©2020 Meg Bashwiner
Next Year Together
I’m not Jewish. I am married to a Jewish person. When we joined our lives together I gained a whole slew of new holidays. Passover is my favorite. Mainly because of these three factors.
Number one being the food. As an Italian American, I am hardwired to always be concerned about the food in any given situation, especially with gatherings. I crave the comfort of the sweet fatty flavors of jewish cooking and I have loved learning how to cook passover mainstay dishes. Rendering chicken fat with onions brings me a joy that is unmatched by much in this life. Passover has some strict rules concerning food but with limitations comes great ingenuity and creativity. On our passover table there are usually none fewer than three dishes prepared with matzo and or chicken fat. The passover palate has truly steered into the skid of matzo—matzo ball soup, matzo kugel, chocolate covered matzo. I’ve even made meatballs with matzo like a true shiksa paisan.
Number two being the story. I am a theater maker. I love a good story and I really love a good story that finds an interesting way to be told. The concept of a seder is a genius method of storytelling. It is interactive theater at its best. It assigns roles, there’s props, snacks, drinks, rituals, and songs. A seder is a play that understands and acknowledges its audience, it engages them to ask questions, it feeds them, it calls them to action. It is full to the brim with symbolism and metaphor, turning painful memories of oppression into invigorating dinner conversation. A seder also understands a captive audience, we are hungry and ready to grip it and rip it into some chicken fat laden foods, so it goes out of its way to keep you involved and progressively more drunk. Children are engaged as well without the booze, they are encouraged to be active participants. And just when they would get bored and restless at the end of the meal they are sent on a mission to find, you guessed it, a hidden piece of matzo. A great use of working with the props you already have on hand, I will say.
Number three is being together. This one really combines the first two for me. I love cooking and sharing a meal with people I love. I also really love creating a play with a theater company. Both of these things get to happen when we join together to celebrate passover with friends and family. It is encouraged to invite an outsider to your family table. Opening our door to Elijah is a parable to encourage us to welcome outsiders in. I have been that outsider and have benefited greatly from the radical hospitality of passover. Before I started dating my husband, I didn’t know much about the practices and rituals of Judaism, other than what I absorbed from being raised in North Jersey, where as comedian Chris Gethard says, everyone from Jersey is somehow a little bit Jewish. I went to my first seder in 2012 and I learned so much. I was encouraged to learn and not made to feel weird for not knowing why there was a bowl of salt water on the table. I was welcomed. I was gifted with inclusion in a beautiful and ancient tradition. I treasure that gift and grow it by sharing in the tradition with new people every year. This year you are the new people.
This year is, of course, different. I did my best with our grocery store limitations to put together a proper seder meal. They didn't have the kind of matzo I like best. Shout out to Yehuda! I’ll see ya next year. But all and all, the food came together and the preparation was a welcome change to the monotony of my normal quarantine day. Although it was weird to make a whole seder dinner just for two people, but because i’m Italian and making too much food is a requirement, it ended up being enough for about six people.
There were 11 plagues this year, more so if you count capitalism and the fall of democracy. God is punishing us to get us to change. I don’t believe in God in a traditional way. For me there is no man in the sky. I believe that God is our collective, the choices and actions humanity makes as a whole, what we build and what we destroy, that to me is god. Our choices and actions are punishing us and instead of lambs blood above our door we keep our door shut and anoint its handle with lysol.
Our seder was just my husband and I, sitting in our kitchen, with me asking him to tell me the story of passover. We ending up telling it to each other, me asking questions and him answering and then him quizzing me: “Why did the Jews have to leave Egypt in such a hurry?” “Because Pharaoh changed his mind about letting the Jews go because he’s a messy bitch who loves drama.”
We talked about how we are connected to the jews throughout history who held seders in worse times, more dangerous times, and in better times, much better times. It was important that we have a seder even if it was just the two of us because we have to keep this tradition going, we have to remember even if we have to use the slightly less good matzo to do so.
I asked my husband why we say “Next Year in Jerusalem” at passover. He said because this year we are in Egypt but next year, next year we will be in Jerusalem. I don’t know where we will be next year. But I hope I am making too much food for more than two people. I hope our ad hoc theater company of family and friends are all there to ask the questions as they drunkenly await a meal of far too much matzo. I hope that we keep the tradition going, that we keep remembering, keep remembering that we are god and we have to work together to stop the plagues. Today I say to all of you happy passover, next year in Jerusalem, and next year together. Please God, next year together.
Featured on the Our Plague Year Podcast