Week 5 - The Jews left Egypt but I can't leave my house

Day 26: Sunday, April 5th - House Cleaning

By week 5, I really had a handle on my routine:

Wake up. Scroll the internet. Roll down the stairs. Sign on to my work laptop on the couch. Get a banana, peanut butter, and dark chocolate for breakfast. Switch sides of the couch. Get some more chocolate. Work on the floor. Get some more chocolate. Go for a walk. Go back to working on the couch. Get some more chocolate. Work at the table. Take a nap on the floor. Get some more chocolate. Back to the couch. Cook dinner. Back to the table. Go for a walk. Eat dinner. Scroll the internet. Eat some ice cream with chocolate. Watch some tv. Get into bed. Scroll the internet. Fall asleep. Rinse. Repeat.

With such a structured, and healthy, schedule, I felt like I was ready to grab COVID-19 by the horns (from 6 feet away) and easily survive this whole sheltering thing. But, along came Passover, the holiday that celebrates the Jewish freedom by constipating you and forcing you to get that piece of cracker you ‘accidentally’ kicked under the refrigerator like 6 months earlier. This year, the passover story felt quite appropriate given we are currently undergoing a plague, but it sort of raises the question of whether we should even be celebrating in the first place.

Regardless, Passover is a holiday that I usually spend with my family in Atlanta. Yes, I love spending the holiday with my family, but, even more than that, I love showing up just before the holiday starts - after my parents spent days cleaning, cooking, and planning - saying “oh, I’m sorry, I totally would have helped clean and cook if I was able to come sooner” and not having to do any prep at all. This year, though, I am staying in Berkeley, at Savyon’s house, with our quarantine crew of me, her, two of her roommates, and one of her roommate’s brothers who is currently in graduate school in England (read: currently in Berkeley but attending zoom classes at 2 in the morning because of the time difference).

When it was decided that Savyon and I weren’t going to go to Atlanta, all the roommates enthusiastically responded, “Let’s do Passover here!” It was extremely thoughtful. While I initially understood their enthusiasm as “We would love to do a seder with you,” they insisted that they wanted to do the full thing; complete house cleaning, all wheat products stored away for the week, and two full seders, including four cups of wine at each, the whole retelling of the passover story (twice), some singing, some brisket, and dipping of parsley into salt water to remind us of the tears of the Jewish slaves in Egypt.

“You really don’t want to do that.”

“Yes we do.”

“No no, trust me, you don’t.”

“No! We really do! We want to support you.”

“You have no idea what you’re agreeing to.”

“It’s fine. We really want to do this.”

*Ok……*

“So what comes first?”

“Cleaning.”

So, here is the thing about Passover cleaning, it’s like spring cleaning on steroids. Let’s be real, when have you ever actually done a full spring cleaning that included everything you intended? We all know how spring cleaning usually goes:

It’s a Sunday morning, you wake up, and go, “Today is going to be the day that I clean,” which is mostly motivated by having absolutely no plans. You start by emptying everything out from under your bed and your closet, including all the trash that obviously someone else left there because you would never just leave trash in your room, that’s gross. You also make a pile of clothes to donate but it will really just sit in your closet for a year because you don’t know where to drop off donation clothes.

You originally plan on cleaning your room, the fridge, the pantry, and under the living room rug that hasn’t been picked up in 5 years. But, somehow, you lose track of time choosing a playlist and eating breakfast and it’s already past noon. While your closet may be clean (read: completely empty), the middle of your room is just a massive pile of clothes, chords, and shoes like a stack of leaves in fall that you’ve raked together and are ready to jump in to.

With all the time that has passed, you have a brief moment of intense motivation. You fold all your clothes, make your bed nicely, and line up your shoes nicely underneath your bed, which will obviously only last until the first time you leave the house. You then watch an episode of tv (read: 3 episodes) because you’ve done such a good job. Now it’s 8pm, your closet looks nice, your dresser is arranged, and you have a whole bunch of crap that didn’t really belong anywhere but that you also couldn’t get rid of so you took the top drawer of your night stand and shoved in it all the random chords, cards, markers, gift cards, and letters that you haven’t touched in 7 years for safe keeping in case some day you need a charger for that 2008 flip phone that you no longer own. You then also realize you never cleaned under the rug, touched the kitchen, or went into the pantry other than to grab a snack. But it’s 9:30 pm and you’re tired, so you crawl into bed to watch a tv show and go to sleep.

Unlike a typical spring cleaning, Passover (read: old white Jewish men from the 1400’s) tells you that there are little pieces of bread just hiding everywhere, like a bunch of gremlins, and if you don’t clean them out, then they will sneak into your soup and contaminate everything. Ok, it doesn’t say that explicitly, but I would say it is strongly implied. Regardless, it forces you to really clean.

Now, the benefit of not being in my own house for passover cleaning is that I don’t have to actually confront my hoarding habit. I can pretend that in the back of my closet, there isn’t a stash of over 40 amazon boxes that I have saved mostly because I’m too lazy to go to the recycling bin but partially because what if I need them at some point? (What if my neighbor’s child is building a cardboard fort for her science fair project and needs dozens of boxes of various shapes, sizes, and colors in order to bring her vision to a reality? I can’t let down the non-existent daughter of the neighbor that I do not know.) The drawback is that somehow it is my responsibility to throw out the bottle of moldy tomato sauce that found its way to the back corner of the fridge behind a few, much newer bottles of tomato sauce, all of which are not mine because I have never stored tomato sauce in a house I do not live in.

As the one who was instituting all of the food laws in the house (so basically Pharoah), I was in charge of cleaning out the kitchen to meet my standards, which, in this case, was a set of rules close enough to how I might typically practice that I'd be comfortable, but not too extreme that everyone in the house would kill me 15 minutes into an 8-day holiday. This set of rules involved placing their bread-filled junk food in a plastic box outside, completely rearranging their entire cabinet and fridge, and pouring boiling water all over their counters and silverware. No biggy, right?

Let me tell you, if you’ve never before been in a kitchen cleaned (read: destroyed) for passover, it can be a bit jarring. It’s a war zone. Full cabinets are blocked off with caution tape, Law and Order style. Condiments are laying sideways in a drawer in the fridge like bodies in the morgue. And you have people taking a flashlight and feather to every random corner of the house looking for any pieces of bread that may have escaped the massacre. I'm surprised they didn't kick me out that first day.

Once the kitchen was clean, it was time to plan for the two seders we were going to have, including wine, brisket, soup, a lot of matzah, horseradish, gefilte fish, parsley, and a lot more wine.

---

Day 27: Monday, April 6th - Tea?

There was a lot of cooking that needed to be done for Wednesday night, and there was also a lot of planning. For those that don’t know, depending on what book you use, the seder is a multi-hour ritual that includes 4 glasses of wine (2 of which come before you eat any dinner), matzah sandwiches, a complicated re-telling of the exodus story, a questionable part about the four types of sons which really don’t need to be gendered at all so it really makes you wonder about the level of misogyny that was going on when the whole thing was written, a lot of horseradish to clear your sinuses, a burnt shank bone that just sits on a plate in the middle of the table that you point to during the retelling, and many other complicated items and rituals. It is also generally a time that people discuss life, freedom, and the state of the world as we know it, so you can imagine the depressing conversations that were happening around the world on April 8th at approximately 8 pm local time.

So on Monday, instead of cooking, I focused entirely on preparing the content for the seders. For the first time since quarantine started, I did not cook anything new. I did, however, try a new kind of tea that came in a box from the local grocery store. Everyone deserves a rest day.

---

Day 28: Tuesday, April 7th - Horseradish

As much as I am a planner, I am also a procrastinator. Rather than start cooking Tuesday night, the house wanted to watch the Prince of Egypt together, so cooking could wait until Wednesday. The one thing I did make on Tuesday, however, is horseradish.

Something to know about me is that I love spicy food, but I’m not very good at eating it. Once every few months, my boss will order lunch for my office from this Mexican restaurant across the street. I always order the same salad with a habanero dressing, and every time, my face explodes. After a few times, everyone in the office lost their patience with me commenting how my tongue was falling off, so now I just sit there shoving food in my mouth trying to stop the snot and tears from rolling down my face, assuring them that “I’m fine, I’m fine” like Ross in Friends after he sees Rachel and Joey kiss.

One time, however, we had a working lunch with a client and I, of course, ordered my favorite salad. Especially with a client, I had to pretend like my mouth wasn’t burning up, Jonas Brothers style. So, I sat there, eyes watering, nose starting to get a bit full, still trying to play it chill. At a certain point, however, I couldn’t handle it anymore, so I took a napkin and just lightly dabbed the end my nose. As it turns out, I had been bleeding into my salad for a good 30 seconds - the spicy food had caused a nosebleed.

I immediately excused myself and ran into the bathroom, pulled myself together, gave my nose a good stern talking to, washed up, and went back to the table to pretend like nothing happened. Except I later found out I spent the entire rest of the meeting with dried blood on my face. Oops.

Ok, back to Passover. For most of the crew, this was going to be the first time having a more traditional seder, so I wanted to give the real passover experience of a horseradish induced sinus burn. What better way to do that than to take fresh root, put it in a food processor, and mix in some vinegar. Voila, you have a sinus clearer! (Is it just me that whenever I write voila, I either want to type in Viola like Viola Davis or violin? Like, voila just looks like voy-la. Just me? Ok cool. Cool.)

So I cut up all the horseradish, and put most of it in the food processor. I kept a few slices of plain root for myself. Before grinding it up, I put one of the slices in my mouth and chewed as fast as possible to try to get all the juices out before the pain stopped me. It’s like that time when I was 17 and I told the nurses that I didn’t like needles, but I needed 3 shots. They told me to close my eyes. So, I closed my eyes, inhaling deeply, waiting for the first of the shots. But, all of a sudden, I heard one of them abruptly shout “Now!” and felt 3 needles enter my arms one right after the other after the other. It was an ambush! But it was all done before I could even react. I guess I'm thankful they got it over with - I say as the person that didn’t return to a doctor for 6 years.

Let me tell you, the plain root was strong. All excited and giddy, I put the horseradish in the blender, added some vinegar, mixed it up, and boom, I still had horseradish but now chopped up with vinegar.

I immediately took a spoonful, tried it, and was disappointed because my sinuses felt nothing. Don’t fret, though, because 1 minute later, one of the roommates walked in and stuck their face in the opening of the food processor, immediately exclaiming in pain.

“Wow. You’re so dramatic. It’s really not that bad” I say as I proceed to stick my nose into the food processor only to literally (read: figuratively) be thrown on my butt by the intensity of the smell. It felt like I was the ogre in the first harry potter when a wand got stuck up his nose. This is why some many recipes explicitly warn you not to stick your face in the food processor after blending it together. On the bright side, I can confirm I still have a sense of smell.

Well, that was it for Tuesday. We watched the Prince of Egypt, discussed all the historical inaccuracies, also discussed the historical accuracies (of which there are a lot, surprisingly). Also, takeaway from the evening is that for our new party trick, Savyon and I are going to re-enact the “Playing with the big boys” scene where Hotep and Huy sing about all the Egyptian gods. Stay tuned.

---

Day 29: Wednesday, April 8th - Passover Seder

Now, I could tell you all about how I made matzah ball soup, a gefilte fish pie that looked like a rotten cheesecake, or a brisket that just never seemed to cook, but none of those stories are of interest (although, is any of this really of interest to you? Probably not. If you’ve made it this far, I appreciate you spending 10 minutes of your not-actually-that-busy day).

I will say, on a serious note, celebrating passover this year was an amazing experience because it allowed me to celebrate, share, and discuss with other individuals who have such different types of experiences as me. It really allowed me to reflect on my Judaism and think about the reasons behind why I practice the way I do. Under normal circumstances, I just would have gone to my family with people who have lived fairly similar lives to me, but this year I was able to celebrate with such a more diverse, intimate group in an intentionally thoughtful way.

A few thoughts that the seder brought up:

1. Even some of the more progressive haggadahs (the books that guide the seder that usually include translations, explanations, and discussion topics) use male gender for god in english. It was quite excessive the degree of “him,” “he,” and “his,” that appeared in the seder. (I know, I’m very Bay Area now).

2. The four questions are really more like the one question with four answers.

3. The seder has two cups of wine before any food and then 2 cups of wine immediately after dinner before you go to bed. The Jews really did not understand the concept of getting drunk early and coasting.

4. Horseradish gets far more intense the longer it sits in your fridge.