You made this with matzoh?

Passover is my favorite holiday, it’s one of the few I’ll get in a car and drive a long time for, or buy a plane ticket for, or sit on a train for six hours for. It’s not just because it’s the only Jewish holiday MGM made a movie about or because the food is good, though those are perfectly good reasons to like Passover and Yul Brenner makes an excellent pharoah. But for me, Passover is, believe it or not, all about the message. It chokes me right up.

Granted there are probably a bunch of different messages to take away from wherever you spent your Passover. You could come away with the “let all who are hungry come and eat” part or the “I believe in miracles” (where you from, you sexy thing), but the part I like best is the “depending on the kindness of strangers” part. Your seder may vary, but the one we’ve been doing for years has this whole section in it about how you should be kind to the stranger in your midst because “you yourself were once a stranger in the land of Egypt.”

Some friends of mine shared a house in Montlake a few years back and one of the things we did as part of the Sunday dinners that they hosted for a glorious season when we were younger, thinner, and possibly better looking, was invite a stranger to dinner. Sometimes that went well, sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes it was some guy you met in bar a few nights back, sometimes it was someone from the art supply store who came in all the time and was always friendly, it varied. Sometimes it worked and we made a new friend, sometimes it didn’t and it was no big deal. At Passovers throughout the years, there’s inevitably a stranger at the table, though usually they are a friend of someone, they just don’t know everyone. Often it’s a Passover novice – last year we had E. and this year we had G. and S. – all of whom had never been to a seder before. Regardless of where the strangers come from, we are always kind to them and feed them seconds.

The other part of the seder I’ve also come to appreciate is the focus on the underdog. Not that the tribes in Egypt were totally the underdog, I mean, according to the story, they had the almighty on their side. But the seder says that the tribes in Egypt were enslaved. And it goes on to say that while you are celebrating your freedoms, you should remember those that don’t have it as good as you and that while they’re suffering, no one is truely free. I don’t know exactly what we’re supposed to be doing about it, but once again, it’s good to be reminded that while we’re living in pleasant splendor, there’s lots of places we could be helping out others. For me, this part seems kind of political; I always think about working for systemic change (voting, for example, or giving money to the ACLU, or volunteering with a political cause). There’s a whole “you might be free but what about those people who were devastated by the Tsunami?” part to the seder that admonishes you to not forget others who might need a little help.

We drove to Oregon for the holiday, three of us, me, J. and my best friend L. The weather was foul on the way down and the car behaved badly until J. slapped in a new fuel filter in Wilsonville. Never mind that the drive was about as wet as crossing the Red Sea, we arrived in the promised land of Veneta to dine on bbq turkey and three kinds of dessert. On Sunday, we visited an alpaca farm out on the Long Tom grange – the farmlands northwest of the Fern Ridge resevoir. The land was so green as to almost be shocking, all of it under a wide western sky punctuated with white fluffy clouds. And on Monday, we drove back to Seattle. Now I am spending the remaining days of Passover by trying to eat less and excercise more as the seder feast appears to have come home with me. Passover ends on Friday, the 29th.