The 10 Non-Plagues – Things to be Thankful for on Passover
Three things have all congregated together for a grand celebration. The birthdays of my son and my friend and Passover, the Festival of the Plagues. While the food cannot compare with the fare of its cousin Easter, and we have a ghost instead of a bunny, I still like Passover. We all join together at the dinner table engaged in song, prayer, and rituals for what lasts approximately three hours. And during that time, we also nibble on matzoh, charoset, hard boiled eggs, and dip our finger into what we generously label as wine. My grandma used to make matzoh muffins. Before she died, the recipe was handed down to me. Now, I suffer through the slings and arrows of outrageous insults to my muffins. My brother calls them hockey pucks. The nieces and nephews have threatened to throw them at neighborhood windows. But my sisters and I have fond memories of grandma as we slather butter and jam on the pucks and shove them into our mouths. This year, however, with some tweaking, we are celebrating the Festival of Plagues during the Plague with all of the uncanny parallels. Tonight, it will just be Ralph and me in our kitchen eating whatever meal I can conjure up from the contents of our pantry while we Zoom conference with the rest of the family. Passover with the darkness of lice, blood, and death is also a time of rebirth. For that reason, I am focusing on the positive. Instead of recounting the 10 plagues, I will focus on things I am thankful for, like a springtime Thanksgiving: I won’t feel guilty that my mother worked far too hard to prepare for the holiday. I won’t worry that the brisket mom served came from her freezer and was dated 2007. Everybody can join in regardless of location so my aunts in Michigan, my daughter in Upstate New York, friends in Virginia, and anyone else who wants to say prayers can join in. No “I got caught in traffic” excuses for arriving late. We can sneak whatever we want into the wine goblets. No (or only minimal) risk of running out of “the good stuff.” Zoom has a “touch up my appearance” feature to make me look younger. Zoom has a feature that allows the participants to choose a virtual background which has saved me from cleaning the kitchen. I am thankful that the Governor of New York wished everyone a Happy Passover in his morning briefing to alert me of the holiday since all the days have flowed together. I can eat all of the matzoh muffins myself! We are experiencing a modern day plague that makes it hard to feel like celebrating but it is a reminder of the importance of family, home, and tradition. And, if everyone agrees to wear a face covering and pulls up the Egyptian desert for their virtual background, we could pretend that we were trekking there with Moses when he picked up the tablets. You can’t do that every Passover!
