The Way It Will Be ... I Hope

Too much is going on -- if not around the house, then in my head. So I've come up with a plan to post to this blog twice a week from now on. Here's the general plan:

Sunday or Monday -- Something about the Parsha Hashavuot, the weekly Torah reading or, depending on whether a holiday is imminent, the Torah readings associated with the holiday. I'm going to be posting something early in the week for the upcoming Shabbat.

Thursday or Friday -- Something else. It could be related to what's going on in the Jewish calendar (e.g., Rosh Hodesh or holidays), something about Jewish living or symbols (e.g., kashruth - keeping kosher, mezuzah, tallit) or even something more general (e.g., what is kavvanah, tzedakah, mitzvah - give you a hint, a mitzvah is not a "good deed").

Because today is Friday, the first post under this new scheme will be delivered no later than Monday, May 3. I'll write something about the double Parshah Behar/Bechukotai (Leviticus 25:1 - 27:34), which will be read in synagogues around the world on Saturday, May 8, 2010. I'm not sure yet what direction these weekly divrei Torah (words of Torah) will take. Perhaps some ideas of things to do or discuss with your family, perhaps my own thoughts on the reading, perhaps something else altogether.

For the later post next week, I will probably talk about counting the omer, a ritual we engage in between the second night of Passover and Shavuot.

The post-Pesach wind-up and let-down

Remember all that time and effort spent getting the kitchen ready for Pesach? Well, once Pesach is over, it's time to change the kitchen back to everyday use. One could choose, of course, to keep the kitchen in Pesach mode for a while longer. But that would mean no cereal or bread or muffins or cookies or pasta or anything else that uses chametz. So, we bite the bullet and return to normalcy. Whatever that is.

That's the pile of empty boxes that used to contain our Pesach dishes. And here's the other side of the pile:

Yup, we unloaded all those boxes and washed everything just so that we could use the dishes, pots and pans, and utensils for 8 days. We packed up the meat dishes first:

Relatively uneventful, except that there were a few meat leftovers that had to be repackaged in plastic wrap or foil or a plastic bag -- things that could be discarded later rather than Pesach meat dishes.

Then the pareve dishes, since most of what we eat is dairy:

Most of our pareve stuff is either glass (like the wine glasses) or things that are used only for vegetables (like the food processor and salad spinner and juicer).

And finally, the dairy dishes, which form the bulk of our Pesach kitchen stuff:

We did most of the packing during the afternoon of the eighth day of Pesach. Anyone who wanted a snack ate leftovers off of paper plates. The paper towels used to line the cabinets and drawers were pulled up, as was the Contact paper that covered the counters.

The only good thing about packing up the kitchen eight days after setting it up for Pesach is that it generally takes much less time. And you can fudge a bit -- for example, the counters got uncovered in bits and pieces as we had time.

That's our regular dairy dish drainer sitting on top of the still-covered counter. And also a glimpse of the dishwasher, which decided to start leaking on the day we switched over to our Pesach kitchen. Still better than the stove crapping out on us like last year.

Now that we're back to our regular kitchen operations, it's time to start thinking about the next holiday -- Shavuot -- and how we get there by counting the omer. Next time.

The Seder Experience

A seder is a type of ceremony or ritual with a meal inserted about two-thirds of the way through. Yes, that's right -- there's quite a bit of seder after the meal, though there is a certain segment of the population who never get that far. Speaking from personal experience -- it's worth the extra effort. A great book for learning more about how a seder is constructed and what each of the parts entails is Dr. Ron Wolfson's The Art of Jewish Living: The Passover Seder.

As usual, since living here in the Galut, we hosted two seders (sedarim) at our home. What was a bit unusual was that we had pretty much the same people here both nights. In past years, we have been asked to invite various Jewish strays (in or around town at the right time, far from home) and/or have invited people we knew to join us for at least one night. The second night is usually a smaller group and often just our immediate family. This year, we had the same two families join us both nights, with a few extra people on the first night only.

We had to scramble a bit to make the second night different yet enjoyable. I did some online searching and came away with bunches of ideas, but only two that we tried to implement.

First of all, we decided to scramble the seder. Seder means "order" and there is a list of 15 steps that are generally agreed upon (as you can see, the meal is #11).

1. Kiddush & first cup of wine
2. Urchatz - wash hands w/o blessing
3. Karpas - eat green vegetable
4. Yahatz - break middle matzoh
5. Maggid - The telling of the Exodus story
6. Rachatz -- wash hands w/blessing
7. Motzi -- blessing over bread/the meal
8. Matzah -- blessing for eating matah
9. Maror -- eat bitter herb
10. Korech -- Hillel sandwich
11. Shulchan Orech -- the meal
12. Tzafun -- Afikomen, end of the meal
13. Barech -- Birkat Hamazon
14. Hallel -- songs of praise
15. Nirtzah - conclusion of seder

The step that generally takes the longest for religious Jews is #5, or Maggid, the telling of the story of the Exodus -- along with a lot of digressions. So in addition to treating each of the 15 steps as individual pieces of the seder, I also broke down the Maggid portion into a bunch of individual pieces. Here's the list I had:

Kadesh-Urchatz (mnemonic listing the steps of the seder)
Kiddush & first cup of wine
Urchatz - wash hands w/o blessing
Karpas - eat green vegetable
Yahatz - break middle matzoh
Maggid - Ha Lachma Anya
Maggid - Mah Nishtana
Maggid - Avadim Hayinu
Maggid -- Rabbis talking until dawn
Maggid - Four children
Maggid - How Jacob went to Egypt
Maggid -- Vehi She'amda
Maggid -- Torah and midrash
Maggid -- Wonders and signs
Maggid -- Ten plagues
Maggid -- Rabinnical math
Maggid - Dayenu
Maggid -- Pesach, Matzah, Maror
Maggid -- L'fichach and Hallelujah
Maggid -- Second cup
Rachatz -- wash hands w/blessing
Motzi, Matzah -- blessings and eat matzah
Maror -- eat bitter herb
Korech -- Hillel sandwich

Shulchan Orech

Tzafun -- Afikomen, the end of the meal
Barech -- Birkat Hamazon, blessings after the meal
Third cup of wine
Fill fourth cup and welcome Elijah the prophet
Hallel, songs of praise
Fourth cup of wine
Nirtzah - conclusion of seder
Songs - L'shanah Haba'ah B'Yerushalayim
Songs - dir Hu
Songs - Echad Mi Yodea
Songs - Chad Gadya

I printed out the list and cut it up into individual segments. I decided to leave Shulchan Orech -- the festive meal -- in its usual place, so I put the slips from before the meal in one cup and the slips for after the meal in a second cup. I also made a chart with ALL the pieces so that we could fill things in as we pulled them out and completed them.

There were a few glitches, and we refined things a bit in a discussion after the fact so that, if we ever do this again, the "big" kiddush will come before the first cup of wine and certain blessings will be said in an appropriate order. But all in all, the scrambled seder was a big success. We had lots of conversation and discussion. Encountering familiar things in a different order helped me, at least, to think about them in a new way.

The second idea I had gleaned from my online searches was really for the kids in attendance -- something for them to do if they needed a break from the seder. I found kosher-for-Passover sugar cubes and set them up on a table in a separate room so that the kids could build pyramids. They destroyed their Great Pyramid before I could get a picture, but here are some of their other efforts. First, the Great Sphinx:

The Sphinx and some pyramids:

A cat (they were sacred in Egypt, after all):

A few sugar cubes got eaten before the evening ended, but everyone had a great time building things. Even a few adults, who shall remain nameless, got into the act.

Pesach preparations -- craziness at the end

The last few days before the start of Pesach are probably the busiest in our annual round. As I've mentioned before, we do not change over our kitchen or do any Pesach cooking until the very last minute. This year, the first seder was on a Monday night. We spent pretty much all day on Sunday cleaning the house, especially the kitchen. Sunday night we did the b'dikat chametz, the search for chametz, and on Monday morning we ate our donuts and burned our leftover chametz.

Also on Sunday we changed over to Pesach mode, which means we finished putting all of our regular dishes and utensils into temporary storage in the garage, brought in all of our Pesach stuff, rinsed or washed all the Pesach dishes and utensils, put the Pesach stuff into our cabinets (which had been lined -- we use paper towels, for ease of use and disposal afterwards), covered the counters, kashered the oven and other appliances as well as the kitchen sink, and .... oh, yeah, moved the remainder of the chametz-dik foods out of the house.

With everyone home, plus a non-Jewish friend who came over to help, multiple tasks were going on at the same time. The pantry shelves were lined with paper towels and we moved some of our Pesach purchases onto the shelves:

At the same time, we were cleaning the kitchen thoroughly and packing up any dishes, utensils, kitchen linens, pots and pans, storage containers, etc., etc., etc., and so and and so forth that were still lying about. And someone else was dusting and vacuuming and mopping and doing some general cleaning.

The refrigerator shelves had to be cleared off (still some chametz there), washed, rinsed with boiling water, and replaced. One of the reasons that we bought a refrigerator with glass shelves is that they are easy to kasher for Pesach -- no need to line them, as some do with wire shelves.

 Uh-oh. Still some bread and soda and other stuff to get rid of. Fortunately, we own a second refrigerator, which is very handy at this time of year. We clean it and line the shelves, then store perishable Pesach supplies there until we switch over the kitchen. Once the main fridge is ready for Pesach, we use a shelf or two in the second refrigerator to store any perishable foods that we will use again after Pesach (e.g., our Brita pitchers, open juice or margarine).

Cleaning the refrigerator is always  fun because, no matter what we think, there is always a collection of crumbs at the bottom. I have no idea how they get there -- it's not like we leave loose baked goods in the fridge. But whatever.

All clean and ready to go:

I always love seeing my refrigerator like this, right at the beginning of Pesach. Once the cooking starts, this refrigerator will never be this empty again -- until next year.

The refrigerator freezer compartment also needs some special cleaning, even though everything is cold cold cold. Ice cream and leftover ice cream pie need to be consumed and whatever spilled on the bottom of the freezer has to be cleaned up. (Funny thing about that piece of ice cream pie. We forgot to eat it and then found it in the freezer a few hours before the first seder, past the time at which our sale of chametz had taken effect. It was "dust of the earth" and I had to throw it away, even though I felt a few pangs of regret.)

We also had to cover the kitchen counters. We generally use Contact paper. Sometimes we just tape the Contact paper down, but other years (including this one), we peel off the backing and apply the Contact paper directly to the counter surfaces.

Because we have at least one big meal each year during Pesach that includes meat, we have more meat dishes, pot and pans, and utensils for Pesach than we do for daily use. This largesse takes up more room, therefore we labeled the cabinets and drawers in order to lessen confusion.

As for the stove and oven, dishwasher, microwave, and sinks -- opinions on how to kasher these items vary. This is the sort of thing you should consult your local halachic authority (e.g., rabbi) about.

Once everything was completed -- whew! -- we could start preparing food for our sedarim.

Pesach countdown -- minus 7 days ?

Unfortunately, the last few days before Pesach are always a little .... busy. Especially the last two days, which -- in my family -- are spent changing the kitchen from regular usage to Pesach usage and then preparing for the seder (or sedarim). Pesach is further complicated by the fact that it lasts for 8 days, but 4 or 5 of those days are either chag (holiday) or Shabbat, during which some Jews refrain from various types of work, including going online and updating blogs.

What with one thing and another, I'm just going to have to backtrack to fill in the blanks. I am actually going to break down the remainder of the Pesach stuff into 3 parts and publish each on a separate day. That's just to give myself a little breathing space.

1 -- Pesach preparation, the final stages.

2 -- The sedarim we hosted this year.

3 -- Returning to normal after Pesach.

After all that, it will be time to think about the next thing on the Jewish calendar -- counting the Omer.