A Truly Different Night
Helen Nadel attended a Zoom seder with seven open screens. Photo: Helen Nadel
“We were able to find matzah,” Rebecca Davis says. “We had horseradish and all these traditional things. But my mom always brings the potato kugel.”
Davis’ parents had planned to be at her Passover seder in Swarthmore. But they were stuck in Ohio because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
So, on Thursday night, Davis, her husband, and their two children got on Zoom with Davis’ parents, her mother-in-law and her boyfriend, friends in D.C. and in Connecticut. For an hour they went through holiday basics, with a few improvisations. The traditional story of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt was retold courtesy of a children’s book read by Davis’ six-year-old daughter. Instead of her mother’s potato kugel, they took last Hanukkah’s potato latkes out of the freezer. “Definitely not kosher for Passover.”
Despite all this, it was “a wonderful seder,” Davis says. “For me, the holidays are ways to mark time and to connect to something important. Now, when time seems to have lost all its moorings, this felt extra important.”
Passover is one of the central holidays in the Jewish tradition. It’s a time when families congregate, eat traditional foods, and retell the biblical story of Moses leading the Jews out of slavery in Egypt. This year, because of the coronavirus, few could congregate. Instead, the seders of 2020 were largely held over Zoom.
Tradition and Variation
Helen Nadel and her family attended two different Zoom seders on the same night. The first one included her mother, who lives a few hours away, and her brother and his family, who live in North Carolina. “We ended up having dinner for two hours, gathered around our respective tables.” At the second seder, later the same evening, seven screens were open. Still, Nadel says, “It was an evening of such beauty and connection, which surprised me.”
Nadel cooked a combination of traditional Ashkenazi and Sephardic foods. (American Ashkenazim, descended from the Jews from Eastern Europe, are more numerous than Sephardim, whose ancestors came from Spain and Portugal.) Her brisket was the standard Askenazi brisket, but her charoset was made not of apples, nuts, and wine, but dried fruits, pistachios, and rosewater. “Which I had in my house,” she says.
Charoset symbolizes the mortar Jews used when they were slaves in Egypt building the Pharaoh’s pyramids. At Passover, the bitterness of the mortar is transformed by the sweetness of charoset’s ingredients.
Nadel got horseradish, a traditional food symbolizing the bitterness of slavery, from an unexpected source. Lauren McKinney, a neighbor who is not Jewish, got a big horseradish root as part of her local farm share. “She cut it up and drove it around Swarthmore, delivering it to people.”
Nadel couldn’t rustle up a lamb shank, “but we had a lamb chop bone, which we decided would suffice in a pinch.” The lamb shank reminds Jews of the tenth plague that God sent to the Egyptians, the smiting of the firstborn. According to the Book of Exodus, Jews marked their doorways with lamb’s blood so the angel of death would “pass over” their houses and leave their firstborn sons alive.
Blood, Frogs, and Hail
From Amy Pollack’s “Reflections on Passover 2020,” which is illustrated with photographs of previous seders.
Plagues were on many minds this Passover.
In the Graham household, the talk over the brisket often involves intense textual analysis. “We have a lot of academics in my family,” says Amy Graham. This year, during the seder led by her 23-year-old daughter Alyssa, the conversation turned to the coronavirus.
“We had some really good discussions relating to what’s going on currently in the world, and looking at that through the lens of tradition.” The idea of plague was central to this discussion. “What’s happening to the Earth, and what’s happening to people. Our role in the plagues, and who is Pharaoh? All those kinds of questions.”
Amy Pollack usually hosts upwards of 20 people at her seder, renting tables and filling the house with “the joys and chaos and responsibilities of having your house filled with people and food.” But this year, it was just going to be her and her husband. As she got ready for it, she too found herself meditating on the parts of the holiday that seem particularly relevant. Then she sat down and wrote “Reflections on Passover 2020” to complement the usual Haggadah readings. “I thought about it as something that, maybe when my little granddaughter asks me, ‘What was it like, Grandma?’ I can give her this.”
In the document, Pollack reflects on traditional parts of the ceremony: “Washing hands — who knew that this would become a planet-wide ritual?” She describes her sense of the connection between the story of the Jewish people in Egypt and the way we are living now. “This year, perhaps more than at any other time in our lives, we feel like we are living within the Passover story itself. We are plagued, we are not free, we are in the wilderness, and yes, we must have hope.” She shared what she had written with family and friends, some of whom incorporated it into their own seders.
A Festival of Redemption
Hope has been on Rabbi Linda Potemkin’s mind, too.
A rabbi at Congregation Beth Israel in Media, Potemkin helped lead a second-night seder on Zoom. The 60 or so people who attended were sometimes put into breakout rooms so they could talk with each other. At the end of the service, some stayed on to chat while they ate their separate meals.
“Passover is a festival of redemption,” Potemkin says. “It ends on a note of hope, and that’s what we really need right now to strengthen ourselves.” She finds comfort, too, in looking back over Jewish history. “Previous generations conducted seders under far more dangerous and difficult circumstances than we have.”
Laynie Browne, who conducted two Zoom seders this year from her home in Wallingford, says that the holiday “is all about humility and the path from slavery into freedom. Stripping down, renewal, cleansing and rebirth.”
She didn’t mind forgoing the usual elaborate feast. “The holiday comes whether we are ready or not…. Telling the story, remembering, putting oneself in the position of those enslaved — because none of us are free until everyone is free. That seems highly relevant in this moment.”
Carrot and Asparagus Salad
My mom made this for Passover when this recipe came out in Gourmet Magazine in March 1991, and it’s been on my holiday table ever since. It’s Sephardic – part of the Moroccan/Tunisian kitchen.
I’ve tweaked the recipe over the years. Here’s my version:
2 pounds carrots (+/-14 of them) cut diagonally into 2-inch lengths, thick ones cut in half
2 pounds asparagus, trimmed, cut diagonally into 2-inch lengths
6 tablespoons olive oil
2 medium onions, halved lengthwise and cut very thin crosswise
1/2 teaspoon red-pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon caraway seeds
1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
1/2 teaspoon paprika (smoked if you’ve got it)
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
Fresh herbs (parsley, cilantro, and/or mint) optional
In a wide saucepan, combine the carrots with cold water just to cover, and a pinch of salt. Bring the water just to a boil and simmer about seven minutes, or until the carrots are just barely tender. Remove with a slotted spoon to a bowl, reserving the liquid. Add the asparagus and simmer for 2 minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon to a separate bowl. Reserve the liquid.
In a large skillet, heat the oil over low or medium-low heat, and add the onions and a pinch of salt. Stir the onions occasionally for about 10 minutes until soft and starting to caramelize. With the heat at low, add the red-pepper flakes, caraway, cumin, and paprika, and another pinch of salt. Stir once or twice. Let heat through for one to two minutes, then turn off heat and set aside. Add the carrots when ready, and stir to coat.
Turn the heat to medium-low and add 1/3 cup of the reserved liquid to the skillet. Stir occasionally until the liquid is reduced and coats the carrots well, two to three minutes, or until the carrots are as tender as you would like. Add the asparagus, stir, and turn off the heat. Add salt and black pepper to taste. Just before serving, add the lemon juice (and herbs, if using). Traditionally, this cooked-vegetable salad is served at room temperature.
Helen Nadel
Swarthmore
