First Seder
We're having two good-sized seders here this year. Tonight we had, lets see if I can get to eleven people, Arlene, Anne, Charley, me, David, Rachael, Herb, Estelle, Judy, Joey. Nope, just ten. That is, respectively, nuclear family, Arlene's sister's son, his fiancee, my father, his significant other, Arlene's college and post-college roommate, and her son. Joey, as a college sophomore the youngest person present, was a startlingly good sport about reading the four questions in Hebrew. We used the so-called New Hagaddah, revised in 1942. It's living proof that you should never call anything “New” if it's likely to be used for more than five years.
Judy was really good at having extra things to say. When I went to a seder at Buzzy's house when I was in grad school, I learned that there's a real tradition of adding extra comments to the seder. It says as much in the hagaddah, in a paragraph that goes something like, “whoever expands on the story of the exodus is worthy of merit”, but a lot of households zoom through the seder, reading every word of the hagaddah as fast as possible but nothing else. Then there's the other extreme that Judy was talking about, saying she had xeroxed a God-free humanist hadaddah for the seder she was going to the next night. That's clearly going to have a lot of things that aren't in the traditional hagaddah, but it seems to us that it's missing a lot of the point; after all, this is a religious holiday. Oh, anyway, I like to have people add relevant commentary. Not silly songs that are parodies of the seder songs, or passover words to the tune of "Clementine", but relevant.
Rachael is teaching at a Jewish day school and was thinking of studying to be a cantor (butİitİsounds now more as though she's planning to get a graduate degree in special ed) so I tried to defer to her in the matter of tunes. She wisely declined to chant the kiddush -- wisely, because the New Hagaddah changed the words to the kiddush so any tunes you ever learned no longer scan, and you have to wing it. At least I'm expecting that.
David works for a company that loans money to businesses (mostly stores) in trouble, secured by inventory. It looked for a second as though there would be a little friction over that when my father asked, “What's the difference between that and factoring?” I remembered his talking about how his father's business had been OK until my grandpa “got mixed up with a factor.” Later I found out that there had been a fire at my grandpa's factory. At any rate, the moment passed without my dad chewing out David for being in that business. I believe my father said something like “lending money at usurious rates” and David, rather than taking offense, said, yes, it was fair to say that.
I had cooked a roast chicken with grated orange and lemon peel and ginger root rubbed over the top and a quartered orange and lemon inside, and Arlene made sweet and sour turkey meatballs, cooked in red cabbage and cranberry sauce.
Estelle recently had tooth surgery and said she couldn't eat anything with corners. Gefilte fish, chopped liver, and matzo balls were just right.
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