Wading Through Widowhood: Passover perspective

Has the Halacha changed in the days since I got married? Why is everything so much crazier today?

By PAMELA PELED
Making matza in Ashdod. (photo credit: REUTERS)
Making matza in Ashdod.
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Passover is sort of my hag – every 19 years or so, my birthday coincides with the Seder. As a child, I remember kosher-for-Passover ice cream cakes and coconut macaroons at some of my parties.
One of my earliest memories is spending the festival’s intermediate days in the South African Karoo town of Bloemfontein (of all places!) with family of my father. Our maid took my baby brothers and myself outside the garden gate to eat Marmite sandwiches for breakfast… Our parents believed that kids under seven were exempt from the prohibition concerning leavened bread.
Still, they balked at crumbs in the kitchen, though the bread must have been buttered on the counter next to the sink. Go figure.
My parents had an altogether relaxed attitude towards religious strictures. Among the ever-more hardline adherence to ritual that we see in Israel today, the Jewish practices of my Diaspora youth seem quaint and funny – my dad drank only black coffee after a meat meal, accompanied by two squares of Cadbury milk chocolate – but despite the contradictions, we loved our traditions.
The black coffee (in our extremely unkosher home) was a nod to belonging; we ceremoniously brought out my mom’s mother’s fancy dinner service on Passover to feel we had “changed” alongside others in our tribe around the world. The fact that meat and milk snuggled up together on those pretty plates was not important, we didn’t care that our pots were not kashered or dipped in a mikve – it was all symbolic, it was all lovely, and it all worked.
We enjoyed our Judaism. We went to shul on Shabbatot and hagim, and after davening we drove to drama classes, tennis lessons or the beach. My dad, fortified by some chopped herring or fishballs from the post-service kiddush, slipped out of his smart suit into something more comfortable, and moseyed off for a round of golf. We were so very Jewish, somehow – we went to Jewish schools, and Habonim on weekends; our friends were Jewish, our activities were Jewish, our hearts longed to live in a Jewish land.
And at first, in this Jewish land, being Jewish was such fun. The bus driver wore a kippa… wow! A “Hatikva moment,” if ever there was one. The supermarkets had pre-Passover specials on cleaning accoutrements – how great is that! And it’s actually spring here for the spring cleaning; unlike in the southern hemisphere, where Passover is accompanied by the first winter squalls. The DJs spinning discs about renewal and freedom wishing their listeners “Hag sameah” at the top of the hour… what fun, what a privilege, what a miracle to live in the Holy Land.
But then, slowly, inexorably over the next decades, a sad thing happened to us. Little by little our Judaism seemed to be hijacked by extremists, and being Jewish sort of started to be a drag. The army, of course, is the big humdinger of an issue: Our kids grew up and served their time, often defending black-clad yeshiva boys who were forbidden to enlist. But forget the army; just thinking about it makes me tired.
It’s the little things that creep up to knock you on the head. When I was a bride, three decades ago, going to the mikve was a prerequisite for marriage in Israel. Okay, you might say, it’s a Jewish country, this is the Jewish way. I enjoyed my soak in the hallowed water – the “mikve maid” informed me that if ever God listens to prayers, it’s during your pre-marriage dunk. My beloved dad was dying at the time, much, much too young; I prayed with my blood and my bones and my super-clean body for him to recover. God was not in a listening mode that day, but the experience was pleasant in its own way.
Today, immersing in the mikve, it seems, is not enough. Today, the “on-duty keeper of public morals” hands a prospective bride three white cloths, with intimate instructions of where and when to utilize them; only if you assure her of their pristine state on the three days prior to your mikve visit is your immersion deemed kosher.
Or you can lie.
Has the Halacha changed in the days since I got married? Why is everything so much crazier today? It’s the same with Passover. Once it was “Kosher le’P” coconut cookies; today it’s dog food and floor detergents that need to be approved. Let’s not start on the complicated kitniyot (legumes) – okay for half the Jews, off limits for the other half. Unless you are married to a Sephardi. Of the right sex.
And now, as more than half the country votes for an even more radical government, God alone knows what we can look forward to. Perhaps by next Passover we’ll be buying water in kosher bottles, for fear of contamination of contraband crumbs tossed into the Kinneret by an unsuspecting tourist. The mind boggles.
Still, it is the time of freedom, and it’s nearly my birthday, and life is short. The cleaning will soon be done, the tables will be laid, the chicken soup will lie resting in the pot. A week of mellowing in the Middle Eastern sun is waiting around the corner and, for the moment, peace is in the (oh-so-clean) air. It’s time to stop carping and enjoy the carp… Hag sameah to us all. May we all be blessed to freely celebrate our festivals in our own country, in any way we please, for many, many, many generations to come.
The writer lectures at IDC and Beit Berl; peledpam@gmail.com