4 Drink Minimum

At sundownish tonight, I will be a guest at Seder - the communal meal held at the beginning of Passover, the week-long holiday commemorating the Hebrews flight from Pharaoh and Egypt.

Like Easter, this celebration is a movable feast, occurring on the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Although the day might change, the meal is static – seder as a word means order and the menu is locked in place, each food an allegory. A bitter herb, usually horseradish, signifies the bitterness of slavery, a bone – generally lamb represents the sacrifice at the start of Exodus; similarly, a betza - a roasted egg symbolizes an offering. There is sweet herb, parsley, to remind people of the sweetness of life, a bowl of saltwater reminds guests oftears, matzo – unleavened bread – there was no time to let the bread rise, haroset – a mixture of apples, honey, almonds and wine represents the mortar the slaves used to bind bricks and four glasses of wine.

The last Seder I attended was an ecumenical affair in a college town, the organizers tried so hard to make it something for everyone, it ended up being nothing to anyone. The event was memorable only for its earnest attempts to rewrite 1000s of years of tradition, ritual and history for early 1990s sensibilities. Before that, my previous Seder, where a rural Catholic boy gets invited to a Jewish girlfriend’s home for a holiday that little was known of beyond what Charlton Heston had conveyed in the 10 Commandments, was nerve racking: The meal was long, if I remember properly, it took up at least half of Passover – food was on the table not to be enjoyed but because this is the way it had always been done. There was no conversation, only arguments, long standing family grudges being played out against cultural ritual and sweet syrupy Manishevitz being guzzled to blunt the tension. It was, according to most of my Jewish friends/girlfriends, a pretty accurate experience of Seder.

Tonight, I am optimistic. Not only because my hosts are roughly my cohort - skipping the generations that did things because they had to be done that way, instead embracing holidays and customs with a respectful sense of discovery and intrpreting rituals for themselves. Nor is it because the hosts are on the clock, promising to get people home by 10, an IronSeder of sorts. It is because the food sounds good, NPR recently posted a story about food that attempts to be both good and relevant and I think I am in for a similar approach to the meal tonight - I have heard talk menu and ingredients. And while little can be done about haroset, you can only do so much with a food created to mimic the qualities of ancient cement, but as for the wine, it will be kosher and it will have a cork.