ritual
So it's Passover now. I am on record-- maybe not internet record, actually, somehow, but if you know me you've heard me complain about this-- as Not Liking Passover. It's just not my holiday! Seders take foreverrrrr, the food's not very good, and then for a week you're subject to a bunch of semi-nonsensical dietary restrictions that a) nobody agrees on the exact rules of, so I always feel like I'm doing something wrong but also b) make me feel like I'm "giving up carbs for Lent" which is to say, disguising an eating disorder in a thin religious wrapping.
I guess it just always feels like suffering we're imposing on ourselves from the outside, as opposed to asking ourselves to understand an internal experience. Like, okay, for one week I bought matzah at the grocery store instead of bread. It has nothing to do with the actualities of deprivation or affliction.
And you know what? Not much in my life right now has to do with deprivation or affliction, not really. Sometimes I have to cook an unfamiliar meal instead of the one I always make because I don't have something-- canned tomatoes, cumin, dry pasta-- but I have more than enough food. I have safe, quiet hills to walk in and friends who agree to do silly things with me-- watch a movie or drink some sake or just shoot the shit-- on our shared screens so that we all stay grounded in each others' lives. I have so, so much. Why would I ever pretend to have less than I do?
That's the thing I'm feeling hardest this year. I have no desire to add to my affliction, or anyone else's. I don't want to use my flour for matzah when I can make loaves of soft bread.
On the second night I Zoomed with my parents and my brother and some close family friends. We did an improvised seder, heavy on poetry and light on ritual. One of the things we did keep, though, was the part where you call out the plagues that were brought down on the Egyptians. As you recite-- dam, tzfardeyah, kinim, arov, dever, sh'chin, barad, arbeh, chosech, makat bechorot-- you dip a finger in your wineglass and dot a drop of wine onto your plate for each one. Tradition has it that you don't even lick the finger when you're done. This is the moment when we let go of our focus on our own suffering and remember that others died as a part of our liberation.
One of the people on the call was a doctor-- a respiratory specialist who'd spent the morning teaching residents how to intubate patients. I've known her since she was six or seven. Her work and the work of her colleagues is what makes it possible for me to sit home and think and read and work and bake in this strange new world. I dipped the wine out of my cup-- okay, it was bourbon, what do you want from me-- and thought of the doctors and janitors and grocery store workers and delivery people who experiencing bitterness, who are experiencing loss. That part of the holiday still felt resonant to me, and important. To be asked to acknowledge the stories and the suffering that surround our own; to remember that suffering anywhere is suffering everywhere. That we don't need to make it our own to feel it as pain.
Related: Rebecca Solnit wrote a piece for the Guardian about the current situation, and I loved this paragraph:
I guess it just always feels like suffering we're imposing on ourselves from the outside, as opposed to asking ourselves to understand an internal experience. Like, okay, for one week I bought matzah at the grocery store instead of bread. It has nothing to do with the actualities of deprivation or affliction.
And you know what? Not much in my life right now has to do with deprivation or affliction, not really. Sometimes I have to cook an unfamiliar meal instead of the one I always make because I don't have something-- canned tomatoes, cumin, dry pasta-- but I have more than enough food. I have safe, quiet hills to walk in and friends who agree to do silly things with me-- watch a movie or drink some sake or just shoot the shit-- on our shared screens so that we all stay grounded in each others' lives. I have so, so much. Why would I ever pretend to have less than I do?
That's the thing I'm feeling hardest this year. I have no desire to add to my affliction, or anyone else's. I don't want to use my flour for matzah when I can make loaves of soft bread.
On the second night I Zoomed with my parents and my brother and some close family friends. We did an improvised seder, heavy on poetry and light on ritual. One of the things we did keep, though, was the part where you call out the plagues that were brought down on the Egyptians. As you recite-- dam, tzfardeyah, kinim, arov, dever, sh'chin, barad, arbeh, chosech, makat bechorot-- you dip a finger in your wineglass and dot a drop of wine onto your plate for each one. Tradition has it that you don't even lick the finger when you're done. This is the moment when we let go of our focus on our own suffering and remember that others died as a part of our liberation.
One of the people on the call was a doctor-- a respiratory specialist who'd spent the morning teaching residents how to intubate patients. I've known her since she was six or seven. Her work and the work of her colleagues is what makes it possible for me to sit home and think and read and work and bake in this strange new world. I dipped the wine out of my cup-- okay, it was bourbon, what do you want from me-- and thought of the doctors and janitors and grocery store workers and delivery people who experiencing bitterness, who are experiencing loss. That part of the holiday still felt resonant to me, and important. To be asked to acknowledge the stories and the suffering that surround our own; to remember that suffering anywhere is suffering everywhere. That we don't need to make it our own to feel it as pain.
Related: Rebecca Solnit wrote a piece for the Guardian about the current situation, and I loved this paragraph:
The idea that everything is connected is an affront to conservatives who cherish a macho every-man-for-himself frontier fantasy. Climate change has been a huge insult to them – this science that says what comes out of our cars and chimneys shapes the fate of the world in the long run and affects crops, sea level, forest fires and so much more. If everything is connected, then the consequences of every choice and act and word have to be examined, which we see as love in action and they see as impingement upon absolute freedom, freedom being another word for absolutely no limits on the pursuit of self-interest.
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And now for some news from my small corner of the world:
This is tonight! Sign up for the Homebound newsletter for a link!
Then on Sunday, 4/26 at 4:00 PM PDT I'll be taking part in a YALLSTAYHOME virtual panel called Writing Empathy. Details and registration here!
Want to hear my voice right now? You can listen to me on fictitious.fox's podcast here, and watch me talk to Maris Kreizman on an episode of her show Sheltering here.
In my previous life I wrote about restaurants, one of the industries threatened by this pandemic and the government's woefully inept response to it. If you have money to spare, you can support laid-off workers here.
If you're in LA, you can also support some of the restaurants that are still open by buying both takeout and groceries from them. This searchable list of local spots has kept me in relatively hard-to-find goods like butter, flour and eggs (and out of the lines at Vons!) for several weeks now.
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