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livBelatedly, since we're now 18 days into the Omer...
The headline is that I did a lot of medium-risk things, including travel and unmasked gatherings (since a Seder meal is all about food, and takes place over several hours, and it starts at sunset so there are a lot of practical difficulties in holding it outdoors), and I got away with it and none of the attendees got Covid.
Ended up returning to my old community in Stoke the weekend before Pesach for a stone setting. We set up the gravestone around a year after the actual funeral, and it's a chance to have a second memorial for anyone who couldn't make it to the hastily arranged funeral. This was in memory of someone who was very deeply involved in running the community over many decades, so a lot of people wanted to remember him. A year ago at his funeral, I wasn't asked to lead anything because the deceased had disapproved of women leading services. But apparently we've forgotten that now, so I walked in and the president gestured to me to take charge.
So ok, it turns out I can in fact lead a memorial service at 5 seconds' notice. And our friend was well remembered, and we drank strong tea out of traditional local china, and a member of the community brought fancy chocolate eclairs in remembrance of the fact that she'd intended to give some to the deceased on the day he died. I wore the extremely lovely embroidered coat that he had found for me in a job-lot of antiques.
It was all made lots easier becauseghoti_mhic_uait agreed to drive us to Stoke. Since she is Christian and it was also Palm Sunday, we attended church the evening before the memorial. I was somewhat nervous about Palm Sunday as it has bad associations for Jewish people, but in fact the service was weird but not at all disturbing. There's a long and semi-dramatized Gospel reading, and some of the decorations in the church are covered up but not all (because it isn't really possible to cover the stained glass, and the Stations of the Cross are directly relevant to the season), so I was a little confused. I recognized multiple former colleagues in the church, it's funny, I've been away from the area for most of 6 years, but there's a continuity.
That left me without a weekend to prepare for Pesach, butjack was amazingly helpful at getting the Pesach cleaning sorted out, and we ended up making real progress in sorting out long forgotten corners (we cleaned out the cutlery drawer!) but without it being too stressful. The first night I had a proper before-times style family Seder at my parents' – all of us siblings and our partners (including my whole polycule with the three children who still live at home), and our first cousin with his three children, and foster-brother H and my parents' current lodger, so at least one person who had never been to a Seder before. 21 people, some of whom attend school or work in healthcare. P'tite Soeur took charge of the meal preparation, and it was busy but relatively calm. We had our usual staples of hard-boiled eggs, butternut squash soup, salmon with various salads, cauliflower moussaka and stuffed courgettes for the veggies, and six puddings because my mother and sister love getting creative with Pesach desserts. Chocolate roulade, hazelnut meringue, caramel and walnut tart, lemon pudding, mango sorbet and fruit salad. Screwy lead the service and he's just brilliant at finding the right balance between lots of discussion and not dragging things out too long, and interesting for all ages.
I did not make it to shul the following day, and in fact I really luxuriated in not needing to travel, as the community Seder I was leading was on the Friday night. Sojack travelled with me to Portsmouth on Friday. I had been worried about travel and accommodation over the Easter bank holiday, but actually the trains worked out just fine; some services being suspended meant we could get the slower but easier train with a direct change at London Bridge, no Tube across London. I think I might try that route deliberately in future, though it's hard to find on the journey planner when the faster train is running. We walked across the park to our hotel in lovely spring sunshine, and then back to the Seder venue. The community have a contact meaning that they're able to hire the ballroom in the Guildhall, which is by a long chalk the fanciest venue I've ever held a Seder in.
The small community ended up with similar numbers to my large family, and they wanted the Seder to fit in the quite narrow window between 5 pm and 8 pm (as people needed to catch trains home). I did in fact stick to the requested timing, even though more than half of it was people actually eating, which really is difficult to speed up. This is partly because I was asked to lead out of the UK Reform Haggadah Haggadateinu, which I intensely dislike. I don't have a very good right to dislike my own denomination's Haggadah but it cuts traditional material to a point where it's actually difficult to follow the order, which is of course the main point of the Seder, and the additional material is sentimental and intellectually vacuous, mostly structured around a kind of superficial 'Miriam was a girlboss' feminism. So, um, I did a fairly minimal Seder, though still allowing some opportunities for discussion. There weren't as many questions as I might have hoped, but at least some, and I think everybody enjoyed it. My favourite feedback was a few people mentioned that they understood the arc of the Seder in a way that they never had before, so I'm pretty proud that I took a rather confusing Haggadah and made it clearer than people had previously experienced with traditional ones.
We decided not to hang around in Portsmouth, because between plague, the BH weekend, and Pesach dietary restrictions we weren't sure we would get much out of a weekend break there. I sort of regret that decision because the weather was absolutely glorious. We did manage a brunch on the seafront before needing to catch our train, with lovely views over the Solent. The bank holiday made it a bit difficult for me to order Pesach treats from my sister the baker, but she arranged a kind of cloak-and-dagger handover where she bribed someone who was travelling from Brighton to a hen weekend in Cambridge to bring me my cakes, assuming I turned up at their AirBnB at a pre-arranged time.
So we had a relaxed weekend at home, ending with a Seder for just my partners and their children andcjwatson's Dad as the Seder newbie. That gave me a great opportunity to do Seder exactly how I like it, such as offering fresh and pickled vegetables to nibble on after the first blessing. We had even more good questions (and different ones from earlier in the week) and my OSOs contributed music for the Psalms and did a good job of explaining to a Christian visitor how rabbinic Seders are not exactly equivalent to what Jesus might have done based on the Gospel account.
I decided to skip soup, as we always end up with too much food. So hard-boiled eggs, my staple of matza lasagne (the secret is to replace pasta with soaked sheets of matza, and also white sauce with pure cheese) which I felt came out particularly well this year. Potatoes, simple green salad, broccoli and cauliflower, and plenty of matza for people who aren't sure about dishes with lots of foods mixed together.ghoti_mhic_uait contributed the desserts: a Passover-friendly Creme Egg roulade, and tira misu also KFP, which was perhaps less successful but a cool experiment. And we finished with a cheeseboard and my sister's bite-sized treats: cinnamon balls, coconut pyramids, and her own invention, chocolate and coconut "totes amazeballs".
The only downside was that I confused everybody by picking a random evening in the middle of the festival so that I would have the bank holiday Monday to cook and prepare, whereas it's more traditional to do a last night Seder, so nobody quite knew when the festival ended and when it was time to restart eating chametz. So I'll be more careful in future years.
The headline is that I did a lot of medium-risk things, including travel and unmasked gatherings (since a Seder meal is all about food, and takes place over several hours, and it starts at sunset so there are a lot of practical difficulties in holding it outdoors), and I got away with it and none of the attendees got Covid.
Ended up returning to my old community in Stoke the weekend before Pesach for a stone setting. We set up the gravestone around a year after the actual funeral, and it's a chance to have a second memorial for anyone who couldn't make it to the hastily arranged funeral. This was in memory of someone who was very deeply involved in running the community over many decades, so a lot of people wanted to remember him. A year ago at his funeral, I wasn't asked to lead anything because the deceased had disapproved of women leading services. But apparently we've forgotten that now, so I walked in and the president gestured to me to take charge.
So ok, it turns out I can in fact lead a memorial service at 5 seconds' notice. And our friend was well remembered, and we drank strong tea out of traditional local china, and a member of the community brought fancy chocolate eclairs in remembrance of the fact that she'd intended to give some to the deceased on the day he died. I wore the extremely lovely embroidered coat that he had found for me in a job-lot of antiques.
It was all made lots easier because
ghoti_mhic_uait agreed to drive us to Stoke. Since she is Christian and it was also Palm Sunday, we attended church the evening before the memorial. I was somewhat nervous about Palm Sunday as it has bad associations for Jewish people, but in fact the service was weird but not at all disturbing. There's a long and semi-dramatized Gospel reading, and some of the decorations in the church are covered up but not all (because it isn't really possible to cover the stained glass, and the Stations of the Cross are directly relevant to the season), so I was a little confused. I recognized multiple former colleagues in the church, it's funny, I've been away from the area for most of 6 years, but there's a continuity. That left me without a weekend to prepare for Pesach, but
jack was amazingly helpful at getting the Pesach cleaning sorted out, and we ended up making real progress in sorting out long forgotten corners (we cleaned out the cutlery drawer!) but without it being too stressful. The first night I had a proper before-times style family Seder at my parents' – all of us siblings and our partners (including my whole polycule with the three children who still live at home), and our first cousin with his three children, and foster-brother H and my parents' current lodger, so at least one person who had never been to a Seder before. 21 people, some of whom attend school or work in healthcare. P'tite Soeur took charge of the meal preparation, and it was busy but relatively calm. We had our usual staples of hard-boiled eggs, butternut squash soup, salmon with various salads, cauliflower moussaka and stuffed courgettes for the veggies, and six puddings because my mother and sister love getting creative with Pesach desserts. Chocolate roulade, hazelnut meringue, caramel and walnut tart, lemon pudding, mango sorbet and fruit salad. Screwy lead the service and he's just brilliant at finding the right balance between lots of discussion and not dragging things out too long, and interesting for all ages. I did not make it to shul the following day, and in fact I really luxuriated in not needing to travel, as the community Seder I was leading was on the Friday night. So
jack travelled with me to Portsmouth on Friday. I had been worried about travel and accommodation over the Easter bank holiday, but actually the trains worked out just fine; some services being suspended meant we could get the slower but easier train with a direct change at London Bridge, no Tube across London. I think I might try that route deliberately in future, though it's hard to find on the journey planner when the faster train is running. We walked across the park to our hotel in lovely spring sunshine, and then back to the Seder venue. The community have a contact meaning that they're able to hire the ballroom in the Guildhall, which is by a long chalk the fanciest venue I've ever held a Seder in. The small community ended up with similar numbers to my large family, and they wanted the Seder to fit in the quite narrow window between 5 pm and 8 pm (as people needed to catch trains home). I did in fact stick to the requested timing, even though more than half of it was people actually eating, which really is difficult to speed up. This is partly because I was asked to lead out of the UK Reform Haggadah Haggadateinu, which I intensely dislike. I don't have a very good right to dislike my own denomination's Haggadah but it cuts traditional material to a point where it's actually difficult to follow the order, which is of course the main point of the Seder, and the additional material is sentimental and intellectually vacuous, mostly structured around a kind of superficial 'Miriam was a girlboss' feminism. So, um, I did a fairly minimal Seder, though still allowing some opportunities for discussion. There weren't as many questions as I might have hoped, but at least some, and I think everybody enjoyed it. My favourite feedback was a few people mentioned that they understood the arc of the Seder in a way that they never had before, so I'm pretty proud that I took a rather confusing Haggadah and made it clearer than people had previously experienced with traditional ones.
We decided not to hang around in Portsmouth, because between plague, the BH weekend, and Pesach dietary restrictions we weren't sure we would get much out of a weekend break there. I sort of regret that decision because the weather was absolutely glorious. We did manage a brunch on the seafront before needing to catch our train, with lovely views over the Solent. The bank holiday made it a bit difficult for me to order Pesach treats from my sister the baker, but she arranged a kind of cloak-and-dagger handover where she bribed someone who was travelling from Brighton to a hen weekend in Cambridge to bring me my cakes, assuming I turned up at their AirBnB at a pre-arranged time.
So we had a relaxed weekend at home, ending with a Seder for just my partners and their children and
cjwatson's Dad as the Seder newbie. That gave me a great opportunity to do Seder exactly how I like it, such as offering fresh and pickled vegetables to nibble on after the first blessing. We had even more good questions (and different ones from earlier in the week) and my OSOs contributed music for the Psalms and did a good job of explaining to a Christian visitor how rabbinic Seders are not exactly equivalent to what Jesus might have done based on the Gospel account. I decided to skip soup, as we always end up with too much food. So hard-boiled eggs, my staple of matza lasagne (the secret is to replace pasta with soaked sheets of matza, and also white sauce with pure cheese) which I felt came out particularly well this year. Potatoes, simple green salad, broccoli and cauliflower, and plenty of matza for people who aren't sure about dishes with lots of foods mixed together.
ghoti_mhic_uait contributed the desserts: a Passover-friendly Creme Egg roulade, and tira misu also KFP, which was perhaps less successful but a cool experiment. And we finished with a cheeseboard and my sister's bite-sized treats: cinnamon balls, coconut pyramids, and her own invention, chocolate and coconut "totes amazeballs". The only downside was that I confused everybody by picking a random evening in the middle of the festival so that I would have the bank holiday Monday to cook and prepare, whereas it's more traditional to do a last night Seder, so nobody quite knew when the festival ended and when it was time to restart eating chametz. So I'll be more careful in future years.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-04-24 02:57 pm (UTC)I am amazed they survived long enough for you to pick them up!