I’ve been called the Pesach Grinch, but I prefer to think of myself as the Pesach Voice of Reason.
Yes, most of my complaints seem to be about the endless rounds of matzah and cheese, the offensively expensive food products that magically triple in price once they have that special hechsher in place and my cereal and pasta cravings but, really, my issue with Pesach runs deeper.
Think of the knots we tie ourselves in getting ready for Pesach. By the end of the eight days, how often have you actually thought about the slaves escaping from Egypt?
Weeks of preparation: shopping, cleaning, cordoning off areas of the house that no one can step in once the cleaning has happened, swapping out cutlery and crockery (and discovering you still don’t have enough saucepans). Drawing up menus for the seder. Boiling endless eggs. Ordering shank bones from the butcher. More cleaning.
Hands up if while sweeping the crumbs out of your cereal cupboard you thought of an Egyptian Jew daubing his house with the blood of a lamb? I thought not.
And this is my real issue with Pesach. I have no problem with the seders. In fact the seders are the truest part of this festival. We remember Purim because we hear the Megillah being read. We remember Rosh Hashanah because of the shofar blasts. We remember Yom Kippur because we fast. These — time-limited —experiences make us focus on the chag and the significance of what those days represent.
The seder does this for Pesach and does it very well. But we are not slaves escaping from Egypt — and so the impositions placed on us (and I would argue that largely these are impositions we place upon ourselves) only serve to distract from the real story and significance of Pesach.
As the joke goes, much of Jewish history is based around the narrative: they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat! So: the Egyptians tried to kill us, we survived to tell the story and have a seder, let’s eat some matzah in commemoration of that loaf that didn’t have time to rise before being packed up and taken to freedom.
As I embarked upon my annual list of complaints about the upcoming festival I realised that I’m not alone. One colleague used the term ‘competitive cleaning’.
One friend admitted that even the significance of the seder passed her by, so distracted was she by all the organisation involved. I know of one man who gets so stressed at the thought of having to lead the seder every year he implores his wife to stop inviting people over.
Do we really need eight days which essentially boil down to: they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat something, anything that doesn’t include chametz? I bet you’ll agree that pyramids and the Red Sea get forgotten as soon as the chametz-hunger sets in around day four.
And no one is thinking about what the Egyptian Jews ate as their first meal after the matzah ran out, especially not when the pizza lands on the table about 30 minutes after sundown on the final day of Pesach.
