A kind of aimless post about Passover and The Hobbit

[At left: an image of the style of Seder plate that I have — though it’s in storage and I’m not using it this year. This is a pedagogical piece of tableware that we use to explain the symbolic meaning of the foods we are eating during the meal.]

The sun has set and so we have now reached the fourteenth of Nissan, which means Pessach (Passover) begins in twenty four hours! Pessach is the most widely celebrated Jewish holiday — even totally unobservant Jews will go to a Seder, or the ritual meal that allows us to fulfill the commandments to remember the exodus from Mitzraim — and a significant segment of Jews who are not normally particularly observant of kashrut ramp up a bit or a lot for the eight days of the holiday (seven in Israel). Me, too. My kitchen is normally orthodox kosher dairy (O-U hecksher, which is cholov stam, but not cholov yisrael, and I don’t eat any meat at home, if you’re observant and thinking about coming over for lunch. In this kitchen I have all glass plates, which means I’m using paper this week — my Passover dishes are in storage). But I usually undertake the additional ritual of cleaning that will make it kosher for Passover.

I won’t bore you with all the minute details of the pre-Passover cleaning, which is finished, but the most important thing is that it’s incumbent upon me to search my apartment for and remove all chametz, or food made from any of the five grains (traditionally: wheat, rye, barley, spelt, or oats) that become leavened when they come in contact with water. That’s not too hard; not much of that stuff has made it into my apartment. A little pasta, a few crackers, and some oatmeal had to be thrown out, and I gave away most of a six-pack of beer. (You can also sell chametz to a gentile, which is what people do who own bagel bakeries — they sell their bakeries for a week –, but selling on the household level is typically reserved for expensive chametz, like whiskey.) As I follow the Ashkenazic custom, however, I also have to eliminate kitniyot (corn, rice, beans, peas, lentils, and peanuts), which is somehwat harder — I eat a lot of rice and various legumes. And this year, since Pesky has persuaded me to celebrate the holiday with the local Lubavitchers, I’ll also be using a specially kosher-for-Passover unleavened bread, shmurah matzah, which has been imported from Ukraine and which I’ll pick up tomorrow sometime in the morning, after I’ve done the last check for chametz. The last step in the check is bdikat chametz, in which, although I’ve already eliminated all the chametz, I take a little piece of it and put it in each room, then I “search” for it and “find” it and burn it to make sure the commandment to search for it is fulfilled. Then I’ll recite a legal formula that says I’ve tried to get rid of all of it, but that in case I haven’t anything that’s still in the apartment is legally null. Can’t burn it in my apartment complex, so I’ll drive it over to the Lubavitchers and burn it with theirs, and then pick up the special matzah. And then I’ll sit outside, watching the bugs fly around, till the holiday begins.

Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) and Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) in rehearsal of a scene from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, from preproduction vlog #2. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Anyway, what does this have to do with anything? I was trying to think of an Armitage-themed Passover post but honestly that’s crossing a line for me. See, I do have some! I don’t know any “fun” songs for Passover without religious meaning like I do for Chanukkah or Purim, so even though there are peppy Passover songs, they usually have to do with divine redemption and I’m not in the habit of comparing Richard Armitage with G-d. So no Passover fanvid. I’m sure we’re all crushed!

But I was musing about the Seder, and The Hobbit, and I was thinking about the dinner at which Thorin Oakenshield makes his first appearance. This dinner bears some similarities to a Passover Seder. You’ve got a lot of things at that dinner that typically happen at a seder: a crowd of unexpected guests, a group of people in exile singing raucous ritual songs that remind them of their history and destiny as a group, a discussion of enemies who have risen up to destroy them, and the prediction of a journey toward a storied destination — not to mention a festive meal, shared bread, and — perhaps too much — alcohol. At a seder, you’re usually celebrating with people with whom you have some connection, but not always an easy one. There’s sometimes a self-important person leading the seder (like Thorin) and usually he loses control over it (like Thorin) as the participants take over. You’re commemorating rupture, and you’re praying for the renewed demonstration of redemption. When the dwarves sang, Tolkien writes, Bilbo felt “a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves.” That’s a bit of what you can feel at a seder (if you substitute Jews for dwarves).

Anyway, it struck me as funny. However, some things that happen at the meal in chapter 1 of The Hobbit that don’t happen at orthodox seders. For instance, you would never, ever smoke at an orthodox seder, as it’s a holiday on which work is forbidden and lighting a fire to light a pipe would count as work. Even if the smoke rings were sweet and amusing. You couldn’t play musical instruments, either, for the same reason. No harp! You would never eat pork-pie, as it’s never kosher, and on Passover you wouldn’t have beer or seed-cake (although I have read recently that a few breweries are now making kosher for Passover beer). Coffee is an interesting problem — apparently the main reason that coffee is considered kosher for Passover is that some U.S. coffee company paid a rabbi for a hecksher that said the coffee bean is a berry, and not a bean, and hence not kitniyot. This is a big relief to me, as otherwise I’d have to switch over to special expensive and hard to get kosher-for-Passover Coke, which is made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup (kitniyot). I guess you’d never drink Coke at a dinner in The Hobbit, either, though …

… yeah, you could call this an analytical post that failed to yield any actual point. It happens (Servetus smirks).

Anyway, enough silliness. I’m unlikely to be posting for the next few days — but I will catch you again on Sunday sometime.

***

My favorite text for the Passover remains, as it has been the last two years, Ha Lachma Anya (“this is the bread of affliction”):

This is the bread of affliction that our fathers ate in the land of Egypt.

Whoever is hungry, let him come and eat;

whoever is in need, let him come and conduct the Seder of Passover.

This year we are here; next year in the land of Israel.

This year we are slaves; next year we will be free people.

We’ve just passed the vernal equinox and so if you’re celebrating a related holiday, I wish you well. Tomorrow is Good Friday for the Christians, a commemoration that also calls particular memories to mind for me. To my many Christian friends, I wish a blessed, contemplative triduum and joyous Easter or Resurrection Sunday at its climax. To everyone who’s celebrating it, I wish a kosher Pessach.

May G-d free the captives and redeem the suffering, wherever we or they are found.

~ by Servetus on April 6, 2012.