This Passover? Do whatever works for you.

The impossibility of 'making seder,' creating order when nothing feels right

It’s Saturday night, I seem to be done with my remote coverage of the calling-for-new-election protests all around the country and I’m staring at the pantry door, trying to determine if I have enough energy to get that piece of Passover cleaning done tonight before heading to bed and maybe the last couple of episodes of “Only You.”

Maybe. And maybe not. It’s not just because it’s 10:30 p.m. and I’d much rather watch something than clean something. It’s that feeling we’re all having of, how can we possibly celebrate Passover this year, the holiday of freedom, when 133 of us are not free? When we’re all caught in this impossible web of war and hostages, hungry and homeless Gazans, anti-Zionist sentiments and antisemitism, when we don’t feel that we really know what the path ahead looks like.

The more mundane parts of Passover are all the preparation that’s involved, the minutiae of taking out refrigerator shelves and drawers and seeing what’s behind them, taking off all the magnets on the fridge door and cleaning that too. I’ve been working our way through the freezer, identifying bags of frozen foods, using what we can, dumping what’s too old to eat.

There’s the pantry job, the one I’m putting off right now (although I did do two shelves), of taking everything out, dumping the half bags of old pasta or rice that have been lingering for months, wiping it all down, putting it back and making room for the Passover goods, the condiments and shredded coconut, the matzah flour and many bars of chocolate that Daniel bought.

It’s never fun to do this work, but it’s never felt quite as pointless as it does to me this year. We’re doing all this in order to have a kosher-for-Passover home, so that we can cook for the seder and the seven days of Passover, but what is that seder going to feel like? How will we recite all those words and passages about captivity and freedom?

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last week or so on hostage family coverage, as these families are trying to make sense of this holiday, this year. (That coverage, alongside reading and writing about three new cookbooks — because life goes on and cooking helps.)

I covered a press conference of grandchildren of hostages who spoke about how their hostage grandfathers are the leaders of their family seders, and they can’t quite figure out how to mark — not celebrate — it this year. No one’s ignoring the seder, but they are dreading that evening.

One of the grandchildren, an 18-year-old, said, “How can we have a seder,” referring to the meaning of the Hebrew word, ‘seder,’ or order, “when there’s no order in our world?”

I wrote about a grassroots project to place an empty chair at every seder, and the haggadah produced by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, with commentary by a mix of people, including Chief Rabbi David Lau, the singer Rita, Be’eri resident Haim Jelin and Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg, in the English language edition.

I interviewed my friends Jon and Rachel for a podcast that I also wrote up as an article, and among other things, we talked about the seder. Rachel, in her still-always humorous, matter-of-fact manner, said that she asked their team if there was a doctor who could put her in a temporary coma this Passover, so that she could wake up when it’s over. An idea that makes a lot of sense. And Jon said they had bumped into a well-known Jewish educator who simply proposed skipping the seder this year. Another idea that makes sense.

And as I returned home from my interview with them, to the task of cleaning out the freezer, I wondered, “Who is doing this for them? Who is doing this for all the hostage families who turn their kitchens over for Passover?”

Because when you’re fighting for your son/daughter/father/husband/wife/sister/brother/cousin, the last thing you’re thinking about is cleaning out the silverware drawer. If they needed help getting that done, I’d be more than ready to do so for them, and I’m imagining that every hostage family who has a kosher-for-Passover home has people taking care of those tasks.

As for me, as for any of us struggling with all of this right now, I’m thinking that cleaning — much of which I’ve left to the very last minute — sometimes has that benefit of making order, making ‘seder’ of things, as one says in Hebrew. You clear things out in order to make room again, to see what’s there, to start from scratch again.

That’s what I’ll do tomorrow. I’m going to try and broach the tasks of the pantry, the cupboards, the silverware drawers, in much the same way I do pretty much everything lately. I veer between the weight of what’s around us with the banality of regular life, from making dinner, doing laundry to thinning nectarine trees with Daniel and the boys or watching an episode of “Ted Lasso.”

So too with Passover prep; I can’t make sense or ‘seder’ of what’s happening, but I can control my kitchen, I can find some pleasure in preparing certain Pesach specialties and I can get the kitchen ready in order to do that.

I’ll be honest: Whereas most years I really get into my Pesach prep, taking the toothpick to those stubborn cracks in the fridge, dusting all the shelves, wiping down each and every surface, this year, I’m only thinking about the kitchen and just those parts that actually need to be ‘kashered’ in order to be used for the holiday. It took the disasters of this year — the losses and assaults and hostages and war and evacuees and reserve duty and displacement — for me to finally truly understand what Passover cleaning should mean.

And when my kitchen is ready for the next stage of Passover prep, I can make some gluten-free biscotti for Hersh’s sisters, and another batch for a friend who loves them. In between all that, I’ll record podcasts and write articles and veer between interviews with hostage families and the director of a newish TV show about Israelis in Berlin, because that’s what life is like right now.

There’s not much ‘seder’ or order to anything, so we find it or create it where we can. Maybe that’s the most we can hope for this Passover.

Wishing those who read and celebrate a meaningful holiday. Or, if that doesn’t work for you, a quick and seamless transition through the next eight days. Thanks as always for reading.