Passover in the Digital Age

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Many years ago I hosted my first Passover Seder and placed steaming hot dishes of food on the table as we sat down and opened the Haggadah.  First question, “why on this night did mom put dinner on the table and not let us eat?”  The food was far from hot when we finally answered all four questions and completed our retelling of the Passover story.

Although I will never be mistaken for a quintessential Jewish mom, I have learned a lot about hosting a Seder in the intervening years.  Perhaps my most important learning has been “make it relevant.”  To that end, we retell the Passover story as a group with one person starting the narrative and others chiming in with additional details or the occasional correction:

“Miriam hid in the bushes and then a Princess, -" 

“Actually the Pharaoh’s daughter.”  

“Right, the Pharaoh’s daughter, came down to the river and saw the baby in the rushes.”

2014 marked the year that we made technology relevant to the Seder.  Our household observes strict no-technology-at-the-dining-table rules.   However, this year we embraced technology to bring together family across borders and share in our Seder via Google+ Hangouts.  We set up a laptop at one end of the table, right beside Elijah’s cup actually, and those of us physically at the table crowded to the other end so we could all be on camera simultaneously.

The slight audio time-lag made the story retelling somewhat disjointed, but the pleasure of all sharing the Seder together more than compensated.  

My daughter is now mulling over designs to transport food digitally so we can all share in the same food.  However, even though we didn’t all serve ourselves from the same dishes, we certainly all shared a meal together.  

It's The Feeling Not the Food

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While the Israelites may have fled with unleavened bread to hasten their departure, finding Matzos these days requires significant preplanning. I would have thought that by now I’d know how much Matzo our household would consume during Passover and be prepared by buying it all in advance. But no, I remain a just-in-time shopper, and consequently we are down to our last morsel of Matzo with Passover not even half over. Scouring the shelves of two different supermarket chains brought no signs of unleavened bread beyond the bagger at the check out commenting that ‘the stock was looking pretty low yesterday so we’re probably all out by now.”

Oh well, if our menu doesn’t provide sufficient reminders of the Exodus, then perhaps I can recreate the feeling of the Exodus with my last minute preparations. While my mother-in-law is the consummate prepared hostess, my food planning is consistently last minute. So when I still hadn’t made the brisket the morning of Passover, even though my mother-in-law's recipe clearly recommends making it the night before in order to simplify dinner preparations, my walking partner suggested instead that I could recreate the mood of the Israelites grabbing what provisions they could as they headed out in haste. I mean really, were any of them writing up their shopping lists days in advance in order to allow their meat to rest overnight for optimum taste? This sounded like just the plan I needed to make my Passover dinner work.

You see, I have only hosted a handful of Passover dinners, and just as the first three Christmas trees my husband set up in the early years of our marriage crashed to the floor in the middle of the night, my Passover meals have been somewhat less than traditional. For instance, the first Passover I hosted, I drew upon the traditional Thanksgiving dinners I had grown up with, for in essence, Passover is both a remembrance and a giving of thanks. So I dutifully made every recipe listed in my Passover book, set the seder plate, and then, before calling everyone to the table, set the table with the steaming how dishes of brisket and kugel and beans—thankfully I at least knew enough to not make biscuits. Not only did the food all grow cold while we read through the Haggadah, but we could hardly hear one another over the growling of our stomachs as the aromas curled around our empty plates and our eyes drank in the feast set before us.

Several years later as I was shopping for Matzos, I found the end cap at the grocery stocked full with Manischewitz Matzos. Upon closer review, I noticed that every box had a large orange ‘unsalted’ banner plastered across the front. Was this what I was supposed to buy? Would everyone notice and wonder why I hadn’t tailed a Jewish shopper around the store to find the regular Matzos for those in the know? Confused, but not heading home without Matzos, I put a box in my cart. My husband found my confusion amusing, “They never have salt,” he told me, “must just be a new marketing tactic for health conscious consumers.”

So next year I’ll know not to put the serving dishes on the table when we sit down, that all matzos are unsalted and that I need to purchase all the matzos I’ll need well before Passover. I wonder what new lesson will come my way.