I was on FaceTime with my luminous niece and nephew last week, when I realised Pesach was seven days away and I didn’t have a Seder.
Tel Aviv is a sociable city and since making Aliyah 18 months ago, I’ve been lucky enough to bond with people at yoga, in coffee shops, at ulpan, in bars – even while apartment hunting and sub-letting in Tel Aviv. But when it comes to inviting myself into other people’s family homes, well, the British part of my brain usurps the new Israeli bit. It feels undignified and desperate to ask for a seat at someone else’s Seder table. So at first I sat back, moped and waited for a Passover miracle to happen.
My dear friend Richard, himself a fellow oleh chadash, was the first to pick up on my subliminally needy vibes.
“Did you find a Seder?” he texted. “Umm, not yet,” I replied. “Well you have an open invitation to Yerucham,” he said. “But you’d have to stay for three days.”
Yerucham is south, deep into the Negev. It was extremely kind of him to ask, but I didn’t want to risk overstaying my welcome. And thanks to Israel’s lack of public transport on Shabbat and chagim, if you venture out of town, you have to stay there till the buses start again on Monday morning. I needed a more realistic option.
By Tuesday evening I was starting to panic.
“I’m Elijah,” I texted to my friend Efrat, who’s recently swapped Israel for Slovakia.
“Except no doors or cups of wine are open to me - I am all alone at Seder night.”
“You are not Elijah!,” she replied. “This makes me sad.”
For some mis-placed reason, I screen grabbed our conversation and shared it as an Instastory before going to sleep. I thought it was tragically funny.
When I woke-up, everything had changed. I’d gone from a Sederless olah chadasha, to a person with six invitations. Firstly, Efrat’s Mother had called me from Beer Sheva. I was invited to join her for an Iraqi Seder, even with Efrat in absentia, and I only needed to stay one night because I could catch a sherut back to Tel Aviv on Shabbat (apparently). Then Yael messaged, inviting me to join her family in Hod HaSharon for a Vegan seder, labelled as such because “it’s a freedom holiday, so we must celebrate freedom for animals too.”
Kerem, the friendly receptionist at my yoga studio, asked me to join her family in Rechovot (it would also be Vegan - do you see a trend emerging?). Then my recently married British friend Sarah invited me to her husband’s family for a Yemenite seder. A stranger in a Tel Aviv community group invited me to her Seder on Dizengoff, and just now an actor I recently worked with said I could join his family for a traditionally Ashkenazi meaty Seder near Netanya.
The whole drama neatly sums up the joy and the pain of living in Israel as a new citizen. One minute you have nothing – the next minute, you have far more than you could ever need. One day you’re facing emotional catastrophe and lamenting the price of flights back to the UK; the next day you’re Googling vegan kosher for passover salad recipes and laughing at the hilarity of it all.
It turns out there’s family everywhere here, even if none of them are actual relatives I’ve known since birth. Just in the nick of time, the Israelis – and Israel – have a miraculous way of making me feel at home.
Wherever you’ll be celebrating Pesach, I wish you a chag sameach!
