Tag: Passover

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

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.

A Sound Investment

Merri Ukraincik

eggs

A Portrait of Pesach in 20 Egg Cartons

A Sound Investment

I was at a wedding the other day when the conversation veered, not surprisingly, towards Pesach. I admitted how much I enjoy the holiday, while another woman in the community kindly disagreed. She confessed she wished it were over already and made me laugh with her description of the scene in her home. It’s so demanding, she said. What’s more, I’m a short-order cook for the whole eight days.

While I concur with her on both points, neither makes me love Pesach any less. The discussion did, however, leave me wondering why I harbor such affection for a holiday that tries the bodies and souls of those of us making it. And it’s only now, as I write from the trenches of preparation more than a week later, that I can finally articulate an answer.

To me, Pesach is magical. It has been since I was a little girl sitting by my grandfather’s side, my legs swinging beneath the seder table, and it’s a feeling that has continued to grow over time. Why? Because the holiday allows us to do something we can’t do at any other point during the year – to time travel.

Through both our storytelling and our other observances, we go back to where we came from, gleaning spiritual wisdom from our collective memory as a Jewish people, reliving the tears of our slavery, and exulting in our redemption. The holiday demands that we live in the present, too, making physical changes to our daily norms – turning our homes upside down to shake out the chametz and altering how we eat. And lastly, it leads us, with the hagada as our guide, to holy places where we can question our role in the world and define what matters to us, letting the answers determine where we go next.

This perspective inspires me to pin a lot of hope on this holiday. What we create during Pesach will, I believe, help shape how my sons think and feel about their childhood and Jewish tradition. I want them to remember with warmth and nostalgia that there was good in all that hard work, that I wasn’t just sleep-deprived and cranky the entire week before we tasted the first bite of matzah – even though I will be sleep-deprived and the tiniest bit cranky – and that there was a lot of love around our seder table.

So I plod along, talking to God as I cleanse our home of chametz and kasher the kitchen, grate the horseradish and make the boys’ favorite Pesach delicacies. The next few days of preparation will demand a lot of me, as will the holiday itself. I’ll be exhausted, to be sure. But the long-term returns, I pray, will be worth it, and that seems like reason enough.

Wishing everyone a meaningful Pesach.

Merri

P.S. To read more of more my thoughts about Pesach, check out my latest column in the Jewish Week and the NJJN,  Honored Guests at the Seder Table.