Part three in the ongoing series of threads about my exploring Jewish practice with an eye at formally beginning the conversion process in the near future.
The Seder has fascinated me since I first learned about it in school in sixth grade. I’ve wanted to attend one since long before I became interested in becoming Jewish. It was about twenty years ago or so that I read a haggadah online for the first time. It fascinated me - the ritual, and the mixture of solemnity and celebration, and the idea that this (possibly fictional) recounting of a specific incident that happened to a small group of people 3,000 years ago could have universal meaning, because knowing oppression and hoping for a future in which we will all be free is universal. The Reconstructionist temple here in Olympia, which I intend on joining in the near future, holds a community Seder every year. I haven’t gotten to know anyone in the congregation well enough yet to ask to be invited into their home, so I paid $75 for a ticket to this event.
The event was set up in the temple’s conference room. Four long tables running the length of the conference room, a fifth set up parallel to the back wall, behind which was the rabbi’s podium. There were easily 100+ people in attendance. I overheard one older man say this was the largest turnout he’d ever seen. The attendees were mostly either elderly couples or single folk like myself, people who don’t have a family Seder to attend. I wound up sitting with a lesbian couple to my left, an older single man to my right, an elderly couple across from me, and just to their left a guy I’ve briefly met before, who works the self-checkout at our local Fred Meyer, who stands out because he’s the ONLY person I’ve ever seen in this town who wears a kippah in public. He and I got to chatting a bit, because I also work in a grocery store and occasionally do self-checkout, so we understand what each other have been through. Turned out he’s also a convert and just had his mikveh two weeks ago! I congratulated him on the achievement. One person showed up in one of the inflatable frog costumes made famous by the antifascist protestors in Portland last year, holding a sign that read “FROG SAMEACH!”
For the handwashing section, since getting a hundred-plus people to pour water over their hands all at once without making a mess of the place is highly impractical, the rabbi explained that his father-in-law is a rabbi in Oregon and he invented the “Oregon handwash”, where you just rub your dry hands together and assume that the high humidity in the incessantly rainy Oregon springtime air is doing the work for you. It works just as well here in Washington, he said.
Instead of individually dressing the plates with the ritual foods, they put communal platters in the middle of the table and invited us to serve ourselves. They also set out bottles of Manischewitz wine, Kedem grape juice, and some imported Israeli reds. I’ve never cared much for wine myself, but I’d heard that Manischewitz is very sweet and doesn’t have much of the bitter taste that I don’t like about wine, so that was what I went with for my four glasses. The stuff is DECEPTIVELY strong for how sweet it is. I could feel it hitting my brain within seconds of drinking the first glass. They provided parsley sprigs for the karpas, a communal bowl of VERY salty water for dipping, a charoset made of apples and walnuts, chopped horseradish root for maror, Manischewitz matzah, and hardboiled eggs that some volunteers had prepared the day before. The eggs had that sulfurous ring around the yolk that indicated they’d been overboiled, but I wasn’t about to complain. I had never eaten matzah before. It’s like a saltine without the salt. I can see why it’s called “the bread of our affliction”. I found that dipping it in the salt water greatly improves the flavor.
The haggadah used was A Night of Questions, which I understand is the standard haggadah prescribed by the Reconstructionist movement. The proceedings started off slow, but once the rabbi got into the body of the text, it moved quickly. Most of the reading is in English, with a few sections in Hebrew, most of which are sung by the congregation. I can’t read Hebrew, but the text fortunately provides transliterations and translations, so I was able to follow along by reading the transliteration as I understood it to be pronounced and aping the melody everyone else was singing. The old-timers sitting across from me said I have a talent for singing Hebrew because I was getting the pronunciation right and enunciating clearly. Maybe if/when I convert and learn how to actually read it, I’ll study cantillation.
The rabbi made a point of emphasizing the universality of the Exodus narrative; it’s a story about how one people escaped from bondage a long time ago, but many peoples both now and throughout history have done the same. He encouraged us to talk amongst ourselves with our neighbors at the table on this topic. I brought up my own ancestry - I am of mixed Scottish/English/Italian ancestry, but my family name is Scottish and I’ve always taken the most pride in the Scot in me. The Scots endured centuries of oppression from the English, and much like the ancient Israelites had heroes like Moses and Samson and Joshua and David who saved them from oppression, we had Robert the Bruce and William Wallace and Bonnie Prince Charlie, and just as they fled from Egypt to the Promised Land, so too did my ancestors come to America to flee the English, and fought them here as well to establish a land of their own. For that matter, so too did my English ancestors, who were among the Mayflower pilgrims, flee religious persecution for a land where they could practice freely, and my paternal grandparents fled the economic and social collapse of 1910s Italy in search of a better life. It’s pretty much a universal experience.
In describing the ten plagues, the rabbi invited us to think about other situations where an unwise ruler made bad decisions and lead his country into ruin as a result. Three guesses who he was talking about. The first two don’t count.
For the section about the four questions and the four types of children, there was no specific individual chosen - instead, the whole congregation read in unison. Drawing back on that theme of universality, it was emphasized that every one of us are all four of the children in different points of our lives. Sometimes we’re full of wisdom and ready to learn and willing to share. Sometimes we’re cynical and we withdraw into ourselves. Sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know and so we can barely scratch the surface of what there is to learn. And sometimes we don’t even know enough to know where to start, so all we can do is sit and watch. I definitely felt all four parts myself. There were marginalia in the haggadah commenting on how you might explain the various parts to each of the four children, which I found very elucidating.
The meal itself was catered by Ninevah, an Assyrian restaurant here in Olympia. (There’s something deeply ironic about Assyrians catering a Jewish event.) They served an off-menu banquet of Jewish classics with a few additions - matzah ball soup, baked salmon, gefilte fish, carrot tzimmes, bagileh (a sort of Iraqi version of refried beans, made with fava beans, tomato, onion, and mild peppers), potato kugel, and steamed broccoli, plus a dessert of charoset-filled chocolate-pistachio truffles and matzah layered with toffee, chocolate, and slivered almonds. I’ve only had matzah ball soup once before at a deli in Chicago, and this version was MUCH better - the broth was a little on the cold side, but the balls were very moist and flavorful. I’d never had gefilte fish before and had heard horror stories about it. It wasn’t bad. A little on the bland side, but the texture was interesting, and adding a little touch of horseradish did a LOT to wake it up. The carrots and kugel were great. The salmon was solid. I want to learn how to make the bagileh - I bet it’d work great in some sort of Mexican-Iraqi-fusion burrito. The desserts were a little hard on me because I have trouble chewing nuts, but they were very rich and sweet.
While the adults were eating, the kids of the congregation were invited to go upstairs to the sanctuary to try to find the afikoman. He was wearing a tie that looked like a giant matzah, and he made especially sure to mention to the kids that his tie was NOT the afikoman. In their absence, the rabbi invited us to join him in a shot of slivovitz to celebrate his upcoming 3-month sabbatical that starts next week and which I get the impression was well-earned. Never had slivovitz before. That stuff BURNS going down. Once the afikoman had been found, he brought out a big basket of candy and offered it to the kids in lieu of chomping on a dry unsalted cracker as “dessert”, and instead ate it on their behalf.
After the meal, the rabbi took some time to acknowledge the caterers, the congregants who helped prepare the ritual foods, and the members who’d bought sponsorships to help fund the event. They have ten top-tier sponsorships, each of which is named after one of the plagues. The rabbi’s parents bought one of them and he said he was thankful they didn’t pick “Death of the Firstborn”. Baskets were passed up and down the tables and we were each invited to grab a plastic egg (which he SWORE were not labeled “Easter eggs” when he bought them, because that would obviously be avodah zarah), inside of which would be a strip of paper including a proverb from Pirkei Avot, the brief Talmud tractate comprising a series of ethical quotes from the rabbinic sages. The one I got was “The world stands on three things; justice, truth, and peace.” I wonder if that’s where the two Jewish guys who created Superman back in the '30s got his famous credo from?
After the third cup of wine and an abbreviated version of the post-meal grace and Hallel, we got into the really fun part of the evening, which is going to lead me to an aside which I hope you will forgive me for.
Every January, there is an event called Burns Supper which is celebrated across Scotland and in the Scottish diaspora worldwide, commemorating the birthday and the life of the celebrated 18th century poet Robert Burns. It’s a communal gathering which revolves around a meal of traditional Scottish foods, singing, recitation of poetry, and consuming lots of ale and whiskey. Sound familiar at this point? About ten years ago, long before I became interested in becoming Jewish, I attended a Burns Supper in Seattle, where I found myself sitting at the same table as Jacob Finkle, the director of the Seattle Jewish Chorale. He doesn’t have a lick of Scot in him, but he attends a Burns Supper every year because he loves the music and the experience, and he told us that it’s so much like a Seder that he wonders if the people who came up with the idea when the first one was held in 1801 were familiar with it. I have to say now that I agree with him. Towards the end of the Burns Supper, there are typically a number of drinking songs which encourage the attendees to get a little loose and rowdy and have fun and a reason to finish their drinks. Once we’d finished welcoming in Elijah, and similarly offering Miriam her cup of water (about which the rabbi quipped that at the beginning of the night he’d filled it with ice, and the ice had melted, and now there’s no ICE anymore and that’s how things should be), and finished up with the religious necessities, the last couple numbers of the evening were DEFINITELY drinking songs. Everyone’s quite tipsy at this point, so it’s time to relax a little, have some fun, and send the night out on a positive note.
At Burns Supper, one of the popular post-meal drinking songs is “The Barley Mow”. In each verse, you name a vessel in which ale can be served and the various people involved in its making, delivery, and service, adding a new one with each verse as it gets increasingly difficult to keep up - the company, the slavey, the drayer, the brewer, the landlord, the landlady, their daughter, the barrel, half-barrel, gallon, half-gallon, quart pot, pint pot, half-a-pint, gill-pot, half-a-gill, quarter-gill, nipperkin, and the brown bowl (I.e. cupping your hands to drink out of a flowing tap). “Chad Gadya”, which is apparently in Aramaic and had the congregation struggling to sing along at points, is similar. It starts with the narrator’s father buying a goat for two pennies - then a cat eats the goat, a dog bites the cat, a stick beats the dog, a fire burns the stick, water puts out the fire, an ox drinks the water, a butcher slaughters the ox, the angel of death slays the butcher, and then God Himself smites the angel of death. That was followed by the similarly jocular “Echad Mi Yodea”, which I’d call a sort of Jewish Twelve Days of Christmas because of how it counts up and adds to each verse - thirteen aspects of God, twelve tribes of Israel, nine months of pregnancy, eight days 'til circumcision, seven days of the week, six orders of Mishnah, FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE ̶g̶o̶l̶d̶e̶n̶ ̶r̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ books of the Torah, four matriarchs, three patriarchs, two tablets of the covenant, and one God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all (or something like that).
All in all, a delightful experience. It probably wasn’t the most traditional one. I’m told that if you attend a Chabad Seder, for example, there’s gonna be a lot more Hebrew and a lot less food that doesn’t taste like cardboard. All in all, it was a positive experience. I’ve gotten over my nervousness about attending the temple at this point. The greeter actually recognized me on my way in. I’ve only gotten to know a few people so far, but I really feel like I’ve found a community in which I belong.
Chag Sameach!
