Category: Jewish Holidays

Note to Self in the Lead-Up to Pesach

Merri Ukraincik

Now that Purim has come and gone, this is a loving reminder to myself and to everyone who celebrates Pesach:

Passover preparations — in all their time-consuming, expensive, and exhausting forms — are not a competitive sport. No matter when each of us gets the process underway, we all win by getting to eat the same matzah, whether that’s the prize you had in mind or not.

A tablescape is not d’oraysa. You can make the same menu your bubbe made 80 years ago or that you prepared last year. Don’t feel pressure to try fancy new recipes if you aren’t up to it or it just isn’t your jam. A one-course meal is fine; so is takeout. We’re all stuffed after korech anyway. Grapes make a refreshing dessert. Do the best you can and be kind to yourself.

If you feel the countdowns to Pesach are the devil, unsubscribe, unfollow, delete, don’t look.

Chametz, not dust, reminds us of the spiritual depths to which we sank in Egypt as a people in bondage. Pharoah enslaved our bodies, but the undoing of our souls was of our own making. Until we sweep away the leavening within ourselves, we remain in chains. More important to focus on that, and on prayers for peace and healing for those who have been uprooted this season, than on reorganizing the linen closet. Spring cleaning can come in July. Or never.

There is plenty to do, but it will get done. Somehow, it always does. Our homes will be clean, the shopping bags piled up in the living room, the soup bubbling on the foil-covered burner, the maror ground in time for seder. This will all come to be whenever we decide to turn over our kitchens, however much we complain about it, whether we have the ability to fill the freezer with briskets and mandelbread weeks ahead of time or if we pull ours out of the oven hours, or minutes, before candle-lighting.

Let’s not lose sight of our wellbeing, mental and physical, in the process, or sweep the opportunity for personal and communal renewal out the door with the crumbs we will inevitably discover behind the couch.

Passover is a wonderful, 8-day (or 7) holiday of freedom. This year, let’s not become enslaved to our preparations.

Love,

Merri

A Little Reflection on Heroes

Merri Ukraincik

There are three women I consider the heroes of my lifetime so far.

The first was my grandmother, who from the very beginning, planted the seeds of grit deep down in my spine, who always said to keep my chest out to project confidence even if I didn’t feel self-assured, and to wear lipstick every time I left the house. She taught me to smile even when it’s hard, that I’d catch more flies with honey, that I would never be too old to learn new tricks, and that it’s good to know how to make things with my hands.

Then came Wonder Woman, played by Lynda Carter on our television one night a week. She showed me that costumed or not, each of us possesses unique strength – that it’s up to us to know this is true, that we should never wait for someone else to say so, and that we should use it to do our part to save the world. Our lives may be ordinary, may never be the basis for a movie, but we all have stories worth telling and we are all worthy of surrounding ourselves with people who will love us enough to listen and hold us dear, no matter how the plot twists and turns.

Then came RBG, who despite her short stature, struck me as the tallest person in the room, who had poise and always knew the right thing to say, who fought and won so many battles for women, precious things we now take for granted – which we should not, not now, not ever, not anywhere, for so many reasons, mostly so we’ll never let them slip through our hands. But she also stood up for others struggling to climb the ladder of equality, sharing her strength and conviction with generosity, knowing she had enough of it to go around.

So last night, I crocheted a collar in Ruth’s memory, put on lipstick for the first time in eons (no one sees it behind the mask, so why bother?) to honor my grandmother’s, and wore a cuff to muster some of Wonder Woman’s strength.

This Shabbos, I pray we all find the hero inside ourselves, that we will use our individual powers to make choices for the greater good, that our voices will take flight, reaching G-d’s ear, and that He will grant us the light to see and the wherewithal to patch up all the places where our world is broken.

Gut Shabbos! Shabbat Shalom!

❤ Merri

  • I made the collar by adapting a pattern by Kristen Stein/ModernLaceCrochet for use with a thicker weight wool.

Getting Used to a New Kind of Silence

Getting Used to a New Kind of Silence

Merri Ukraincik

It’s been a while since I’ve written here. But the pandemic lockdown has rendered my sense of passing time wonky at best. It is hard for me to believe it’s already Labor Day weekend, and that Rosh Hashana is nearly here. I could’ve sworn it was still March and that I’d just sent out a blog post about Pesach.

Over the past several months, I have been thinking a lot about changes I want to make, though I haven’t made most of them. I haven’t felt any pressure to do so, which is good. Still, there are rooms I daydream about reconfiguring, closets I hope to declutter, and projects I want to undertake, among them a face lift for my website and a new format for my conversations with you.

For now, though, my focus is elsewhere, for I awoke to a loud, sudden quiet in our house this morning.

It’s not the quiet I recognize, the one that would echo after our boys, then small, had left for school. Nor is it the tired, afternoon silence they shattered when they’d come back home, arriving like pots and pans falling out of a cabinet onto the kitchen floor. Hungry. Loud. Edgy. Bumping into corners. Clomping down the stairs.

Delighted to see them, I still longed for the hush that would settle over the house again only at bedtime, when the stars would come out and we would read their favorite stories, then read them once or twice more. I would ask the angels to watch over them during the night, and I’d sing to them, to my boys, knowing I was still the center of their world.

This silence, the one I hear now as I begin to prepare for our first Shabbos as empty nesters, is unrecognizable. It’s like a new sweater I’m trying to break in, stretching the wool and folding up the cuffs on the sleeves so it fits just right, like an arm around my shoulders.

I have a flash of memory of my young sons shrieking with delight at the sea, gathering rocks and crabshells and jumping through waves, darting in and out of the water until they have exhausted themselves, falling fast asleep before our minivan reaches the highway. My heart has frozen that moment in time, just as I can still hear the sound of their youthful breathing in my head as I walk through their rooms now to straighten up, murmuring my prayers and eyeing their vacated beds with a pang in my chest, knowing this emptiness around me is the way things are meant to be.

We love them, care for them, trust in the strength of our relationship with them, praying that it will always hold, and then we let them go. It’s the natural order of things, and like breath itself, it is a gift of gifts to know they have grown, that they are men in the world, and that I am no longer the center of their corner if it.

And yet, this is a silence that will take some getting used to.

I look forward to sharing the ways I hope to fill it in the months to come.

Gut Shabbos! Shabbat Shalom!

❤ Merri

A Horseradish Reversal

A Horseradish Reversal

Merri Ukraincik

Every year, I take the head from the horseradish root we use at the seder and plant it deep in the ground. But inevitably, just as the new greens emerge the following spring, one of the garden-eating wild things in our yard will devour the entire plant, root and all, leaving us with nothing.

By now, our recent sedarim feel as ancient as our slavery in Egypt and we no longer require fresh horseradish. Like so much else that’s gotten lost in our COVID-induced isolation, I’d forgotten about the root I planted right after last Pesach until this morning, when I noticed these bursts of green in the garden.

Shocked that they’d not been eaten (perhaps the hose has served as a fortress), I brushed away some of the dirt to check on the roots. They have to stay a little longer in the dark underground to fill out, to be ready for picking. But still, there they were in all their hideous, knobby-topped glory, and I smiled a smile I haven’t mustered in weeks.

The leaves are another story. Unbothered by rabbits and deer, they stand, when fully grown, like a proud gathering of fans, rippled at the edges and ribbed in the center. A verdant crown atop such an ugly, biting vegetable is a lesson unto itself — about silver linings and finding good and not allowing bitterness to consume us. To have played the tiniest role in bringing something forth from the earth, a bit of new life, gives me the taste of something hopeful, and that’s no small thing right now.

Who knows what this week will bring, our dishes packed away and Pesach behind us? Perhaps the animals will leave the plants alone, finding something sweeter to nosh on, and I will be able to offer friends fresh horseradish root with which to prepare an array of quarantine condiments. But mostly it’s the hope I’m clinging to. I’ll lop off the tops and stick them back in the ground.

Wishing the whole wide world a peaceful day of rest, and a Shabbos filled with hope.

Gut Shabbos! Shabbat Shalom!

Keeping Up With Hand Cream

Keeping Up With Hand Cream

Merri Ukraincik

I bought this at Trader Joe’s back in January. I was away for a few days and realized I’d forgotten to bring hand cream. And hand cream, I know from my grandmother, is something we should never be without.

Her beauty regimen was simple, selected from drugstore stock. She assured me you didn’t need fancy-fancy, but you had to be consistent in applying your chosen unguents to keep yourself youthful. As a little girl, I’d watch her with wild-eyed fascination as she went through these paces. She never left the house without putting on lipstick. Before bed, she’d scoop Pond’s from the jar to remove her makeup, and once a week, she had her wig set at the beauty parlor across the road. I hung on her every ritual. But the only wisdom that really stuck was the one about creaming your hands. She’d say that a woman could moisturize her face all she wants, but her hands would give her age away if she didn’t tend to them, too.

Washing so frequently now, I’m finding that hand cream just isn’t cutting it. Levi says my palms, once soft, feel like sandpaper. My knuckles are scrubbed red and raw. My hands are aging before my eyes, as much as all of this is taking its toll on my soul.

But last night, after I’d done the dishes and washed down the kitchen, I picked up this tube of hand cream and noticed the tagline for the first time. “The perfect precursor to your next meeting!” Indeed, whenever that might be, I wondered, allowing myself a full-bodied guffaw.

Lately, especially in moments when fear of this dark shadow that hangs over all of us becomes sharp as a knife in my gut, I miss my grandmother especially. I conjure up her scents for comfort. Sometimes it’s her violet talc and her perfume. At others, especially on the eve of Pesach, it’s frying onions and Sanka. I realize that even if she were alive, I would not be able to visit her or feel her kiss on my cheek. The thought of it pains me because I know so many of us are now separated from those we love. So I will persist, creaming my hands as a way to cling to what I can of what life was like before.

We have arrived to Shabbos Hagadol, the great Shabbos that comes before Pesach, which for us is the third Shabbos our shul is shuttered. May we somehow find grace in this ongoing silence apart from our community, and may G-d hear our prayers to bring this plague to an end.

Gut Shabbos!  Shabbat Shalom!

Sending love to all of you.

Merri

Selfie with Potato Starch

Selfie with Potato Starch

Merri Ukraincik

When a store clerk noticed me posing for this shot in our local Stop & Shop earlier this week, he smiled and asked, “Does it scare you?”

I laughed and said that it did not, though in the past, it would’ve turned my anxiety dial to the max. But I’ve lived enough life and faced enough genuine challenges over the past few years to know that making Pesach is small potatoes – or potato starch, if you will.

“Already? So soon?” I once asked the Kedem man when I spotted him stocking the shelves a full month before Purim.

“I have 200 stores to finish. I’ve got to start somewhere,” he said with a shrug.

We, too, have a starting point, a moment when we’ll say, “Okay. Breathe. It’s time.” But we shouldn’t look over our shoulders, watching to see where everyone else is holding or what they are up to on their prep. Rather, set your own clock. Find your own pace. Shut out the noise, the murmurs of folks reporting how much they’ve already done. Be delighted for them. Truly. But remember this isn’t the Olympics. There’s no gold medal for First to Clean Out the Pantry of Chametz or silver for Filling the Freezer with Knaidlach and Meatballs.

You’ve done this before. You’ll do it again. Have faith in yourself.

When we left Egypt, following Moshe into the uncertainty of the desert, we all did so on the same night. In our day, we, too, will all sit down to the first seder on the same evening — regardless of when we first got the shopping and cleaning underway.

So don’t let those paper-lined shelves and Kosher for Passover signs unnerve you. Enjoy Purim, and take a tongue-in-cheek Selfie with Potato Starch instead.