I attended my first seder ever last night, as a guest of
ashnistrike and her family. It was a wonderful experience, though I suspect that had more to do with feeling like I was part of a community and being surrounded by wonderful friends who made it a beautiful, geeky, and sometimes hilarious evening, than with the specific fact it was a seder. (As a crypto-goy who wasn't raised in the vicinity of Judaism; Passover doesn't have particular emotional resonances for me.)
Besides the normal confusion of participating in a new ritual and new holiday for the first time, it was an interesting feeling to not understand most of the ritual phrases and prayers because they were in Hebrew. It reminded me a little of attending Mass at Our Lady, Queen of Apostles in Hamtramck, MI with my mom and sometimes with my grandma when my family visited my Polish grandparents for Easter. It's not that the Masses weren't in English--there were Polish Masses, of course, but I didn't get taken to them--but just that the priest had a thick Polish accent and I couldn't understand his sing-song voice enough to make out a lot of the words. This time, though, there was a haggadah with translations of all the Hebrew bits, so I could find out what was being said, even if I couldn't understand it.
I got there early enough to help with a bit of cooking, including making deviled eggs, though I wasn't able to help that much with the huge amount of prep that went into it. Shortly after I got there, there was a bit of panic over whether the hard-boiled eggs were leavened, because they came out of the shells falling apart, and the internet told us this was probably because they were very fresh (they were from a CSA) and still had carbon dioxide that hadn't come out of solution. Fortunately, we were able to argue that they were permissible because carbonated drinks are, and that they were in fact in the process of approaching a state of perfect flatness, unlike leavened things, which are in the process of becoming less flat with time.
During the cooking, there was a determination that it was permissible for N. to supervise her own baking of matzoh because she is a middle school teacher, and as a teacher, she is inherently a rabbi and thus qualified to supervise the dough to make sure it only is wet for eighteen minutes. On the other hand,
ashnistrike, who has a PhD and has taught college classes, is a more senior rabbi. Later, during the seder, after she told us the story of the
Oven of Akhnai, we concluded that the God of the Torah isn't a rabbi, because he is in fact not a good teacher: he just handed the Torah to the Jews and told them to figure it out without help.
During the seder,
nineweaving told us about a seder she attended in Prague, which was held in Czech, meaning that the word "slaves" was "robotu". Later, we read a poem that Jo Walton once wrote in response to hearing about this, called "
When we were robots in Egypt."
I think that everyone attending the seder who wasn't Jewish was pagan, and some people were both. This led to some interesting conversations, including an extended side discussion during the seder about the identity and cleanliness of an idol of Aphrodite that was in the kitchen sink because, when the oven was replaced, it was noted that it needed cleaning. It's probably just as well that there were apparently no Christians present, since we also got into a discussion of Jesus of Nazareth having been an arsehole.
Also during the seder, the hosts' household has a tradition in which, after describing the 10 plagues visited on the Egyptians in Exodus, they list out modern plagues, and after singing about the things that were done for the Israelites when they left Egypt, they list modern things to be thankful for. The list of modern plagues included "fascism," "the patriarchy," and so forth. The modern things people were thankful for included modern medicine, librarians, memory, resistance, and so on.
A number of the readings from the seder also really spoke to me, including a short passage about Hannah Szenes, a Hungarian Jewish woman who had fled to Palestine and then returned to Hungary as a special forces paratrooper to fight the Nazis, who eventually captured and executed her. There was also a poem by her,
Blessed is the match consumed in the kindling flame.
Blessed is the flame that burns in the heart's secret places.
Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor's sake.
Blessed is the match consumed in the kindling flame.
that I thought was beautiful. Afterward, we read "
Zog Nit Keyn Mol," a song written by a partisan in the Vilnius Ghetto after hearing about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. There were also some beautiful readings of poems by Marge Piercy: the two I can find online are "
Maggid" and "
The Cup of Eliyahu."
Despite the fact that--as I mentioned at the start of this post--I'm not actually Jewish, my history of being a crypto-goy continues. Several of the attendees who I hadn't met before told me they were very surprised when I implied I wasn't Jewish, because I acted and looked very Jewish. Also, when I clarified at one point that I hadn't said I was Ashkenazi,
ashnistrike pointed out that Ashkenazi is in fact the specific sort of Jewish that I'm not, as an ethnically Polish-Catholic American.
People also told me that I looked incredibly androgynous, and were surprised that I was able to stay closeted at work if I dressed the same way there (I do). This made me incredibly happy, though I still find it deeply hard to believe.
Finally, given Passover's significance as a beginning-of-spring festival, it struck me as very appropriate that today, I noticed for the first time that the flowering pear tress that grow all over my area had suddenly come into bloom.