Pesach

[cellio]

First, two quick seasonal links: Two-minute seder from cahwyguy and Easturducken recipe forwarded by dglenn.

Wednesday night we joined friends from my congregation for the seder. They have two sons; one's local (still in school) and the other came in from California with his wife, so that was nice. (I had not previously met the wife, who is fairly new to the family.) One couple was a work connection, and they brought the only youngish child (about 8), who was very well-behaved. There were a few other people from the congregation. All in all, there were about 15 people.

We did a little less of the haggadah than the last time I joined this family; I think the child's bedtime had a significant effect on that. But it wasn't a "hurry up and eat" seder by a long shot; it was pleasant and we had some good discussions. The food was excellent; they're Sephardi and one son is vegan and the other vegetarian, so we had food I'm not used to at seders -- which is just fine. :-) (They did serve gefilte fish, I think home-made; the sons just didn't eat it.) The freshly-ground horseradish was nicely zippy. Sliced (as opposed to ground) horseradish has a different kind of zippiness -- a slow burn leading up to a culmination that makes one ever-so-briefly wonder if that was too much.

We used The Open Door Haggadah (I didn't note who publishes it). It was new to everyone. It has some nice supplementary readings (midrash, talmudic notes about some parts, some modern commentary), and it actually includes sheet music for the songs. That sounds like a good idea until you find out that some people read music and others sing from memory of slightly-different melodies. Still, it all worked out, and I would like to have a reference copy of sheet music for the common songs even if I don't deploy it at a seder.

As we were finishing up the heavens opened and we got a spectacular, short-lived storm with a nice light show. It made me think about what it must have been like to be at the shore of the sea of reeds as that wind blew all night preparing to split the sea.

Thursday morning at services I was tapped to be one of the readers for Shir HaShirim (Song of Songs). Many congregations read this on the Shabbat during Pesach; I'm not sure why, but we always read it on the first day. It's lovely poetry, and I wish I'd prepared against the possibility of being a reader. Since this is the third festival in a row where I've been asked to be a reader for that day's special book (Ruth for Shavuot, Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) for Sukkot), I think I'll just adopt the practice of reading through each text sometime in the few days before the holiday and practicing parts out loud. That way I'll be ready for whatever chapters they give me. (I should perhaps clarify that we read in English. I don't yet read Hebrew cold in front of people.)

We didn't have an invitation for seder Thursday night, and Dani didn't want to make one (even just for the two of us), so we didn't. Shabbat morning many people were talking about the seders (plural) they had attended; I didn't realize so many in my congregation did the second night. Alas, none of the ones who do responded to the match-making call in the last bulletin. Most years, of course, none of this is an issue for us because we go to Dani's family, but if we find ourselves in Pittsburgh for Pesach in the future, I want to do things differently.

Pleasant surprise of the week: whole-wheat matzah is actually pretty good! Given that regular matzah is already dense and you would assume whole-weat would be even denser, and given that I don't care much for whole-wheat bread because of that, I didn't have high expectations. Nice to know; it's likely better for me than the regular stuff, after all.

Comments

Re: Shir Hashirim

[cellio]

Yup, all of those reasons make sense.

I can't help thinking there's one more, which the rabbis might not have recorded: five megilot, three have obvious associations, Kohelet doesn't go with spring (so that makes four), and you want to do something for the chag. :-)