings of Jewish inadequacy were located: in food. I don’t like American Jewish food. (And before you start telling me I don’t have to like or eat Ashkenazi food in order to be a Jew: I know, but it’s no good arguing. In this country, certain foods form a foundation of our Jewish cultural tradition, of shared experiences. On some level, I think I must embrace the matzoh ball and the gefilte fish.)

But it’s more than the food. This time of year Jewish memories come roaring out of the past, thousands of years of eating and food and legend and Torah. I see the fondness for the holiday in my friends’ eyes, hear it in the familiar, and familial, warmth of their voices as they recall Passovers gone by. It’s as though I suddenly realize that everyone went to the same summer camp and I did not.

(A couple years ago I sat through an excellent PBS movie about preparing for Passover called The Gefilte Fish Chronicles, and I cried the entire time.)

Passover and everyone’s reminiscences and fond feelings about it underline for me the fact that my parents weren’t Jews, and moreover they are both dead now and never even knew me as a Jew. I have no Jewish childhood. Daddy never said a blessing over wine (trying to picture my stoutly atheist father saying any kind of a blessing makes me smile); Mom never lit candles or produced a brisket for us. Among other things, food just wasn’t meaningful in my world until recently.

Some families in the American Protestant culture no doubt do share loving, food-infused family traditions, but mine did not. We ate turkey on Thanksgiving, but that holiday brings up memories of a stressed-out Mom grimly producing a feast for the table around which we argued the same as every other day. I come from a culture of zero ritual, no sense of anything larger than ourselves.

I asked David Kraemer, a professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary and author of Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages, why the food was so crucial to Passover. “Pesach is about memory,” he said, which, added to the multiplicity of senses involved in the Seder, makes for an intimate experience. “It’s important to recognize that if you go back to Exodus 12,” he added, “the commandments about what should be eaten and how they should be eaten come before the events themselves.” The primary emphasis on the food and its treatment comes from the highest and oldest authority imaginable.

When davening I have the overwhelming sensation of being an integral part of a vast and venerable whole, but around the Seder table I become an uncomfortable amalgam of the wicked child and the one who just doesn’t know how to ask.

About a year ago, I decided enough was enough. OK, so I loathe matzoh: So what? I will learn how to cook with it, and maybe I can make my feelings change. Same with chicken soup, brisket, tzimmes. Over the past year I have roped my friends into teaching me to cook food the way the Jewish grandmothers I never had did not.

Slowly I have made my way down an unofficial list. I made fish balls with Toni, matzobrei with Joan, kugel with Stephen, chopped liver with Harriet and Jenny. “Show me how to make blintzes,” I said to my friend Joe around Shavuot last year, and he taught me just as his mother had taught him. He told me about how her stovetop didn’t get the right temperature, so she held the bletlach above the electric burner largely in her hands and had the burns on her fingers to prove it. (She didn’t even like blintzes herself, but her little boy did.) Broadening the scope of my project to include some Sephardic foods, I painstakingly baked traditional Syrian ka’ak for my rabbi, who pronounced them, “just like my mother’s!”

The first time I tried baking challah, when I began to knead the dough my eyes filled suddenly with tears. At that moment, I understood something with my body about tradition and food and being a Jew. Now when I go back home to Ohio and visit my brother’s family, I always make a big Shabbat dinner on Friday nights for a big table of big Midwestern goyim. To them it’s just roast chicken and challah and wine. But I, as a Jew, know better. It reminds me of a recent d’var Torah my rabbi gave; he spoke about Rav Soloveitchik’s contention that, whereas eating alone is a mechanical act, when people share food hesed is present.

Judaism makes living life more coherent, more valuable: Prayer organizes the day, Shabbat defines the week, the hagim order the year. This system is profoundly at odds with how I grew up, but now I’ve embraced this new paradigm, and it nourishes me, and I thank God for it. It has allowed me to realize that whereas food merely sustains our bodies, the growing, cooking, and enjoying of it together offer us an opportunity to consecrate something. And with every passing year, as my own memories and experiences accrue, Passover begins to look less like a party I wasn’t invited to and more like a chance to take ownership of something ancient and beautiful.

Siân Gibby copyedits for Tablet Magazine.

Corwin and Jacobs are hardly alone in seeking new resonance for ancient ritual. Synagogues and college Hillel chapters host Chocolate Seders; online communities like Challah Crumbs and Kveller share Passover craft ideas; activists for domestic workers’ rights attend Labor Seders. Indeed, my kiddie Seder plate idea last year was a tongue-in-cheek way to rope in the previously alienated, clueless, fidgety, or unable to ask.

Corwin and Jacobs are not big shul-goers. That’s true of most American Jews. “Passover to us means matzoh brei and matzoh pizza and matzoh lasagna,” Corwin said. “It means going to a Passover-inspired dinner at one of the few restaurants in San Francisco, where we live, that does that sort of thing. Most of the Seders we’ve been to have been attended mostly by gentiles.”

They came up with the idea for the cocktail Seder on a trip to Beijing, where they discovered a Manuka-honey-flavored vodka from New Zealand. At home, they experimented with adding sweet vermouth, and Jacobs had an instantaneous sense memory of charoset.

The two men come from different Jewish backgrounds—Jacobs grew up in an observant Jewish family; Corwin’s parents are intermarried. Most of their friends are “vaguely non-practicing,” Corwin says. “But everyone pricks up their ears when we talk about cocktails.”

Their site seems to have struck a chord. “We’ve been surprised to find that people who visit tend to spend six to 30 minutes there,” Corwin says. “People look at more pages than we have, which means they’re revisiting pages. I hope it means we’ve attracted some people to learn about Passover who wouldn’t otherwise know anything. We just wanted to make people smile. That would be enough. But if helps people connect to their heritage, that would be wonderful.” Dayenu.

Soon after the site launched, a woman in Alaska—married to a non-Jew, living in a community with few Jews and no shul, who still wants her children to have a Jewish identity—posted a comment on the site. She wrote that she held Passover cocktail and food pairings every year, featuring offers like a Hillel sandwich with a Junípero martini, and a Bloody Mary with savory smoked-salmon matzoh brei. She signed her comment “Frozen Chosen.”

Corwin and Jacobs also used ingredients they felt had resonance, inspired by a Seder they attended at the restaurant Perbacco a few years ago. The menu was co-created by Joyce Goldstein, author of Cucina Ebraica: Flavors of the Italian Jewish Kitchen, and many of the dishes included artichokes, a staple among Italian Jews. Corwin and Jacobs and their friends talked about how the prickly veggie could represent the Jewish experience throughout history. They wound up using the artichoke liqueur Cynar in their Chazeret cocktail. The Beitzah cocktail incorporates egg whites and Galliano (but not in a “foofy Harvey Wallbanger” way, Corwin promises). “Our first attempts lacked finesse,” Corwin says, “but now it has a more sophisticated flavor profile, and I think it looks like a roasted brown egg, especially in the tulip-shaped stemware we used.”

The most shocking-looking drink is the z’roa, which, in this innovative iteration, represents not just the lamb’s shank bone but its blood.

Z’ROA

2 oz. Basil Hayden’s Bourbon
2 oz. ruby port
1 teaspoon gum syrup
¼ oz. lemon juice
¼ teaspoon Maraschino liqueur

Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass. Shake well with ice. Strain through a fine mesh strainer into a chilled cocktail glass.

“I recently had blood drawn,” exclaimed Corwin, “and I couldn’t believe how much we got right. The bubbles are thick around the edges of the glass from the gum syrup, and the viscosity is just right. It kind of creeped me out. The phlebotomist thought I was insane.”

Worried that the site might be seen as mocking the Passover ritual, Jacobs asked his cousin Irwin Keller to take a look. Keller, known as Reb Irwin, is the spiritual leader of a Reconstructionist congregation in Sonoma County. He also has a law degree from the University of Chicago, wrote Chicago’s gay rights ordinance, is the former director of the AIDS Legal Referral Panel in San Francisco, and plays Winnie in the Kinsey Sicks, “America’s favorite dragapella beauty shop quartet.” According to Tablet contributor Esther Schor, when the group is on the road, Keller gives bar mitzvah lessons via Skype in his dressing room. He talked to me on the phone about the Sipping Seder as he made borscht.

“I think it’s important for us to be open to new ways for our ritual tradition to speak to people,” Keller said. “A lot of people have had ritual experiences they’ve felt to be empty. The commandment is to tell the story as if you yourself had left Egypt; the commandment isn’t to do it with gefilte fish, without the jelly please. I think it’s better to have the content in fewer forms than all the forms with less meaning.”

Indeed, Keller says, sitting around having cocktails with friends is a recipe for connection and introspection. He suggests participants consider incorporating a ritual like the Four-Question Seder, developed by Amichai Lau Lavie, the founding director of Storahtelling:

• What was the oppression that you fled?
• In what ways are you still stuck in a narrow place, and what do you need to be free?
• What are you grateful for right now?
• What can you do (once you sober up) to stir up some more freedom in the world?

“The idea of posing starter questions out of our Pesach story makes sense,” Keller said. “No one is required to read Aramaic or know the songs or have complex, ambivalent feelings about their Jewish education or lack thereof—it’s democratic.” Furthermore, he added, “There’s great elegance to the idea, and I think people are attracted to beauty. It’s hiddur mitzvah [the principle of enhancing a mitzvah through esthetics].”

Zachary Sharaga, owner of the Alphabet City speakeasy Louis 649, understands. “I went to an Orthodox yeshiva in Pelham Parkway—tzitzit and all—until second grade,” he told me. “Then I attended a Modern Orthodox school until the end of eighth grade. I’m a first-generation American, and I was raised following the Orthodox traditions, but my immediate family was pretty secular. I’ve battled with several degrees of piety and observance throughout my life, becoming fairly observant in my mid-late teens. Currently, I’m secular but very proud of Judaism.” He’s hosted several Seders, always with “crappy Kosher for Passover wine.” But he was inspired by the Sipping Seder to create a recipe for the second Seder this year, which he’ll be hosting. “I’m going to do a pitcher of Negronis,” he said. “But I’ll adapt it to be more bitter, and I’ll make a pitcher because it’s hard enough to get the food on the table for all those people. If you’re hosting, you don’t have time to be shaking individual cocktails. But you could do individual servings for a party.”

MAH NISHTANAH

1 oz. Plymouth Gin
1 oz. Campari
1 oz. Cynar

Pour ingredients over ice into a large Old Fashioned glass or wine goblet. Garnish with sprigs of dill and parsley and an orange twist.

“The fact that the garnish is a long twist of orange is a perfect reference to the orange on the Seder plate,” Sharaga reflects. “And it’s red, which feels very Passover.” He thought a potato-vodka-based drink incorporating myriad flavors of the holiday would be great too.

PASCHAL PUNCH

1.5 oz. potato vodka
1 oz. Lairds apple brandy 100
1/2 oz. pomegranate juice
1/2 oz. lemon juice
3/4 oz. honey (or to taste—I prefer less sweet)
1 tablespoon red khreyn (horseradish with beets) or 1 tablespoon fresh grated ginger

Shake and strain through a fine mesh strainer, over ice, into a large Old Fashioned glass or wine goblet. Garnish with wedges of apple and/or pickled beet (I love Rick’s Picks Phat Beets).

As if all this were not enough, Charles Steadman, bartender at Echo Palm Beach, provided a final recipe.

DAYENU

1 1/2 oz. Karlsson’s Gold (a potato vodka)
1/4 oz. Averna liqueur
1/2 oz. fresh lemon juice
3 oz. sparkling apple cider (chilled)
1 dash Regan’s Orange Bitters No. 6
Garnish: Watermelon radish sliced in half

Combine Karlsson’s, Averna, lemon juice, and bitters in mixing glass with ice. Stir for 30 seconds to dilute. Strain into a martini glass and top with chilled sparkling cider.  Garnish with radish.

Is all this a decadent fin de siècle indication that our religion has lost its moorings or a hopeful hint that our heritage lives on despite intermarriage, the failings of Jewish education, and the American drive toward acculturation? You tell me.

Special thanks to Francine Cohen, Editor-in-Chief, INSIDE F&B.

The first Maxwell House Haggadah was published in 1932 and was free with purchase of a can of Maxwell House. It wasn’t the first instance of marketeering finding a place at the Seder table—the State Bank of New York had done earlier haggadah giveaways—but it turned out to be the most successful by far. More than 50 million copies of the Maxwell House Haggadah have been distributed over the years, a kind of covenant between the coffee maker and those seeking to preserve “a Jewish national institution,” as the 1939 edition described the holiday ritual. It was famously used in the first-ever White House Seder last year, and it remains significant enough that its adoption this year of an updated English translation warranted coverage by the New York Times.

But here’s the odd thing about the Maxwell House Haggadah: Despite being a thoroughly American artifact, it doesn’t read as a particularly American Jewish text. Its early incarnations have the overtones of a David Attenborough script: “Almost everyone is familiar with the Biblical story of Passover,” began the 1939 introduction. “Yet the Jewish people love to recall this tale year after year.” The English doggedly follows the Hebrew, leaching any poetry from the Seder passage linking matzoh to the sought-for relief from exile in a way that renders it literally rather than conceptually Zionist. “At present we celebrate it here, but next year we hope to celebrate it in the land of Israel,” it says. “This year we are servants here, but next year we hope to be free men in the land of Israel.” So much for the goldene medina.

The English of the Maxwell House Haggadah stands in sharp contrast to the other major mass-market American haggadah of the 20th century: the booklet distributed to more than 350,000 Jews serving in the United States military during World War II. (Proper title: Haggadah of Passover for Members of the Armed Forces of the United States.) Consider this alternate rendering of the same Hebrew lines describing the Jews’ desire for redemption: “May Israel wandering yet this year reach Israel’s land this coming year, and Zion’s mount and shrine ascend. May those who freedom lacked this year their shackles break this coming year; may freedom on the world descend.” The authors, David and Tamar de Sola Pool, were unhesitant about drawing an explicit link between the safe haven of mid-century America and the hoped-for Promised Land of the Seder. “This book brought to them a heightened dedication to the ideal of liberty doubly theirs as Americans and as Jews,” the de Sola Pools wrote in 1947, in a preface to a postwar edition.

It may have been significant that both the de Sola Pools had a newcomers’ appreciation for the United States. David de Sola Pool was a Briton ordained as a rabbi in Berlin, while his wife Tamar was born in Jerusalem and arrived in New Jersey as a teenager. David de Sola Pool came to the United States in 1906 to take the pulpit at Congregation Shearith Israel in Manhattan, better known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the first Jewish congregation established in the colonies. At the height of World War I, he was known as a fervent Zionist, and he publicly argued that the colonization of Palestine was “the only way to restore Hebrew ideals,” according to a report in the Times—in opposition to those who insisted, according to the same item, that “the keeping alive of Hebraic ideals at home was of far greater importance than the Zionist movement.”

The rise of Hitler shifted de Sola Pool’s focus. Speaking at Fort Dix, N.J., just before Passover in 1941, he told a thousand Jewish soldiers that fighting Hitler was their chief responsibility as Jews. “The rape of Europe by armed violence has made it clear that the world war now being waged will determine whether human liberty is to live or die,” de Sola Pool declared. “Our American army is being expanded to strengthen the defenders of liberty, and the highest concept which you can hold of your function is that of being trained to preserve liberty against the forces of tyranny.”

De Sola Pool wasn’t the only rabbi asserting a link between the Passover story and the special burden on American Jews to save the entire free world. “Through twenty centuries of history the Jew refused to surrender his faith in the ultimate triumph of liberty,” Joseph Lookstein, the rabbi at New York’s Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, told his congregants on the Upper East Side in 1941. “And today, the greatest victim of the barbarism that seems to have engulfed the world, the Jew still stands unbowed, convinced that no temporary retreat by the forces of democracy can check the march of civilization toward its ultimate destiny of equality, liberty and brotherhood.”

When the United States entered the war in December 1941, de Sola Pool was chairman of the religious activities committee of the Jewish Welfare Board, which had been established during World War I to support Jewish chaplains and which commissioned the new wartime haggadah. In 1943 the USO distributed the first printing—65,000 copies—which carried a stern reminder about “generation after generation of Jews who have stood up to cruel taskmasters.” In the de Sola Pools’ English translation, Israel is referred to not as the terroir of the Maxwell House Haggadah but as a body standing in for all humanity, “Israel wandering” toward a promised ascent to a Zion of the spirit. It evokes a striking moment in the Jewish story: a frozen instant when “Israel,” not yet a physical entity, was at serious risk of being destroyed as a notional one in Europe.

Today, that makes reading the wartime haggadah, still available from Bloch Publishing, something of a relief. The literalist language of the Maxwell House Haggadah sets up an almost guilty dynamic. By the time “Next year may we be in Jerusalem!” rolls around—page 47, if you’re wondering—it’s almost impossible, for people reading outside Israel, to avoid thinking about vacation time and air miles. (Coach fares for this year’s holiday, from John F. Kennedy International Airport, are running about $1,200.) But for people who prefer to be in Bethesda, and for Jews in the Diaspora who harbor conflicting feelings about the State of Israel—whether over its domestic politics of conversion or the looming prospect of another war in Gaza—the de Sola Pool haggadah offers a short-circuit around contemporary history. It ends, not with Chad Gadya, but with a trio of songs: Hatikvah, the Star-Spangled Banner, and My Country ‘Tis of Thee, under its alternate title, America.

Haggadah:

On the Bookshelf: From the classic to the newfangled: haggadahs for Seders of every shape, size, and stripe, by Josh Lambert

National Treasure: A critical edition of The Washington Haggadah, a 1478 manuscript housed at the Library of Congress, shows how much—and how little—Passover has changed since the 15th century, by Adam Kirsch

To the Last Detail: More than 50 million copies of the Maxwell House Haggadah have been distributed since 1932, but a different, lower-profile version of the Passover prayerbook is the quintessential Jewish-American text, by Allison Hoffman

Paschal Lampoon: Forget Purim. Passover has a rich comedic tradition all its own, with parodies of the haggadah mocking everything from rabbis and the rich to Mussolini and Hitler, by Eddy Portnoy

Crossing Over: Journalists Steve and Cokie Roberts, a non-observing Jew and a Catholic, have hosted Passover Seders together for four decades. They share the rituals from their interfaith observance in a new haggadah. By Vox Tablet

On the Bookshelf: Beyond Maxwell House: A haggadah roundup, by Josh Lambert

The Tablet Haggadah: Writers, artists, and a boxer meditate on the meaning of Passover, by Tablet Magazine

Piece Meal: The first Passover celebrations included neither haggadah nor Seder. With the passage of millennia, the two have become central elements. Herewith an interactive guide to the collage of texts that constitutes the holiday’s guidebook, by Joshua J. Friedman

Ritual:

Funniest Nights: From setting crumbs on fire to the awkwardness of eating a matzoh-and-salami sandwich, an illustrator recounts her family’s weird and wonderful Passover traditions, by Vanessa Davis

iPassover: Holiday smartphone apps offer everything from a simulated candle for ferreting out hametz to a Ten Plagues noisemaker that you never knew you needed, by Joshua J. Friedman

Plagued: For an unrepentant news junkie, the Seder plate’s symbolism can turn topical, transforming the usual boiled eggs and parsley into delicacies like Qaddafi charoset and bitter Boehner herb. By Steve Brodner

Platonic Form: What makes the Seder night different? Its Greek roots. By Judith Shulevitz

‘I Lift My Lamp’: Including Emma Lazarus in the Passover Seder reminds Jews to keep marching toward justice, by Esther Schor

Repeat Performances: What Jewish rituals and Judaism share with Civil War reenactment and Southern culture, by Dara Horn

A Different Night: A Washington journalist discusses some of the Christian Seders he has thrown, by Allison Hoffman

Guess Who’s Coming to Seder: A Passover in Berlin stirs up questions of freedom and faith, by Jude Stewart

Next Year in Sulaymaniyah: Passover takes on new meaning for a reporter far from home, by Jessie Graham

A Seder in Sulaymaniyah: How the story of Passover resounds in northern Iraq, by Jessie Graham

‘Exodus’ Hits Twitter: #Letmypeoplego, by Marc Tracy

Dead Wrong: A haftorah of rigidity and ritual, by Liel Leibovoitz

Organizers and Agitators: A new documentary looks at the latest generation of Jewish radicals, by Jennifer Bleyer

Food:

Trans Siberian: Family recipes traveled from the remote Russian region to Japan, California, and finally Providence, R.I., carrying delicious tastes of the Old Country, including an unusual Passover treat, by Joan Nathan

Against the Grain: In Israel, milk and eggs are kosher for Passover only when produced by livestock that is chametz-free. A dairy farmer explains how the holiday alters his routine. By Vox Tablet

Off the Table: After a kosher-certifying agency deemed quinoa, the South American grain-like seed, Passover-compliant, it’s become a darling of the Passover table. But now rabbis are having doubts. By Leah Koenig

Refill: Specialty cocktails inspired by the Seder plate offer the flavors of Passover with a twist, by Marjorie Ingall

Push-Pull: I became a Jew at the age of 39, and I love my new faith. But learning to embrace Jewish food—especially at Passover—was another story. By Siân Gibby

Paste Test: Comparing charosets—the date, nut, and wine concoction that sweetens the seder, by Joan Nathan

It Is Risen: At the end of Passover festival known as Mimouna, Moroccan Jews return to yeasty treats in grand style, by Lara Rabinovitch

Before the Exodus: A tour of Streit’s matzo factory, while it’s still in the neighborhood, by Sean Cole

Crash Course: Invited to a seder, a non-Jew quickly learns everything he can about making a kosher-for-Passover recipe, by Patrick Huguenin

Off the Menu: Why did my grandmother keep meticulous records of her Passover meals, but kept her maiden name a secret? By Jennifer Weisberg

Going Nuts: Passover is about freedom, so let’s not encourage our kids to be slaves to their allergies, by Marjorie Ingall

Purple Haze: Taking a plunge into kosher wines, by Sara Ivry

Passover Pancake: This Passover, Daniel Boulud is borrowing a food staple from a different holiday, by Liel Leibovitz

Unkosher Cooking: New York chef Joseph Dobias is best known for the ‘Conflicted Jew,’ by Molly Young

It Oughta Be Kosher! This Passover, help yourself to some cookie dough, by Marc Tracy

Mmmm, Fruit Slices: An audio tour of a well-worn candy store on the Lower East Side, by Blake Eskin

Family:

Passover Perfect: More than any other Jewish holiday, Passover can turn mothers into obsessive control freaks. But if we’re to have a meaningful holiday, we have to resist the madness. By Marjorie Ingall

Substitutions: For a kid-friendly Passover, try rounding out the seder plate with some off-menu additions, by Marjorie Ingall

Ask, Don’t Tell: A father’s reflections on teaching his son the Four Questions, by Vox Tablet

Kids These Days: After a Seder circus, wondering if too much emphasis on children is ruining ritual, by Marjorie Ingall

Monkey Business: Just in time for Passover, an exhibition devoted to Curious George sheds light on the character’s genesis and his German-Jewish creators’ exodus, by Marjorie Ingall

Exodus: Forget cleaning for Passover and instead head to a luxury hotel for the holiday, by Jennifer Garfinkel

Five Kids: El Lissitzky’s revolutionary take on a medieval Passover song, and a contemporary illustrator has a fresh look at the Seder’s four sons, by Sara Ivry

Mothers’ Little Helpers: Guidebooks quell the anxieties of raising up a child, by Lynn Harris

A Gathering of Diasporas: An Israeli in New York contemplates her homeland, by Nelly Reifler

School Days: An eleven-year-old who’s finding her way, by Nelly Reifler

Art and Culture:

Free Verse: To celebrate the overlap of Passover and National Poetry Month, poets Andrea Cohen, Robert Pinsky, and Mark Levine offer some selections on the themes of liberation, ritual, journeying, and food, by Vox Tablet

Slaving Away: On Passover, we recall that Moses was a stranger in a strange land. An illustrated column imagines how the story might sound in a contemporary Israeli classroom. By Etgar Keret and Asaf Hanuka

Not Kidding: Painter Archie Rand’s 10-piece Had Gadya series—now on view in Philadelphia—underscores the darkness and complexity at the heart of the Seder’s final song, by David Kauffman

About Time: A vivid new scholarly book illuminates how the calendars of early modern Europe—playful, alive, and beautifully designed—reflected and transformed Jewish conceptions of time, by Anthony Grafton

Signs of Spring: In this week’s “Tell Me,” Tablet Magazine’s illustrated question-and-answer column, we revisit the Four Questions—and watch as New York wakes up from its wintery slumber. By Liana Finck

Cracked: In this week’s “Tell Me,” Tablet Magazine’s illustrated question-and-answer column, we interrogate what it means to ask questions—and ponder a fridge full of damaged eggs. By Liana Finck

Everything’s Coming Up Moses: Songs from Tablet Magazine’s ‘Gypsy’-inspired Passover musical, by Rachel Shukert

Jazzed Up: New albums find inspiration in the Passover haggadah, by Alexander Gelfand

Exodus ’56: A novel examines the parallel dislocations of Hungarian and Egyptian immigrants to Israel, by Adam Kirsch

The Torah in the Altarpiece: A new exhibition explores the overlapping worlds of Christian and Jewish art in medieval Spain, by Robin Cembalest

Let My People Grow: God & Co., Episode II, by God & Co.

• Amir Mizroch lays out exactly why Israel is in deep trouble when the U.N. General Assembly rolls around in September. [Forecast Highs]

• Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit offers a biting rebuke to the Israeli left on the occasion of Juliano Mer-Khamis’s murder. [Haaretz]

• “What kind of kosher steakhouse is filled with rambunctious yahoos and hot jazz music at 1 in the morning?” “Uh … the best damn kosher steakhouse on the Upper West Side!” [Vos Iz Neias?/DNAinfo]

• Orthodox Brooklyn Rabbi Mordecai Fish became the latest to go down in the Solomon Dwek sting, pleading guilty today to knowingly laundering $900,000 of criminal proceeds. [DOJ/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Baruch S. Blumberg did not only discover Hepatitis B and show how it could lead to liver cancer—he then helped develop the vaccine. He died Tuesday at 85. [NYT]

• An interesting take on how the logistics of reporting have helped foment anti-Israel bias among the media. [Standpoint/Jewish Ideas Daily]

• A study shows that the United States could learn much from Israel’s health care system. Of course, since Israel has universal health care for its citizens, that’s probably a lost cause. [JTA]

• Roger Cohen’s column on Richard Goldstone’s mea culpa—excuse me, his “volte-face”—is weird and kind of incoherent. [NYT]

• The keynote speaker at Christians United for Israel’s annual conference in July in Washington, D.C., will be soon-to-be-ex-Fox News host Glenn Beck. [JTA]

• Though abandoned, Lifta, just north of Jerusalem, is the last intact pre-1948 Arab village in Israel. The Palestinians want it to be an open-air museum; the Israelis want to build apartments there. [LAT]

• Worth re-reading Moshe Halbertal’s masterful takedown of the Goldstone Report from late 2009 in light of the week’s events. [TNR]

The Passover story, told through Google.

Meanwhile, the best thing about Easter, for people of all faiths, is the Washington Post’s annual Peeps diorama contest. So here’s a challenge: If anyone wants to make a Jewish-themed Peeps diorama and send it to me, it will find its way onto The Scroll. Best one gets a free Nextbook Press book of your choice.

Passover and Easter Traditions in a Box [Challah Connection]

This week’s winner is “Howard,” who wrote, on the question of whether quinoa is properly considered kosher for Passover, “Wheat, barley, spelt, rye, oats—all the rest is commentary, and rather annoying commentary at that.” He adds, “We’ve been honorary Sephardim (the honor is self bestowed) in this regard for many years, and feel not a twinge of guilt.” I, too, am Sephardic for eight days every year.

Since he quotes Hillel (or at least paraphrases him), he gets the biography by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin.

Off the Table [Tablet Magazine]
Hillel [Nextbook Press]

On Monday’s podcast, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry talks to Steve and Cokie Roberts about Passover’s unique ability to bridge the divide between Jews and Christians, past and present, and secular and religious—though when it comes to the question of Passover victuals, Cokie concedes that there remains much division and strife:

It’s a familiar story, of course—most of us spend one or two nights a year munching on matzoh, reclining, and retelling this tale to our families and friends—and it’s familiar by design. “Remember this day,” Moses tells his flock, “when you went out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, for with a mighty hand, the Lord took you out of here.” It’s more than a passing suggestion: We are all commanded to speak of the Exodus each year, to introduce it to the next generation, to keep the collective memory vividly alive.

Taken literally, this is a strange demand. Shouldn’t memory, like the moon affecting the tide, take its natural toll on the heart and the mind alike? Shouldn’t we be allowed to remember what we want to remember and forget what we want to forget? This, surely, is true of individuals; but once a collection of selves congregates and contemplates peoplehood, the rules change. A people needs a story, upon which nations are founded and according to which history is understood. In his renowned book Imagined Communities, Cornell professor Benedict Anderson argued that America invented the notion of nationalism, creating a shared narrative powerful enough to bind together men and women who hailed from different parts of the world, lived in different parts of the country, and believed in different religious and political ideals.

In this week’s parasha, we see the same principle at work. As they prepare to flee Egypt, the Israelites are still a loose collection of clans, sharing little but common ancestry and the brunt of Egypt’s burden. But in the story of the exodus, and in the commandment to retell it in perpetuity, they have found the platform for peoplehood. Sharing a story is often much more meaningful than sharing DNA.

This idea, incidentally, is also the basis for our copyright laws. And it is everywhere under attack. While our current copyright laws, for example, allow copyright-holders to seek redress from individuals guilty of specific copyright infringement, a new bill that is likely to pass into law soon would give the government the right to shut down an entire website if the website was “dedicated to infringing activities.” The law, called the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeit Act of 2010, does not specify precisely what such dedication might mean, giving corporations a powerful tool to use not only against legitimate offenders but also against competing corporate entities. The recent case of Viacom v. YouTube, for example, would most likely have ended very differently had the media conglomerate had legal grounds to argue that the web video giant, despite all efforts to remove unlicensed content, still harbored many infringing materials and should therefore be shut down.

This is a perilous state of affairs, one that stands in direct contradiction to the original intent behind copyright law. Passed in 1710, the world’s first piece of copyright legislation, known as the Statute of Anne after the queen to which it was presented, makes this point explicitly. The law’s full title was “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.” It’s a mouthful, but it gets the point across: Rather than grant authors or publishers perpetual ownership of their creations, as had been the case for decades, the law required that all works be made available to the public after a certain period of time, for the benefit of the common good. It is no coincidence that the statute came only a few short decades after John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government; if, as Locke famously argued, the only legitimate governments are those who govern by consent of the people, then the people must be educated. For that to happen, they need access to shared resources, an interest that trumps even that of private property. So was born the public domain.

Unfortunately, in the hands of lobbyists and legislators, this noble idea dies a little each year. When Charles Pinckney of South Carolina and James Madison of Virginia drafted the nation’s first copyright law in 1790, they were content with giving authors the rights to their work for 28 years; by 1998, the term limit has climbed as high as life of the author plus an additional 70 years. This grants creators and publishers excessive protection, leaving the rest of us with a staid and struggling public domain.

As we read this week’s parasha, then, let us be reminded once more of the importance of shared stories, and let us zealously guard those shared spaces that corporations, politicians, and other interested parties are forever trying to make private and profitable. Without such common resources, without a public domain, what we have is not a culture but a marketplace. Emma Goldman, whose work entered the public domain this week, said it best. “Heaven,” she quipped, “must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there.” Let us struggle to make sure that is never the case.

• “Blessed Bluegrass” by Jon Kalish, December 7, 2009. In this Vox Tablet podcast—one of those that won Tablet Magazine a National Magazine Award—Jon Kalish profiles Jerry Wicentowski, the Orthodox bluegrass player who won’t play on Shabbat.

• “Song Cycle” by Liel Leibovitz, May 10, 2010.. On another Vox Tablet, Leibovitz takes a look at the many versions and meanings of “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav.”

• “It Oughta Be Kosher” by Marc Tracy, April 1, 2010.. A bonus! In our favorite Scroll post, Tracy considers whether cookie dough oughtn’t be considered pesadik.

Do you have other favorites? List ‘em in the comments …

“When you ask people what’s their favorite holiday, I’ve heard people say Passover, Hanukkah, Sukkot, Purim,” says Jonathan Sarna, who teaches American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “I think it’s harder for people to find an emotional attachment to Shavuot than to almost any other Jewish holiday.” According to Sarna and other historians, Shavuot’s trouble catching on is nothing new—it goes back, they say, to the fall of the Second Temple in the year 70 C.E.

In its earliest incarnation, Shavuot marked a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the sacrifice of the harvest’s first fruits and is one of a historical trio of harvest celebrations, along with Sukkot and Passover, known as the shalosh regalim. According to Paul Steinberg, a rabbi at the Conservative synagogue Valley Beth Shalom in Los Angeles and the author of a series of books on the Jewish holidays, rabbis in the Talmudic period needed to reinvent Shavuot after the Jews left Israel for the Diaspora and no longer traveled to Jerusalem with harvest offerings. So, through what Steinberg calls the use of “complicated mathematical formulas” that were debated for centuries, the sages associated Shavuot with the giving of the Torah. But that interpretive shift, says Steinberg, has not “captured the imagination of Jews in America or anywhere else.” (According to Reform rabbi Andy Bachman, who leads Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim, some early Zionist settlers went so far as to explicitly reject the rabbinic interpretation of the holiday in favor of the agricultural one and celebrated Shavuot by dancing in the fields and riding on tractors.)

In the United States, Shavuot has met with particularly bad fortune. “They used to say that Jewish holidays needed mazel,” or luck, Sarna says. Hanukkah and Passover—located next to major Christian holidays that Jews want an alternative to—have mazel. Shavuot, marooned in the long stretch between Passover and the High Holidays, has the opposite. “Passover is the last Jewish gesture of the year before you disappear into summer camp, Memorial Day, et cetera,” Bachman says.

Until recently, Shavuot’s overlap with the end of the school year actually did confer some mazel at many Reform and Conservative synagogues, because Confirmation ceremonies—celebrations for high school students who have continued their Jewish education in addition to or instead of bar and bat mitzvahs—have traditionally been held on the holiday. But many congregations, including Bachman’s and Steinberg’s, have recently dropped Confirmation, which is increasingly seen an accommodation to Protestantism without authentic Jewish roots—another inadvertent blow to Shavuot.

Beyond the bad mazel, though, some conjecture that Shavuot may simply be too abstract to become popular among all but the most engaged or observant Jews. “The holidays that have done really well here are either firmly grounded in the home or allow for a kind of interplay between the synagogue and the home,” says Jenna Weissman Joselit, who teaches American Jewish history at George Washington University. Home-based holidays have strong elements of material and ritual—seders for Passover, sukkahs for Sukkot, menorahs for Hanukkah. But on Shavuot, “there’s no stuff and nothing to do, if you don’t go to shul,” Joselit says. “It’s a very serious holiday about law and responsibility and duty.” (All of this might be said as well for the High Holidays, which of course don’t lack for attendance. But the High Holidays make these themes personal, while Shavuot applies them to the Jews as a people—which, Joselit argues, makes them feel more remote.)

Shavuot is the consummate rabbis’ holiday: Its difficult themes of revelation, law, and collective responsibility make it a favorite among scholars—who struggle with how to share their enthusiasm with the laity. Elliot Dorff, a rabbi and professor of theology at American Jewish University in Los Angeles, calls it “my holiday”—precisely for the reasons their congregants may not. And Sarna says, “Shavuot is the holiday of books—it’s a harder sell, but we’re the People of the Book. Maybe it is our most authentic and distinctive holiday in that way.”

This idea might be starting to catch on: In the past few years, some synagogues have begun holding a tikkun leil Shavuot, or all-night study session, to celebrate the holiday. In its original form, the tikkun, first practiced in the 16th century by kabbalists who were themselves trying to revitalize Shavuot, involved prayer and Torah study from dusk until dawn; non-Orthodox congregations that hold the celebration now usually substitute lectures and roundtable discussions on a variety of subjects. Dorff said that Temple Beth Am, the Conservative synagogue he attends, can pull in 500 people for its tikkun (this year themed around “ethical, spiritual, halakhic implications of our food choices”), with 100 still remaining when the sun rises.

But some question whether the tikkun will ever catch on at most synagogues in a way that even approximates the success of lighter, more family-oriented holiday celebrations. “God bless Elliot Dorff, but Beth Am has a lot of academics and rabbis,” Steinberg said when asked whether he thought all-night study could save Shavuot. “That’s not the case for most synagogues. Most synagogues you get people till 10:00, then it dwindles.” (Indeed, some Jewish communities—in New York, California, and elsewhere—are trying to make the tikkun a more popular destination with performances, film screenings, and Israeli dancing.)

Steinberg’s own congregation is trying a different approach this year: bringing in a cow. Children at the synagogue will have an opportunity to watch a milking demonstration and churn their own butter in conjunction with the tradition of eating dairy on Shavuot. “We’ll see how it goes,” Steinberg says wryly. “It’s an intervention, if you will.”

Take the seder.  This year I joined the Facebook group “Great Seder Ideas for Kids!” and adopted several suggestions from it. To illustrate the plague of blood, I poured water into all the Hebrews’ glasses, then pretended to be Pharaoh and poured water into my own; I’d secretly placed a few sprinkles of red gelatin dessert powder therein, and the glass filled up with “blood.” The kids were gobsmacked as I screamed in terror. I also provided a mix of personalized seder poems and songs, combining the classic stories of our people with in-jokes and references to family members.

Our seder featured an interpretive dance interlude, inspired by Moses’s sister Miriam, in which the kids boogied under an ocean-blue sheet waved by adults. As we sang Dayenu, we beat each other with scallions, a Sephardic tradition that represents the Egyptian overseers beating the slaves. Maxine told what has become an annual joke, lifted from the delightful middle-grade novel Penina Levine Is a Hard-Boiled Egg, about a kid experiencing Passover and Easter in a multicultural world. Said joke: Can Elijah get through a screen door? He can, but it’s a strain! (Get it? A strain!)

All of this raises the question: Is this a seder or a circus?

I’m not self-congratulatory about my parenting. I am all about the second-guessing, self-flagellation, self-questioning, and guilt. And I’m worried that my attempts to tailor the seder to the kids have gone too far. Our sages have always wanted the seder to prompt questions and engagement, but when parents like me create a multimedia extravaganza, what do we lose in the process? Are we, as they say, diluting the brand?

Stephen Colbert touched on this subject last week, devoting a segment on his show to the commercialization of Passover. As Colbert put it, “Tradition-loving Pesach-poopers complain that this holiday doesn’t need leavening.” (Get it? Leavening!) He quoted Miami resident Dorothy Raphaely, who told the Wall Street Journal that “Tedium is part of the tradition.”

It’s true. As a kid, I went to Jewish day school, where texts, prayers, and rituals were taught the old-school way: by rote, in a fevered spew of Hebrew and Aramaic. There was little attempt to make things relevant. We kids understood that there were expectations: We would memorize; we would be silent; we would not confuse Judaism with a Pink Floyd sound-and-light show.

My education may not have emphasized modern-day values like multiculturalism. But when I was my kids’ age, I knew a lot more Hebrew and a lot more textual content then they do now. Sometimes I feel the tradeoff has been worth it; sometimes I don’t. I don’t mean to sound too “hey kids, get off my lawn,” but it’s not accidental that kids today have an air of entitlement earlier generations lacked. Isn’t tailoring the seder to children part of a larger cultural trend of catering to our kids’ every whim? My generation takes its kids to fancy restaurants and smiles tolerantly as they hurl dinner rolls. When our kids get in trouble, we blame the other kid, the teacher, the school, the playground, the community. Are we really doing our kids—or our society, in the long term—any favors by convincing them the sun rises and sets upon their golden, flawless heads?

And when we turn a seder into the ritual equivalent of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, aren’t we giving up a meaningful, mysterious adult night? My child-free friend Lori and my editor Liel host sedarim that involve discussions and debates about free will and international politics. Meanwhile, my seder involves wearing a mask that looks like boils.

I spent a lot of my childhood hiding novels inside siddurim. I was bored a lot. But I also understood that there was a huge, important grown-up world I would one day be privy to. Is it possible that some presents are worth waiting for? Life isn’t one big afikomen gift.

I think hardest about this question during the High Holidays. It’s been eight years since I had a truly spiritual experience. These days I attend children’s services and devote my attention to hushing, shushing, and quivering with worry that my kids are not sufficiently engaged, or, alternately, that I should have given them the kind of education where they expect not to be sufficiently engaged. I realize that Orthodox Judaism gives moms like me an out, excusing women from all time-bound mitzvot. But whatever your level of observance, not being obligated to do something doesn’t mean you don’t necessarily want to do something. I’m always torn. I want my kids to love Judaism, to feel drawn in to our narratives, to make connections between ancient stories and the world they live in today. But I also mourn the personal engagement with text I once had. Does becoming a parent—particularly a mother—inherently mean buckling your own intellectual needs into a booster seat in the way-back?

I don’t have answers to any of these questions. And I suppose the tensions can be productive. “It is a part of the human condition to live in polarities,” wrote Abraham Joshua Heschel in God in Search of Man. “A challenge is not the same as a clash, and divergence does not mean a conflict.” But I’m not F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I don’t pass his test of a first-rate mind: the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time. Instead, I whiplash back and forth between worrying about engagement and worrying about traditionalism; I fret about the state of future generations (the ones eating candied fruit slices at my own table) and the state of my own. But that too is part of the history of our people, after all.

I suppose I should take comfort in a quote from that Wall Street Journal article that Stephen Colbert did not share on TV: “We have to make sure that rituals don’t become dead symbols,” says Rabbi Kenneth Brander, a dean at Yeshiva University.

The dean’s right—no meaningful religion can be frozen in amber. But how to balance relevance and respect, the needs of the many and the needs of the few? The tension can get overwhelming. It’s brutal feeling that we can’t let ourselves, or our kids, off the hook. To some degree, I suppose I’ll just have to be patient; as my kids become more independent, I’ll regain more of my own spiritual focus.

Or so I hope. Perpetually angsting over how to be the best Jewish parent you can be isn’t really productive. Parenting is easier when we just take it holiday by holiday, plague by plague.

To clear the air, I called up Rabbi Charles M. Feinberg of Adas Israel, the Conservative synagogue in Washington, D.C., which is the chosen congregation of both the Israeli Embassy and my family. Rabbi Feinberg confirmed that, indeed, normal cookie dough, even eaten as cookie dough, is not Pesadik. “Because the dough is sitting together, there’s a minimal amount of leavening,” he explained. This would probably apply even if you mixed the flour and water but then ate it—without baking it—in under 18 minutes. “The rabbis defined it in this way,” he added, “that’s part of what Judaism became, part of the old tradition. It’s in the Talmud, and that’s the basis for most of our observance.” Well, phooey.

Earlier: It Oughta Be Kosher!

Cookie dough—normal cookie dough, not special, kosher-for-Passover cookie dough—is another matter, though. It is of course chametz, since it invariably contains flour or wheat or something used to make cookies, and said materials invariably were made wet for over the 18-minute limit. To be honest, most cookie dough, particularly of the store-bought variety, probably contains corn syrup, too. And don’t tell me about corn syrup—I know all about corn syrup.

But, c’mon! Think this through! Cookie dough should be kosher for Passover. It is the very definition of what ought to be kosher for Passover: would-be bread that specifically hasn’t been baked. It is the precise sort of thing you would grab for a nosh if you didn’t have enough time to prepare properly—because, maybe, oh, I dunno, you were fleeing Pharaoh! Eating cookie dough on Passover? It shouldn’t just be countenanced—it should be encouraged! We should be slathering it onto the afikomen for dessert!

This is all by way of saying I had some cookie dough ice cream last night. And you should know I made a sacrifice in doing so: I specifically and deliberately did not eat cookies-and-cream ice cream—which I prefer!—because, after all, it’s Passover, and once we were slaves, and now we are free.

Others just like the excuse for a big communal meal. Chris Billing, a 48-year-old journalist and documentary filmmaker, hosts a weekly Bible study group at his Washington, D.C., condo, and held a Seder on Monday night with 10 friends, only one of whom was Jewish. He talked to Tablet Magazine about why.

Why did you decide to start holding a Seder?

This is the second year we’ve had a Seder among this group in D.C. The impetus for the first one wasn’t anything spiritual or ecumenical at all—a friend of mine came across a recipe for matzoh ball soup on Epicurious.com, and she was looking for an occasion to make it. She’s Chinese and hadn’t made it before so we figured a Seder would be a good time to make it.

When was your first Seder?

My first exposure to the Seder was in Israel. As far as I know there was really only one Jewish family in the town where I grew up, in upstate New York, so I didn’t really know anything about Jewish holidays when I was younger. As long as I can remember, we would be at our family’s Baptist church every Sunday, and I majored in religious studies in college at a small school that was then called the Philadelphia College of Bible (now Philadelphia Biblical University), with a thought of going into the ministry. As an undergraduate I spent two years living in Israel studying Hebrew, along with archaeology and Middle Eastern history at the Institute of Holy Land Studies, and I took Hebrew classes at Hebrew University. My parents had gone to Israel through Christian organizations they were involved with, and they always wanted me to go—they were just amazed by the place—so I went for my junior year abroad, and got infatuated with living there. I was in Jerusalem, and had a nice community with Jewish friends who would invite me for Passover. I was certainly the only Christian there.

Did you keep up the tradition after you left Israel?

I wound up going to Harvard Divinity School, majoring in world religion, but between college and divinity school, I got a call completely out of the blue from someone affiliated with Beijing University asking if I was interested in teaching Hebrew in China. This was in 1986. At that time China and Israel did not have diplomatic relations, and China had strong relations with the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Arab countries, though they were moving toward establishing relations with Israel. They wanted to have some students who were familiar with the language, but they didn’t want to hire anyone who was Israeli and didn’t even really want anyone who was Jewish because they didn’t want any political or religious overtones to the course.

Because I was the Hebrew teacher I became a focal point for the Jewish community among foreign students studying in Beijing, even though I’m not Jewish. It was mostly American Jews. And about 10 of us got together and had a Seder. There was one supermarket affiliated with a hotel that had matzoh, but I think people had relatives in the States send it over. We got a live chicken and had one of the other students slaughter it, and we included a few of my students from the Hebrew class. They were Chinese and not Jewish, and it was definitely their first Seder.

How was it organizing the Seder yourself, with so many people who weren’t familiar with the traditions?

I think a lot of Christians think of this idea of the Judeo-Christian ethic, and the Judeo-Christian society, but they don’t know much about the Judeo part. Having a Seder really brings that home. Once we came up with the idea based on the matzoh ball soup, my thought was that if we were going to do it, we’d better do it right. So we took it very seriously. A friend of mine who isn’t Jewish was commissioned with the task of getting the shank bone, and she went to a butcher in her neighborhood and said, “You’ll think I’m crazy but do you have a shank bone?” Of course he said, “You need it for a Seder?” And she was shocked that he had them wrapped and ready.

I got a haggadah from the JCC, one with a picture of matzoh on the cover. We went all the way through it. Or most of it. The truth is we do an abridged version—the parts about the rabbis getting into the minutiae, we skip that. But we open the door for Elijah, and we flick the wine drops for the plagues, and we hide the afikoman. And we sing. Seders are like the Jewish Top 40 in terms of songs, but they’re all tongue-twisters, which is hard because by the time you get to them, you’ve had several glasses of wine. Last year a friend of mine, Liz, came, and she’s half-Jewish, so she’d been raised with Seders at home, which was helpful because, well—everyone loves singing Dayenu but I’m the only one who can sing the verse.

At certain points we threw it open for questions—there were a fair number of journalists there, and they’re not shy about asking questions. Some people weren’t familiar with the whole story, so we went through that, and talked about the plagues, and the things the items of the Seder plate represent. We used the haggadah and Wikipedia as our sources—I had printed it out, just to make sure I had the Seder plate arranged properly. This year we had an exchange student from China, who read the Four Questions, and she had a lot of questions about what it all meant.

How did your guests feel about the experience?

One of the people there this year was Jewish, and he brought his girlfriend, who isn’t Jewish, and he called me and said she told him that in addition to it being educational and a good ecumenical experience, it really makes you feel connected with humanity, and makes you realize who God is, and how he works in the nation of Israel. And I think all of us felt that it’s sort of uplifting and encouraging to be the keeper of a tradition like that.

• Over the first part of Passover, there were skirmishes along the Gaza border, resulting in several Palestinian injuries. [NYT]

• As even proximity talks stall, Israel in theory continues to contemplate a four-month East Jerusalem construction freeze in exchange for direct negotiations. [JPost]

• Around a dozen Hezbollah members will appear before a U.N. probe investigating the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. [WSJ]

• Two separate, violent anti-Semitic incidents on the Berlin subway system have alarmed Jewish leaders there. [World Jewish Congress/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Mormons have Seders, too? What a world. [Ynet]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Cabinet rejected U.S. calls to cease building in East Jerusalem. [NYT]

• Despite what you’ve always been told, Jesus’s Last Supper was (probably) not a Seder. [Slate]

• Palace intrigue! Reported internal disputation over Israel within the Obama Administration. [Laura Rozen]

• Thomas L. Friedman on the necessity—not preferability—of peace in the Mideast. [NYT]

• Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan advocates against sanctions on Iran. [Haaretz]

• The Simpsons are going to Israel! (Actually, they went, last night; Sacha Baron Cohen voiced the Israeli tour guide.)

• An analysis concludes that the Israeli-U.S. dispute occurred due to different perceptions of Jerusalem’s importance and the Palestinians’ capacity for self-rule. [NYT]

• First on the agenda at the G-8 summit today in Canada is Iran sanctions. [Ynet]

• The Arab League may consider normalization with Israel in exchange for peace. [Reuters/NYT]

• The most in-depth article yet on the dispute over that single house in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. [LAT]

• You probably saw it, since it was the Most Emailed article like all day yesterday, but: the White House Seder is an Obama tradition. [NYT]

• The United States and Russia agreed to a mutual nuclear arms reduction pact. [JPost]

• Rumors have surfaced that White House economic adviser Larry Summers will depart by the end of the year. [Fox Business]

• A store in Montreal’s Mont Royal neighborhood is selling what it claims is actual Nazi soap made out of actual … Nazi victim. [CBC/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Sink the matzo ball in the hoop. Do it! [Ultimate Matzoh Balls]

• iPesach.

Here are lyrics to four songs.

“Some Hebrews”

MOSES
[Spoken.] You just don’t get it, do you, Aaron? Anyone who stays in Egypt is dead! If I die, it won’t be from slaving. It’ll be from fighting, to get up and get out!

Some Hebrews can get a thrill
Hauling stones up a sandy hill
That’s OK for some Hebrews
Who don’t know they’re alive

Some Hebrews can thrive and bloom
Digging pits for some Pharaoh’s tomb
That’s perfect for some Hebrews
For four centuries or five

But I at least gotta try
When I think of all the sights that I gotta see
And all the prayers that I gotta pray
All the tables I gotta eat at
Come on, Aaron, whatta you say?

Some Hebrews can get their kicks
Cutting straw and then making bricks
That’s peachy for some Hebrews
For some weak, dumb Hebrews to be
But some Hebrews ain’t me!

I had a dream
A wonderful dream, Aaron
All about God in a bush that was burning
That’s all that it took for the wheels to start turning

I had a dream
Just as real as can be, Aaron
There I was in Mr. Almighty’s office
And he was saying to me, “Mose,
Turn your old staff into a serpent
Plagues of frogs and blood in the river
Send a cloud of locusts to Egypt
Boils and hail and death to the firstborn
Go to Pharaoh, if he’s in pain then
You’ll be on your way back to Canaan!”

Oh, what a dream!
A wonderful dream, Aaron
And all that I need is 88 bucks, Aaron
That’s what he said, Aaron
Only 88 bucks

AARON
[Spoken.] You ain’t getting 88 cents from me, Moses

MOSES
[Spoken.] Well, I’ll get it some place else! But I’ll get it! And I’ll get my people out!

Goodbye to the Desert Sinai!
Good riddance to all the rocks that I had to carry
All the bricks that I had to cart
All the mummies I had to bury
Hey, Red Sea, get ready to part!

Some Hebrews sit on their butts
Hope for freedom, but got no nuts
That’s living for some Hebrews
For some dumb bum Hebrews I suppose
Well they can stay and rot!
But not Mose!

“Little Pascal Lamb”

YOUNG FIRSTBORN EGYPTIAN CHILD
Little blood, river blood
You left us with nasty mud
Little frog, little frog
Your croaking freaked out my dog
Little louse, little louse
Infected our whole damn house
Little cow, little cow
You’re no longer with us now
Little boil! Little boil!
You’re giving us all the blues
We look in the mirror and recoil
The dermatologists all are Jews
Little hail, burning hail
The firewall did not prevail
Little night, endless night
Will we ever again see light?
Will we ever again see—
[The Young Egyptian Firstborn Child falls down dead.]

“Everything’s Coming Up Moses”

MOSES
[Spoken.] It’s time we show them what Moses is really made of, what I really got inside me. Finished? Ha! This is only the beginning!

I had a dream, a dream about you, Aaron
It’s gonna come true, Aaron
You think that we’re through, but Aaron—

Lift the staff! Part the sea!
We got nothin’ to do but be free
Manna falls from the sky
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses

No more fights, no more fuss!
It’s the number we call Exodus!
Gotta rush, gotta fly
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses!

On to freedom, build your own pyramids
Jews don’t need ’em, they got a prophet to lead ’em!

Don’t need light! Don’t need bread!
Got a pillar of clouds overhead
We’ll be fine, we’ll be great
We’ll kvell, just you wait
That burning bush will never fade from view!
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses for me and for you!

We can do it, get to the old Promised Land
We can do it, Moses is gonna see to it!
Don’t need light! Don’t need bread!
Got a pillar of clouds overhead!
Lift the staff, part the sea
I can tell, we’ll be free
And no one’s gonna stop the freaking Jews!
Honey, everything’s coming up Moses and Miriam
Everything’s coming up farfel and matza brei
Everything’s coming up brisket and seder plates
Everything’s coming up Moses for me and for you!

“You Gotta Make a Living”

WISE SON
You can sing Aleinu
Til they say Dayenu
Bench at the bench til you’re bent
But you gotta make a living
If you wanna make your rent
You can sacrifice a heifer
Ostracize a leper
Spend Yom Kippur on your feet
But you gotta make a living
If you want your kids to eat

You can oy, you can oy
You can oy oy oy
It ain’t such a draw
Me I oy, and I oy
And I oy oy oy
In my practice of the law
My arguments are thrilling
And I ain’t even billing
I was first in my class at the bar
Make yourself a living
Israelites, and you’ll go far

WICKED SON
You can oy, you can oy
You can oy oy oy
It won’t make you well
Me I oy’d, and I oy’d
And oy’d, oy’d, oy’d
But I did it at Cornell
Tell me it’s farkakte
I’m still a fancy doctor
And clearing half a million a year
Make yourself a living
You can say goodbye to fear

SIMPLE SON
They can oy, they can oy
They can oy oy oy
That ain’t the golden goose
Me I oy, and I oy
And I oy oy oy
Yep, you guessed it—I produce!
Once I was a failure
Now I’m L.B. Mayer
For everything from films to Broadway
Make yourself a living
If you wanna win the day

ALL
Be a professional
Any old profession’ll
Earn you a house and a car
It’s easy to be giving
When you make a living
Can’t you see how happy we are
Make yourself a living
And you, Jew, can be a star!

To honor the haggadah’s spirit of collage, we offer an interactive guide to learn about the origins of this Passover text. Click on the words and icons to learn more about the origins of the elements of the haggadah; their explanations appear underneath the graphic.

When Jews observed Pesach in the Second Temple period, roughly from the mid-sixth century B.C.E. to the first century C.E., there was no seder and no haggadah. Those who could make the journey would travel to the Temple in Jerusalem, bringing the paschal lamb as a sacrifice, and afterward take the whole roasted animal back to their homes across the city to eat with their families. Wine, matzo, maror, and charoset would accompany the festival meal, as would a recitation of Hallel, but without any substantial discussion of the Exodus. Only after the Temple’s destruction in 70 C.E. were the rabbis of the Tannaitic era, which lasted until 220 C.E., forced either to re-imagine Passover observance or to lose it altogether. In that moment, they reoriented the holiday toward study and reflection, setting forth in the text of the Mishna a list of rituals and readings that still form the core of today’s celebration: the search for chametz, the four cups of wine, the four questions, the story of the Exodus told “from disgrace to praise.” It is at that moment that we see Rabban Gamaliel, standing on the threshold between the Pesach observance of the Second Temple era and what would come, declaring the haggadah into being by telling us: You are obligated to explain these symbols.

In the centuries that followed, the haggadah evolved as Jews migrated from Roman-ruled Palestine to Babylonia, to Europe, to Modern Israel, and the United States. In the Amoraic era (the time of the Talmudic rabbis, between 220 and 550 C.E.), the haggadah was formalized as liturgy and as a public occasion, with a leader and a script. In the Geonic era, between 589 and 1038, the text was consolidated and additional passages added. For centuries the haggadah was not written down: The seder leader would know the elements by heart and, at a crucial moment, give a substantial drash, or interpretation of biblical passages. In the Middle Ages, as Jews spread across Europe, and as Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1440s, printed haggadahs finally emerged, filled with illustrations and, to enhance the festivities, lively songs like Chad Gadya. The haggadah became one of the most common Jewish printed books, found wherever Jews have settled across the world.

(Sources include Shmuel and Ze’ev Safrai’s Haggadah of the Sages (1998), Joseph Tabory’s JPS Commentary on the Haggadah (2008), and Joshua Kulp and David Golinkin’s Schechter Haggadah (2009).

• President Obama won’t approve the end-of-Passover prayer, “Next Year in Jerusalem,” until both sides agree on the exact wording. These things are complicated. [Frum Follies]

• A columnist faults Prime Minister Netanyahu for not offering an alternate concession in order to stave off U.S. pressure over East Jerusalem settlements. [Haaretz]

• U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates asserted that the stalled peace process does affect “U.S. national security interests in the region,” though not necessarily directly. [Ynet]

• “WTF (What the Fish) is Gefilte!” A Passover conversation with Russ & Daughters. [Bon Appetit Daily]

• Because everyone else has linked to it, here’s a Hasidic band covering Lady Gaga. [The Gloss]