Rant #2,383: Doin' Our Thing

Yesterday, we had our Passover seder, and considering everything that we are up against now, I think it went pretty well.

My mother actually made her usual abundance of a Passover meal, so she passed us up what she had made that she and my father weren't going to eat from her part of the house, which is downstairs to our upstairs.

So we had various parts of a turkey, we had potato kugel, and we had gefilte fish, and yes, we had matzoh, and plenty of it.

It was just the three of us--my son, my wife and myself--and we had what we had upstairs and my parents had what we had downstairs.

In our seder, I led the festivities, and I told my wife and son about the events that led up to the Jews leaving Egypt, and we spoke about the 10 plagues that God put upon the Egyptians for their harsh treatment of our ancestors.

Of course, when you do that, you have to include the final plague, the one that really and truly demonstrated that God was on the Jews' side: the killing of the first born of Egyptian families, including that of the pharaoh. That is the one the got the pharaoh to truly let the Jews leave Egypt, signifying the true power of God.

And that part of the story can also we woven into what we are going through today, as the Jews quarantined themselves, put animal blood on their doors to signify and signal to God that they were Jews, and thus, were to be spared this final, terrible plague.

And when the Jews left Egypt taking whatever they could carry, including foodstuffs, they had to move quickly, and this led to bread not having enough time to rise, creating the cracker-like matzoh.

Everything kind of dovetails into the next thing when talking about Passover, and of course, we recited The Four Questions--led off by "Why Is This Night Different From Other Nights?"--first by my son in English, and then by me in Hebrew. I also read the answers to the questions in English.

This part of our meal went pretty quickly, and my son asked that tonight, during the second seder, that we talk more about the plagues, and I will take his suggestion, and do into each plague individually, not just centered on the last of the 10 plagues. It was a great suggestion from him, and I thanked him for it.

We ate our dinner, which was quite good, and later on, I hid the matzoh, he found it, and he got a prize, which will come sometime next week, as I ordered him a WWE Wrestlemania T-shirt.

Me, when I found the matzoh, I might have gotten some coins or maybe a dollar bill; we have to move into the present time with that, and petty cash, I guess, wouldn't cover it. More to the point, I wanted to get my son something--he has been on furlough for a few weeks with still presumably some time to come--and I wanted him to be upbeat, and I know this made him happy.

(There are also a few WWE wrestlers and personalities who in their private lives are Jews--Cain, Alexa Bliss, Goldberg, and Paul Heyman among a handful--and I hope they celebrated the holiday as best they could, just like we did.)

And then our first night of Passover was done, and having led the seder for the first time ever, it made me harken back to when I was a kid. We would have our seders at our two sets of grandparents homes, one in Brooklyn and the other in Queens. At my mother's parents home, we simply did the standard and short retelling of the Passover story, but my father's parents home, boy, was it different.

My orthodox paternal grandfather led the seder, aided by my uncle, who had at one time studied to be a rabbi. Those seders went on with the religious portion of over two hours, and my sister and I would study the reading of The Four Questions in the car as my father drove us and my mother to the seder at my grandparents' house in Flushing, Queens. My sister and I did not want to upset our grandfather by not reciting The Four Questions correctly, so we studied and studied, and we never got it wrong.

I also remembered that one time coming home from the seder, my sister and I were looking out the back window of my father's cab and somebody shot the car with a beebee, shattering the back window into a million pieces.

Whatever the case, I think this year's first seder of Passover went over pretty well, and it will be a memorable one in my life. We will do it again tonight, and I am sure it will go well once again.

To those who celebrate, I hope the joy that we had was what you had at your own seders.

And with Easter Sunday coming up around the bend this weekend, we are certainly in a period of hope, a period of renewal, and a period of redemption.

It simply affirms the fact that we will beat this thing, and beat it to a pulp. It will take some time, but we, as a civilization, will do it, and do it good.

And then, when that happens, we will go back to normal, and really be doin' our thing.