Death of bin Laden; Death of Hitler

 "Hitler Dead!" "Bin Laden Dead!"  Exactly sixty-six years elapsed between the two headlines, both splashed across newspapers on May 2.

Another "coincidence:"  The day Jews around the world mourn and remember the enormous evil of Hitler's genocide, Yom haShoa, was the very same day Osama bin Laden was eliminated.  Eerie how these two clear reminders of evil--and death--occurred together. 

Jews around the world presently have heightened awareness of days, as we're in the midst of a special period that links the Passover exodus from Egypt to its purpose, receiving the Torah on Mt. Sinai.  Each day we "count the omer," saying aloud the number of days and weeks in this transition.  As part of this, we're ideally preparing ourselves with attention to specific character traits, in order to emulate our biblical ancestors who in unity and lofty spirit replaced their bondage to Pharoah with voluntary service to God.

I've been reading that some well-meaning, soft-hearted people, while glad the threat Osama bin Laden's continued existence posed is gone, refuse to "celebrate" the fact he's dead.  I find this inappropriate.

Yes, I, too, remember the sickening videos of Muslims whooping and jumping for joy when they heard about the 9-11 attacks.  That was particularly heinous and offensive, because the American civilians killed were just going about their daily lives.  They were indiscriminately murdered for the sole purpose of terrorizing and humiliating our nation.

Osama Bin Laden, on the other hand, considered himself a holy warrior.  He not only planned and facilitated the deaths of those 3,000 innocents on 9-11 but masterminded or enabled attacks dating to 1992. In 1998 he signed a fatwa or commanding decree, which includes the following: "We -- with God’s help -- call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it."

Three reasons were offered in the fatwa, the first two rooted in alleged American crusades against Muslims, with a supposed toll (as of Feb. 1998) of a million dead.  The third justification for the fatwa is decidedly anti-Semitic: "...if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there."

Ironically, a 2009 Pew poll found that Arabs in middle eastern countries hold overwhelmingly negative views of Jews--except those who live in Israel.  Only 35% of Israeli Arabs expressed a negative opinion of Jews, while 56% had a positive response.

What we must consider, given the confluence of Yom ha Shoa and the killing of Osama bin Laden is the similarity of target between the Nazis and militant Islamic jihadists.  It all seems to come back to the Jews, a religious group too tiny in number to effect any real rulership or oppression of Muslims, even if it were permitted or desired.  Yom ha Shoa, the remembrance of the unspeakable annihilation of Jews on no basis except heritage, is whispered in Osama's fatwa, and broadened to include an entire nation, or more accurately, western civilization and culture.

America is not only hospitable to Muslims, but even now, officially tiptoes to assure them they are respected and not held responsible for the faction who would destroy us.  Pres. Obama was careful to say in his announcement that Osama "Bin Laden was not a Muslim leader. He was a mass murderer of Muslims. Indeed, al Qaeda slaughtered scores of Muslims in many countries including our own."

I don't think al Queda was aiming for Muslims when it took down the Twin Towers, but I also don't think killing Muslims who defend America would be seen as more than collateral damage to the jihadists who have such low regard for human life, even their own.

Jewish tradition teaches that certain individuals and groups are imbued with a proclivity toward evil, and we remember these destructive forces ("Amalek") yearly before Passover.  As we offer thanks to the courageous American security and military personnel who sought and destroyed Osama--for eight years under President Bush, and for two more under President Obama--we need to remain vigilant and cautious.  On an individual, spiritual level, the timing is right to pursue personal elevation as a means to replace the world's evil with good.

The headlines are just a reminder that little in this world is truly coincidence.

Passover: Holiday of Exuberant Liberation--or Humility?

In most religiously observant Jewish homes this time of year, the mood is frantic.  At the deadline--this year on Monday morning, before the Passover holiday starts near sundown--leavened food products become forbidden.  That means that cereals and cakes, bread and cookies, pasta and beer may not even be owned, much less consumed.  For the duration of the 8-day holiday, these products, called "chametz," cannot be part of Jewish life, replaced by a diet big on fruits and vegetables, eggs, meat and a fresh stash of specially certified for Passover goods, many of which include the flour-and-water flat crackers called "matzah."

Matzah is very carefully baked within the 18-minute time frame that excludes possibility of leavening, and during the festival is creatively served as "matzah pizza," "matzah brei," (fried up with egg), and in fake-cakes and other baked sweets using matzah "flour" instead of the real thing.  Before the holiday, homes are prepared by elaborate cleaning to remove all residue or crumbs of anything leavened, and usually kitchen counters are covered with something--a tarp, foil, contact paper--as a barrier against any errant chametz particle.

Sounds bizarre.  Seems like a lot of work.  And for what?

Not to strip away all pleasure from eating.  Not to drive Jewish women crazy taking toothbrushes to grout.  The restrictions and cleaning are important, though, because all the work and restraint do put us in the frame of mind that the holiday promotes: humility.

Everyone knows that Passover is a festival of liberation. Pharoah finally caved to Moses' repeated pleas to release the Jews, with the coaxing of ten plagues, including the killing of Egyptian firstborn sons.  Freedom is a wonderful thing; it lets you do what you want. Slavery, obviously, is horrific, especially subjugation to cruel taskmasters.  If it's a holiday of ecstatic liberation, how is the message humility?  And what has chametz to do with either liberation or humility?

If you've heard of the seder, then you probably know that the reason for matzah instead of fluffy bread is right there in the haggada, the little book that contains the proceedings of the evening.  It says that once the Jews got the go-ahead to leave Egypt, they didn't have time for yeasty expansion, so they packed their flat matzah, grabbed the Egyptians' gold, and bolted.  Matzah represents the exhilaration of freedom, and the absence of lofty loaves symbolizes the happy haste of their exit.

Of course, the haggada also calls matzah "lechem oni," the bread of poverty.  Poverty?  True, it's a poor excuse for hot-from-the-oven challah, and yes, the Jews in captivity were
kept down, and matzah is the most basic combination for subsistence, just flour and water.  Why remember this negative side of the story in the midst of our most triumphant moment, escorted out of bondage by God?

Here's where we come to the humility part. It's a myth from what used to be called a "Negro Spiritual," a traditional folk song, called "Go Down Moses," that the Jewish leader asked Pharoah to "let my people go." Instead, he asked the Egyptian ruler to allow a 3-day furlough so the Jews could worship God in the desert--and return! (Exodus 8:23)

With his heart hardened by God (so his real inclination to refuse the Jews could trump the plagues), Pharoah said no.  God told Moses and Aaron to keep going back, each time asking Pharoah to "send out My people that they may serve Me." What God had in mind, though, was the birth of the Jewish people, and their ultimate removal from Pharoah's human domination--to be replaced by a different servitude, this time directly to God.

They had to clean their mental slate, emptying it of the slave mentality. Opening their minds to something greater than their human condition.  They had to expand their sense of possibility, grow their sense of potential, inflate their view from physical survival to heavenly consciousness.

Kind of like dough, going from flat, gloppy blob to an enlarged, and more refined state baked into bread.  This is the process the Jews needed to accomplish--moving from matzah-minds to an awareness of heavenly presence.  The "rising" process took 50 days, the time between escaping Egypt and the receiving of the Torah on Mt. Sinai.  The Jews started out internalizing--eating--matzah, the flat bread of affliction and poverty.  And over time moved outward spiritually, expanding upward, getting closer to God, until finally, they became ready to stand as one in His actual presence.  That day, called "Shavuot," or the holiday commemorating the culmination of this seven week process, is annually marked by an offering of real bread, baked from the first wheat harvest.

So the celebration of freedom is the kind that comes from detaching. No longer tethered by Pharoah's slavery, the Jews are actually poor, eating bread of poverty, because at that point they have neither the familiar, though oppressive status of slaves, nor their new servitude to God's demands as given in the Torah.  They're adrift, fleeing one status yet unsure of their destination.  They need to be aware of this void.  They need to be humble, to realize how desperately they need God.

The first bit of expansion of their souls came after they were cornered at the Red Sea.  Finally, when Nachshon ben Aminidav proves his trust in God, submerging in the rushing waters up to his nostrils, God opens the way--and their minds--to pass through to the other shore.  Once they make it, the first line of their song of praise--they all knew the words in a communal fit of prophesy--was, "I shall sing to God for He is exalted above the arrogant... (Exodus 15:1)"  A perfect juxtaposition to their own humility, in the realization of their dependence on and gratitude to God.

It's unlikely that the White House Passover ceremony of the seder (recounting the exodus), that President Obama plans to host for the third year in a row, will strictly follow Jewish law (which is actually written directly in the Torah) to avoid chametz.  The announced menu for his seder includes a noodle kugel, and unless it's made with that weird-textured passover pasta (usually made from ground matzah and potato starch), it's probably not acceptable. It's also unlikely he knows the holiday doesn't celebrate the "now we can do what we want" freedom that everybody lauds, but rather the "I've gotta serve my real master" that's tougher to embrace.

In a sense, it's easier to understand the relief those enslaved Jews experienced after you've been rooting out crumbs and emptying refrigerators and locking up cupboards for weeks.  As you do these things, you're constantly questioning its purpose, and trying to imbue the tiring experience with some kind of uplifting rationale.  Finally, when Passover does arrive, and your tired limbs want to succumb to fatigue and four cups of wine, you let go and identify with the yearning to move from the physical to the spiritual realm.  Quite a transition; quite a magnificent trick to make the exodus real and current.

I confess that my thoughts of pressured house-cleaning are memories rather than realities as my husband and I are fortunate to be scholars-in-residence at a Passover program in a beautiful hotel.  The meals are excellent, the accommodations comfortable, the setting serene. Our family will be together, among hundreds of others at their own tables reading the same words of the seder, transmitting the history of our people to our children, and attempting to relive and renew our own passages from physical slavery to service to God.  But the lovely surroundings themselves are reminders that we must not take for granted even a moment's blessings.  Nothing in this world is truly free.

This post inspired by "The Symbolism of Chumetz" by Rav Ezra Bick.

Searching for Bright Light...for a purpose

It's the big day--the day when the sun returns to the exact location of its creation, and the once-every-28-year opportunity to note the occasion with the "birkat ha chamma" blessing that celebrates God's "works of creation."

This always occurs on a Wednesday, April 8, but seldom on the eve of Passover as today. I stayed up absurdly late packing not only myself but my fatigued son, tuckered out by all that watching me write/edit his term paper yesterday and through the night before.

But the birkat ha chamma is so rare, and so momentous, that we dragged ourselves from our slumber to join our synagogue members early this morning. The first thing I noticed upon casting my eyes outside was--dum, dum, DUM--the dreaded "curtain of gray." Without the ability to actually see the sun--even its outline through clouds will do--you can't recite the blessing. And after three glorious, sunny, clear and warm days, we'd dived right back into the gloomy Northwestern norm, in which colors are muted, and the sky and Lake Washington match in an oozy sheet of the non-color best called neither-here-nor-there.

With minimal hopes, we climbed into the car and slipped into the crowded synagogue in time to catch the conclusion of our Rabbi's exposition of a Talmud tractate and the raft of blessings marking a "siyum," a meal celebrating completion of a portion of Torah, especially important today for the many "first-born" guys who otherwise would have to fast until the seder tonight. My own spouse, also a first-born male, will be one of those with heightened anticipation of that first cup of wine and desert-dry matzah, as he had to fly early and had no siyum that would have allowed him to eat for the rest of the day.

We who seek the sun--who are Searching for Bright Light--do have a ray of hope that we can still say the birkat ha chamma today. One is allowed to do so until 1:10 pm, and also to view the sun, and say the blessing, through a window. Before that time, we'll be rising above the clouds, as we wing our way to our Passover destination, and I anticipate the joyous recitation of the rare and marvelous blessing.

If only we had window seats.

Unfortunately, no seats were assigned for our flight until day-of-departure, and my children and I are all seated separately and distantly. Only one of us has a window seat. So I'm planning to visit the flight attendants at the back of the plane and peer out their window, just long enough to claim a moment of that brightest light, a sight I hope will illuminate the next 28 years.

Again...Happy Passover, Happy Easter--and Happy Sunshine! (that's the slogan on my cell phone. Photo above is dawn on Jerusalem.)

A Rare Holiday

With the weather here in the glorious 70s with sunshine, I had to take advantage. Yesterday I joined throngs of camera-wielding families at the quad of the University of Washington, where a circle of grandly gnarled cherry trees are in magnificent full bloom. Spring has arrived, at last, in the northwest.

And with it Wednesday arrives a very special Jewish spring day. It only occurs once every 28 years, the last time in 1981. And because it is attached to the solar, rather than the usual lunar Jewish calendar, it moves--but dawns this year on the morning of another festival called "Chag Aviv," the holiday of spring, Passover. The last time the rare special day occurred on Passover eve was in 1925; the time before that, in 1309.

What is this unusual day called? I'm not sure the day has a name, but the action we perform does--reciting a blessing called "birkat ha chamma," acknowledging God's creation of His "works," when the sun returns to the position it occupied in the sky when it was created.

The hitch here is that you need to actually see the sun, at least through the clouds, in order to say this blessing. In Seattle, we can only pray that we get another couple luscious warm and clear days like yesterday and today. Because if we don't, and the sky reverts to its usual low-hanging curtain of gray, we're out of luck until 2037.

We've got a three-hour window of time to say these few magic words (well, many hold that you can say them when you see other of God's awesome works) but the profound thought for me is that we humans can agree (based on biblical calculations) when and where the sun was created. And that people for millenniums knew and agreed and said the same words, looking up (very briefly!) at that same burning orb.

This is the kind of natural phenomenon that my late father-in-law, a scientist who wrote about the confluence of the bible with the natural world, would have savored. We'll look up at the sky (if clear), and know he's reciting with us.

Meanwhile, approaching Passover, most everyone I know is scurrying.

Either they're setting aside the "chumetz" (leavened food ) in their homes and attacking the residues and residuals with various implements, be it blow torch or toothbrush--or, if they're very fortunate like me, they're packing to abandon their beer and Cheerios-stocked houses, sell all that chumetz to a non-Jew, and flee to a Passover hotel.

At these mostly sun-belt "resorts," a synagogue, kosher food purveyor, recreation and activities specialist, day care emporium and mini-university are magically assembled for the period of eight days. Families gather together from far-flung corners of the world to conduct seders and reunite in the re-enactment of our peoples' delivery from slavery to Egypt's Pharoah, to slavery instead to God. The rest of the time is divided between holidays of restricted activity similar to Shabbat, and "chol ha moed" days that are still part of the passover festival, but allow a modicum of non-holiday activity such as car travel, electricity use, necessary work and Facebook. Just kidding.

Much preparation goes into Passover, including study of the Hagada, the book containing the fifteen-step "order" that is the seder ceremony. Participants come up with novel and complex questions, and deep analyses of each aspect of the hours-long evening's discussion. Many people mistakenly think of the seder as indoctrination "for the children," but serious Jews stay up debating and querying long after the children and morning-types have drooped. Sometimes they debate how long the debate can go on.

I don't plan to take my laptop in the suitcase with the twelve fancy outfits I'll need for all the dressy meals and synagogue services that characterize the holiday, (not to mention the casual togs and walking shoes and seder-prep and speech-giving materials) so I'm afraid my blog will probably languish until my return after the holiday. I'm scurrying today not with a blow-torch but errand-running and laundry washing and okay, helping my son with his term paper on James Bond that he should have done weeks ago but must be turned in tomorrow.

I wish my Jewish friends a "Pesach kasher v'sameach," my Christian friends a Happy Easter, and for all of us, a springtime blossoming with new possibility.

Turning the Tables for Two: A Passover Story

Passover just ended--and this feels like liberation! We're now enveloped in the warm fuzzies of saying farewell to the many friends and renewed acquaintences we've enjoyed in this ten days at our Passover retreat.

I don't have much time now, as soon we'll go downstairs for the chumetz pizza and beer bash that concludes our holiday-- but I want to tell you about the Cohens. Mr. and Mrs. Cohen are an elderly couple, about four-feet-ten, he with a wisps of white hair and matching snowy beard, and she with a variety of brown sheitls. We saw them the first night at their table for two, conspicuous among the round tables for ten, and rectangles of gathered families of 20. The only little table for two--the couple hobbled to their seats, at first looking to us a bit pitiful, all alone. They chatted with each other a bit, but mostly sat quietly, dignified, munching their matza, sipping their wine, eating the courses we were all served, just the two of them, the miniature old couple that seemed so sweet and yet so apart.

Over the course of our ten days together, Mr. and Mrs. Cohen attended the lectures my husband and I gave to the crowd. They spoke in their thick European accents to our children. They got to know others and soon we saw them seated for meals, animatedly chatting, at a table of ten elders, the table for two gone. Mrs. Cohen approached me to comment approvingly after my lectures; she sat down after lunch at our table one time to say how she enjoyed watching our family so attentive and loving toward my father-in-law, 82, with us for the holiday from Jerusalem.

I now complete this post at home. By the end of our ten days at the Passover hotel, the Cohens were thoroughly embraced by most everyone. At our final night of celebration, eating our just-prepared gourmet pizza and pretzels with beer, the little couple were in demand for photos, and happy to oblige. They seemed to be beaming, and freely shared how delighted they were to have enjoyed this time with such a congenial and warm group.

Passover at a hotel may seem like an indulgence, but it offers many benefits beyond just avoiding the chores of cleaning and preparing. Families unite from around the globe, as ours did, and together, the joyous assemblage of so many people realizing the specialness of this time creates a camaraderie and closeness difficult to duplicate. As the days dwindle, the desire to stay, to dwell in this pocket of unreality, increases. Here are people not just gathered for a good time, but to observe God's rules for these elevated days.

And then, after the pizza and the packing, the taxis line up for the parade to the airport and the matzah crumbs, photos and fables are all that remain. Perhaps we'll see Mr. and Mrs. Cohen next year in Jerusalem. If not there, at the same hotel at our table for lunch would be just fine.

More Consternation about Jewish Rules

My last post was about my difficulty with all the minutia that goes into preparation for Passover--and here I am writing on my laptop at a Passover Resort hotel. The sun is shining brightly outside and I just came back to my room from a wonderful outdoor buffet brunch, where the cheerful mosgiach made me the perfect omlet on one of those little gas flame burners, and in the background I heard the whirrr of the blenders making choose-your-ingredients smoothies. Matza brei and platters of cheeses and lox and fake bagels that look like the surface of the moon (and probably taste just as good) were on tables in the shaded patio, with crocks of hot porridge, bins of cool yoghurt and other comestibles embarrassingly abundant. So how can I continue to feel that many details of mitzvot are, um, unnecessary and weird?

Coincidentally (if there is such a thing), my 15-year-old son joined me sitting on a comfy couch in the sun this morning and we devoured our perfect omlettes together. He told me that he was up late moderating a heated discussion between a young fellow who is an atheist and only performs mitzvot to honor his parents, and one of the rabbis supervising the food prep here. The upshot was that the moshgiach used all the "why there has to be God" arguments and the disbeliever was unmoved.

Meanwhile, I had a fascinating conversation with a young seminary graduate who posits that halacha, every fastidious detail, is meant to further man's interaction with God. By applying logic to new issues, derived by a posek from the vast array of Torah thought, we bring otherwise staid and stale pronouncements into our personal realms on a daily basis. It is halacha, then, that actually forges our personal relationships with God. Whether or not to put tin foil on the shelves of one's refrigerator puts our efforts to conform to God's will foremost in our experience.

I can accept that to a point; my reaction is that we have choices even within the tight confines of halacha, and exactly HOW tight those confines are is a matter of which rabbi you follow or how some view went akimbo several hundred years ago, and just kept billowing further into ridiculousness--but now, entrenched as either minhag or halacha, cannot be retracted or rethought or revised.

An example: At the time electricity became available, I'm told, there was much discussion about its impact on Shabbat. Is turning on a light switch akin to opening a spigot? As water flows readily through pipes, electricity flows in an ongoing basis through a home's wires, and tapping into it for one's hot tray or electric blanket is no different from flushing the toilet to let the waiting water through.

It was decided that use of electricity was not similar to opening a spigot, and so Jews ended up with dark bathrooms and cold nighttime bodies and so many other inconveniences that arise from not being able to use electricity. One can say that this makes Shabbat special, if not more uncomfortable (which it certainly does) and that restraining from changing the world, which using electricity emphatically does, is the point of Shabbat, anyway.

OK, but let's say there's a new means of conveying energy that doesn't require electricity. I understand that in Israel, Jews can use the hot water from their faucets on Shabbat since the heating mechanism is solar, rather than via a gas tank that increases its flame when empty. Israeli Jews, then, regain the comfort of washing their faces on Shabbat with hot water--ahhh!--while I continue to shiver while spashing frigid water on my face. Is my experience of Shabbat somehow better because I have endured a throwback to discomfort?

Which takes me back to my disdain for halachic minutia. Yes, Torah is integrated with everything, every decision, every moment on our planet (and elsewhere!) But the amount of prescribed, mandatory behaviors is just toooooo encompassing, constricting and picayune. I contort my attitude with great duress to envision halacha as wondrous means to bind me to God. But, it's always my fault (God has none, of course) that I can't Pollyanna my way through many directives. In this religion, my view that many rules are over-the-top demanding and strange is by definition wrong, and it is my job to learn my way to seeing that fact.

Even as I write this, I am internally arguing the other side. That old yatzer ha ra is acting up, I tell myself! Also, being Jewish involves questions, so delving and questioning isn't so bad--as long as you keep following the rules. Still, there's that minutia. And then again--are we REALLY supposed to know why God tells us to so peculiarly celebrate matza, the bread of both freedom and affliction? Can we REALLY conceive why chumetz is such an anathema? And that's where I remain--stuck between reason and rebellion and acceptance.

So Rabbi Soloveitchik's "task of covenantal man" becomes a nearly impossible challenge:
“The Halakhah believes that there is only one world—not divisible into secular and hallowed sectors—which can either plunge into ugliness and hatefulness, or be roused to meaningful, redeeming activity, gathering up all latent powers into a state of holiness. Accordingly, the task of covenantal man is to be engaged not in dialectical surging forward and retreating, but in uniting the two communities into one community where man is both the creative, free agent, and the obedient servant of God.”

How do YOU solve this dilemma?

Troubled by Passover Minutia

It's just a couple days before Passover, and no time to have a crisis of faith.

Most people I know are too busy pouring pots-full of boiling water on their counters, perhaps with towels on the floor below waiting for the overflow. They're taking blowtorches designed for creme brulee to their stovetops. They're boiling pans of water in their microwaves. They're taping pieces of tin foil on the grates inside their refrigerators, being sure to poke holes for air circulation. They're cutting pieces of thick plastic or aluminum and using lots of sticky shelf paper. And they're wrapping up all their cereal, flour, cookies, and just about all their regular food--and completing a contract selling it to a non-Jew.

Is this crazy, or what? Hours and hours taking a toothbrush to the grout. Sorting through toys for a stray stub of granola bar. Flipping through the pages of books, shaking them upside down combing for crumbs. This is indeed insanity. Is this really what God wants us to be doing? I thought learning Torah was the most important thing--or maybe praying, or doing kindnesses for others, or visiting someone alone and sick. No, for a week--or several--Jews are overcome with a fear of specks of leavened products.

And the job falls almost exclusively to women. Unless a guy lives alone, in which case he'll only attack this job if he's too poor to hire somebody else to do it, men have women to obsess about this. How many guys do you know who are diligent and compulsive about Pesach cleaning?

The bottom line for me is that--I will confess--my faith is shaken. Frankly, I am of the privileged few who are spared this entire weirdness as I am hired as a staff person at a lovely and luxurious Passover hotel getaway, and I have no right to complain about the work that once again, I need not do.

Still, enough of my friends ARE doing it, and my memory of the process is fresh enough that I do wonder how any clever God would come up with this as something beneficial to His creations. A test of faith, you may say--God provides this so He can reward our loyalty and our effort. Then why threaten us with being "cut off" from our people, ie the end of our eternal souls--if we snatch a slice of pizza over Passover's eight days? Or if we sell all our chumetz except the bag of tortilla chips?

We're taught that the inflation of flour by yeast represents the puffiness of our egos--i.e. arrogance. Arrogance is one of the two characteristics--midos--that we're told to eliminate from our personalities. And here, for eight days, is a means to symbolically eliminate this puffiness, both spiritually, as we relive Jews' transition from earthly bondage to spiritual bondage to the only worthy master, God--and physically by never taking any leavened products into our bodies.

This doesn't wash for me. (I'll skip the Urchatz pun). Why didn't God say we could eat non-leavened stuff like cookies? We can have cookies, but they have to be matza meal or potato starch based--I know, I know, you'll give me the stuff about flour having the potential to be leavened. But it's not about flour--or else we couldn't have matza, which is--flour and water. We know that the already-baked matza can't rise; it's had no more than 18 minutes to combine its ingredients. But the pre-baked cookies can't rise either.

All the permutations of this chumetz-restriction are so way out there as to make Jews look primitive and brainless. Gentiles who enter a Pesach-dik kitchen think we've gone to the moon. I don't really care what gentiles think; I want to do what God wants, and I trust He knows better than I do how to maximize my spiritual potential. But when you spend hundreds--usually THOUSANDS of dollars, and days, WEEKS of work to very indirectly and obliquely tamp down our egos--well, first off, I don't think it works any better than less intrusive means, and it just plain doesn't make sense. I know that God MADE "sense;" if He made everything, He can do whatever He likes. Still the "fences" around avoiding chumetz, and the complexities of it, and the potential punishment for NOT doing it, or doing it incompletely--is just too bizarre.

Tell me where I'm wrong. And in the meantime, have a Pesach kasher v sameach--if you ever get THROUGH kashering.

Pesach at a Kosher Hotel: Aren't you hungry yet?

Passover's past, and we have returned from our blissful escape from reality into Endless Foodland, aka, one of the explosively popular Passover Hotel retreats. Nine days of bounteous meals, each beckoning largely because they would be too expensive to cook at home. Every day, toque'd servers sliced huge hunks of meat...all sorts of meat. Turkey carcasses, briskets the size of a buffalo head, prime rib slabs comparable in girth to a microwave oven, veal roasts. Followed the next day with new jumbo chunks and yesterday's showpieces now cleverly cut into Chinese dishes, meat salads and skewer'd kabobs.
Breakfasts....the omelet bar, chefs sprinkling mushrooms, peppers, and cheddar; the smoothie bar, where blenders whirl fruit with yoghurt and honey to order; tables of cheeses and puffy brown inventions, in wild imagination the shape of bagels and croissants, but in texture and taste--matza.
Soups and salads and theme meals--the ubiquitous Western Barbeque, with huge grills wheeled outside to sear steaks, burgers, chicken, hot dogs. Checked tablecloths, free ten-gallon hats, fake Sheriff stars to clip to your chest pocket. The amounts of food are obscene, the calorie consumption astronomical.

And ME? Well, I don't bother with breakfast. I like to mix lettuce with Israeli salad, egg salad and guacamole for a big lunch treat. I eat what I like of the dinners. I admit to liberally sampling the chocolate-covered almonds in the Tea Room.
Ahhh yes, the Tea Room, the piece de resistance of Passover retreats. When comparing Pesach locales, one gains prestige if there's a "24-Hour Tea Room," which means that if you haven't had enough at the six meals of the day (breakfast, kiddush, lunch, kids' dinner [aka hot dogs for old and young], dinner, night buffet), you can come to the Tea Room at, say 3 am, to grab some potato chips, cellophane-bagged cotton candy, matza-meal-based cake or any of the fifteen kinds of sweets laid out in multi-level'd platters and bowls. Mmmm-mmmh! Mix with a Sprite chaser, and you have....digestive difficulties.
Let's face it, Pesach has its own digestive challenges from the get-go. The first seder features cardboardy flats of shmura matza, punctuated by quickly gulped goblets of red wine. A cube of potato, a leaf of romaine, a little sweet charoses....and more of that dry, tasteless cardboard. I personally know celebrants who spent more than the usual time in the, uh, lavatory over the next several days. Hard-boiled egg, anyone?

Aside from the gastronomic extravaganza, Passover retreats offer their own entertainment. When our family partakes in these events (every year for the past 17), the entertainment consists largely of...us. Lecturing. Few surprises there. But there's always a comedian (this time an oversized African-American named Saleem who had converted to Islam--a joke in itself with our humorless Pesach crowd). We had a Jewish rapper (not joking) whose unintelligible lyrics were made all the more engrossing by the corn-row'd black gentlemen on either side of him seemingly making Kohain finger splits in weird directions while jerkily spasming. There was Casino night, where the game tending staff exceeded the number of patrons, and the ever-popular Jeopardy rounds. Karaoke was fun to watch, but in a frum crowd, the ladies abandoned the scene to the teens, one or two of whom could stay on key.

And yet, and yet, Pesach at a kosher hotel is a wondrous thing. As they celebrate the release from slavery, people bond. They make friends, thrown as they are into a type of shared isolation. They have time to talk, waiting for the doors of the dining room to open...relaxing, allowing themselves to open up. And they learn and daven and have the time to give some thought to the meaning of being born--or choosing to be--a Jew. The rabbis who lectured at our retreat were excellent. Intriguing topics, discussed by inspiring people. Most important to me was time together as a family, reaffirming the centrality of our connections. A daughter from New York with her charming friend, now also a member of our clan. Zayde from Erez Yisroyal; a brother and family who live locally but chose to stay in the hotel for the shared experience. And we enjoyed visits by friends, in leisurely conversations that renewed closeness. The regular world was left at home--this was an eight-day excursion for refurbishing the heart. I hated to see it end, when, at 4 am, we boarded our cab for the airport.

Then, at home, I remembered where we'd left off: The world had stood still--or at least the mess left behind. I was immeditely confronted by the SUITCASE JUNGLE--and I needed a machete. Our guestroom was strewn with all sizes of old backpacks, souvenir canvas bags from conferences, broken-zipper duffels, ripped side-compartment carry-ons, first-grade totes....you name it, if it was a rejected valise, it was on our guest room floor. And the suitcases we'd actually used weren't even unpacked. I first hacked my way through the Target bags, tugged-off tags, new-shirt cardboards, and sticky-edged cellophane... The detritis of packing. Then I stacked all the canvas totes and, like Russian nesting dolls, folded them inside each other to form a big surprise roll with new joys to be discovered with its unwrapping.

The other delight: Nine days' worth of everyone's laundry, which was enhanced by the discovery of FOURTEEN TOWELS still damp on the floor of teens' rooms and bathrooms. Did you know that an eel can live in a damp towel for SIX MONTHS? I was truly tempted to start my very own eel farm.
But now that I've been home 30 hours, I'm downloading my photos, and about to re-hang all the wrinkled skirts from my suitcase-- and feeling nostalgic about the days just passed. They zipped by, and as we count the Omer toward Shavuos, there's a warm-fuzzy feeling as I think of those luxurious meals, the endearing and funny people, and the intense hours in shul. The world around me is blooming, and as the sun charms the earth, I continue to be warmed by Chag Aviv.