2013 Passover recipes

Poached salmon
(Ok to prepare in advance.) Mix 2-3 rough-chopped onions with oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Layer at the bottom of a medium baking dish, and place 3 pounds salmon fillet on top. Sprinkle with salt, cover with aluminum foil, and cook covered in a 350 oven for 30 minutes. Uncover and cook for an additional 10 minutes.

Curried couscous

(Now that Pereg is making a kosher-for-Passover couscous.) Cook chopped onion with oil, salt, pepper, and curry powder. When transluscent, add cooked Israeli couscous, cooked chopped asparagus, raisins, more curry powder, and a small amount of mango puree. When all is hot, melt in a bit of shredded cheddar for a risotto texture.

Matzah pizza

Spread a thick layer of tomato sauce on matzah. Add oregano, paprika, red pepper flakes, and chopped scallion. Top shredded cheddar. Broil for 5 to 8 minutes. Note that some people may consider pepperoni to be treyf.

Matzah crack  
Preheat oven to 350. Line a large cookie sheet with foil, then parchment paper, then matzahs. Bring 3/4 cup packed dark brown sugar (ok to use light brown sugar instead) and 3/4 cup salted butter to a boil, stirring constantly. After 3 minutes boiling, pour over matzahs and spread evenly. Bake for 15 minutes. Sprinkle 1 1/4 cups chocolate chips over top, let melt for a few minutes, and spread out evenly across the top. Optionally add shredded coconut. Allow to cool, or don’t.

Banana matzah brei

Dampen two matzahs, break into small pieces, mix in two eggs, cinnamon sugar, and an entire sliced banana. Fry with butter, serve with maple syrup.

Shopping

Buy a Macaroon Layer Cake from Oberlander’s. Do not serve at seder, or there won’t be any left over. It is better than the Hagada railroad cake. Oneg dairy-free chocolate chips are very nice, and would be good year-round.

Horowitz Margareten matzah is good, similar to Yehuda. Manischewitz matzah is too thin. Streit’s is a step down in flavor. Whole wheat options get terrible reviews, so don’t bother. I don’t think I’ll ever forget how much I disliked shmura matzah the one time I splurged on that, but a reminder doesn’t hurt.

Anti-shopping

Do not buy the premade Manischewitz coconut macaroon pie crust. It tastes like gravel. And not in a good way.

The bells of freedom

Let the bells of freedom sound:
we are free, we are free, we are free.

For a thousand generations shall this story be told, each generation to the next:
we are free, we are free, we are free.

We dry at last the bitter tears of slavery:
we are free, we are free, we are free.

And you shall teach your child on that day, saying:
we are free, we are free, we are free.

Let no one doubt the power of faith. Our bodies were broken by hard labor, yet now we are free. Our children were slaughtered, yet now we are free. We were there, yet now we are free.

We fight to give our children a better life, just as our parents fought for us, just as their parents fought for them, all the way back to our ancestors enslaved in Egypt. We are taught that we were there ourselves, that each generation must face that struggle, must rouse and rise up and search for freedom. And now we are free.

I have never seen a righteous man forsaken, or his children begging for bread. Is that line more difficult than the statement that we are free? We jail more than a million people a month in our country. I went to high school with 1500 other people. That’s how many people are locked up every hour. Do we understand freedom differently when so many of us taste imprisonment?

Serious people argued in the Supreme Court just last week that our only real freedom resides in our right not to act. Is that what we now mean by freedom? Has the famous American optimism been transmuted into a faint hope that we won’t have to leave our homes?

Each generation faces the struggle for freedom, just in a new form. May remembering our ancestors in Egypt give us hope and give us strength. We have faced worse, and survived. We have taken many steps towards freedom. We celebrate each of those steps towards freedom, and say dayenu even as we take the next step. And we proclaim our freedom in order to claim our freedom. We are free, we are free, we are free.

Happy Passover.

Got dreidel?

The federal government would like me to buy a Christmas tree.

I don’t think the government should be promoting a particular religion. I don’t want my government telling my interfaith family which holidays to celebrate or how. I enjoy helping Lisa and her family celebrate Christmas at Lisa’s parents’ house, but it’s not my holiday. For me, a Christmas tree is religiously inappropriate.

And these ads should be disturbing to people who do not consider Christmas to be a secular holiday, but who view a Christmas tree as part of how you honor or celebrate one of your religious holidays. Do you really want the federal government telling you how you could make your religious practice better? Or telling you that your religious practice isn’t good enough?

Can you imagine the screaming if the USDA decided to run an ad campaign to promote halal meat?

Four hours left

I'm supposed to use this time before Yom Kippur to try to make things right with other people, so I can focus during Yom Kippur on trying to make things right with God. I feel utterly lost on how to do that this year, because the people with whom things are distinctly not right seem so intractably alien. Perhaps the work is supposed to be hard, but this year it seems absolutely hopeless.

I don't think I'm at odds with anyone who reads this blog, but if I am, I apologize. I don't want that.

I read an interesting theory today that the best way to convert an enemy into an ally is to somehow persuade them to do you a favor. Their cognitive dissonance (I don't like this person, but I helped this person) will likely be resolved by them convincing themselves that they actually do like you. It seems worth a try as a last resort in some cases, since I've tried everything else. It runs completely counter to my instincts, which are to try to be of service to others rather than ask others for help.

So a request to my readers: please help me out by leaving a comment here. Tell me something good you hope will happen in your life over the coming year, because I want to enter this coming year full of hope for my life and for yours.

Passover wines 2011

For 2011’s seder we’ll go with last year’s winner, the 2009 Tishbi Emerald Riesling, for the first glass. Second glass will be the only red this year: a 2007 Recanati Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve. If we’ve finished those bottles by the third glass, as seems likely, we’ll open a 2007 Ella Valley Chardonnay, from the valley where David defeated Goliath. Then for the fourth glass we’ll go with a lightly sparkling Bartenura Moscato.

The Tishbi Emerald Riesling was my favorite again this year.

The Bartenura Moscato was startlingly light and clear, with almost a spritzer feel. At 5% alcohol, it barely feels like drinking wine.

The Recanati Cabernet was very dry, and those who like dry red wines seemed happy with it. Lisa and I both strongly preferred it with food, particularly paired with the lamb tagine that we served. It was not right for following the sweet Emerald Riesling.

The Ella Valley Chardonnay was fine, not very sweet, with no flavor notes that really stood out.

For 2012, we tried a Galil Cabernet and a Rashi Moscato d’Asti. They were ok.

Passover wines

Best selection I’ve seen around around Boston was at Gordon’s Wines in Waltham, though the staff there was useless. Probably worth trying to go to a tasting, since they have one every year.

Winner: Tishbi Emerald Riesling 2009, purchased 2010: This is the Passover wine I want to have every year. Very drinkable for unsophisticated palates like mine, good on its own or with food. Semi-dry, fruity, no wood notes, not complex. Emerald Rieslings don’t have a very good rep, but this one startled me in a nice way.

Herzog Selection Vouvray 2006, purchased 2010: Good, but not as appealing as the Emerald Riesling.

Not impressed by the reds I found in 2010, which I think were a Yarden Mount Hermon Red (mostly cab and merlot) and a Dalton Canaan Red (cab, merlot, and shiraz). One of them, maybe the Yarden, was supposedly the owner’s favorite Passover red. Whichever it was, I definitely don’t share his taste.

I’ll try to remember to add notes to this post as time goes on. Comments and suggestions are certainly welcome.

This year’s addition to Tashlich

Our hearts and minds are each unique. Just as we each understand God differently and we each understand ourselves differently, we also each understand the rituals and purpose of the High Holidays differently. With conversation and with patience and respect for each other, those differences can give us strength.

We can reflect on three types of sins: sins against God, sins against ourselves, and sins against other people. God can forgive us our sins against God, and we can forgive our sins against ourselves. The hardest part of teshuvah, of repentance and change, is dealing with our sins against other people. That is why we are called to do Tashlich with other people, and why Tashlich is best done early during these Days of Repentance. We symbolically cast away our sins with other people to remind us that none of us is perfect, that we all must seek to change, that we all must seek forgiveness from others.

But the presence of other people should be a positive reminder as well, a reminder that other people can help us to change. We are members of a community, and we have an obligation not just to help others in our community but also to accept help from others. Our friends and family can forgive us if we let them, but they can also support us if we let them.

With that in mind, let us begin our casting away together:

This post is five days too late, or 352 days early

For those who feel overwhelmed by the obligations of preparing for Passover, a voice of reason. For those who do not attempt to rid their house of chametz before Passover, perhaps a different sort of voice. Rabbi Yitzchak Berkowitz explains why various aspects of Passover cleaning are important, and makes the task seem less overwhelming.

My idiosyncratic approach is to use Passover plates, but not Passover cookware or serving pieces or silverware. I follow the ingredient restrictions that are specific to Passover, from chametz through derivatives of kitniyot, but not the year-round rules of kashrut. (So a cheeseburger is fine for me, as long as it’s on matzah instead of on a roll. Corn syrup and soybean oil are right out, though.) And I try to ignore the box of Bisquick that somehow got left behind in the kitchen when we cleared out such things before Passover, because moving it is more likely to wind up with chametz in my food than leaving it in place. I’ve followed basically the same set of rules throughout my life, so it works for me. And even though my set of rules for myself is different from Rabbi Berkowitz’s set of rules, I think his reasoning works well applied to a different set of rules.

Better than U-Haul is not a standard

Valentine’s Day is tough for restaurants. The restaurant is probably full, and is frequently unable to accommodate hopeful patrons who don’t have reservations. In this environment, restaurants understandably don’t want to hold tables for people who don’t show up on time (for some reasonable value of on time).

So the Elephant Walk, where Lisa and I have celebrated every Valentine’s Day since our first date (which was on Valentine’s Day), has decided to call everyone with reservations for tonight and leave messages reminding us that we have a reservation and letting us know that our reservation will be cancelled if we are more than 15 minutes late. It doesn’t bode well that they couldn’t be bothered to include something like “We’re looking forward to seeing you this evening.” This would never have flown when Tony ran the show at the Elephant Walk, back in the long-ago days of phenomenal service. And it’s a good thing that our destination this evening wasn’t a surprise to one of us, since we do still have a quaint shared landline instead of individual cell phones.

(In)to a good year

Like photos, a selective journal can both supplement and supplant memories. Skimming back through my journal provides touchstones to the year past, but the greater narrative needed for Rosh Hashanah has to come from within. This afternoon I will stand at the river bank and cast my sins onto the water, those remembered and those unremembered. And I will renew my prayers for a sweet new year, filled with love and laughter. These rituals too are touchstones, reminders of the greater work needed over the days and year to come if we wish to actually improve our world and ourselves. L’shana tovah.

Today we declare

We declare that all people are created equal. We declare that we should, and shall, govern ourselves. We declare that we shall embrace opportunities, pursue our dreams, and always strive for greater purpose. We declare that we can live together, one nation, under no one but God.

This we declare because we want the world to hear it. This we declare because we want the world to hold us to it. This we declare because we believe it, because we will live up to it, because we can live up to it. Yes, we can.

Today we celebrate a great declaration signed on this date 232 years ago. The founders of this nation signed a declaration of independence, and a declaration of so much more. They set out for us a vision of a nation that would act as a beacon of hope and freedom, a nation that would come to lead the world, a nation that would come to change the world. Of those to whom much is given, much is expected. My friends, we have much to live up to, because this nation has given us so much.

We must continue to lead the world, and that means regaining the world’s trust in us and our trust in the world. So today we declare that we still hold our Constitution dear. Today we declare that we place our rights above our fears, our values above our differences, and with head held high we shall meet the world’s challenges without ever abandoning our principles or our allies. We declare that we will rebuild at home and help to rebuild abroad, because we do not have to choose one over the other. We declare that we are one nation, and that we live in one world, under no one but God.

The power of ideals lived up to will always prevail. Let us live up to the promise of America, and if we do that, we can change the world. That is what we celebrate today.

Help us to lie down in peace

Are there particular prayers in the Shabbat service that you find comforting or moving, even out of the context of the service?

My favorite has always been hashkivenu:

Help us to lie down in peace, Lord, our God, and awaken us to life again, our King. Spread over us Your shelter of peace, guide us with Your good counsel. Save us because of Your mercy. Shield us from enemies and pestilence, from starvation, sword and sorrow. Remove the evil forces that surround us, shelter us in the shadow of Your wings. You, O God, guard us and deliver us. You are a gracious and merciful King. Guard our coming and our going, grant us life and peace, now and always. Spread over us the shelter of Your peace. Praised are You, Lord who spreads a shelter of peace over us, over all the people Israel and over Jerusalem.

It’s not a prayer for which I’ve ever known a melody, though there are of course scores out there. I grew up with the congregation reciting it in English in unison, and for the past decade it’s been a silent reading at the services I attend. The sung liturgy is what draws me to the service, but hashkivenu is the heart of the service for me.

I see it as a wish for peace in several forms, not just a peace that is the absence of conflict. Other prayers ask for justice and for the defeat of our enemies, but this one asks for a shield rather than a sword, peace rather than victory. We ask for life and peace, because without peace there is no meaningful life. I’ve thought about inscribing it on a mantel or a bed canopy, to give the prayer some real form and indulge my literalist tendencies.

Aural knowledge

Siddur Audio (in their own words): “Here is a convenient online resource for learning to chant the Hebrew liturgy of the Siddur (Jewish prayer book), whether you just want to brush up on your davening skills, learn to chant the Shabbat services or prepare for your Bar Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah!”

Many of their melodies are the familiar ones to me from the Conservative movement. You can buy individual tracks or audio CDs, but the streaming MP3 files are also free on their site. Some people may be uncomfortable hearing Adonai instead of HaShem in a teaching context, but I think this is a marvelous approach to preserving and passing on melodies. It’s certainly less work to create than the transcriptions I’ve done for the Friday night service and the Passover haggadah, and you don’t need to be able to read music to make use of the resource.

Pancakes for Passover

4 eggs
2 T honey
1 t vanilla
1/2 t baking soda
1/4 t salt
1/4 t cinnamon
1 banana
1 T yogurt or 1/2 cup uncreamed cottage cheese (dry curd)
1.5 cup almond flour (very finely ground blanched almonds)

Mix all ingredients together, adding almond flour last. Use a pan on low heat with plenty of butter to cook on each side until crispy at the edges. The pancakes may break apart when you flip them, so make them small enough for your spatula. These take a while to cook, because they’ll burn on medium heat, but the result is wheat-free pancakes that taste like regular pancakes.

Passover is a lot easier when part of your family has had to learn to cook without any grains or starches at all.

I have been young, and now I am old

So begins what is probably the most controversial line in the traditional Passover haggadah, right before the third cup of wine:

I have been young, and now I am old; and I have not seen a righteous man forsaken, nor his children begging for bread.

This is part of the birkat hamazon, the grace after meals. It’s Psalm 37, verse 25, and a literal reading of the verse is unkind. Perhaps God does not forsake the righteous, or perhaps the righteous do not feel forsaken by God even if they are forsaken by people. But their children all too often must beg for bread, and it feels particularly wrong to deny that after partaking in a festival meal.

The paragraph that surrounds the verse appears to be disconnected verses from various psalms, and I’d love to understand how those verses hang together. In perusing a 1912 haggadah, Lisa noticed that the verse is missing from that paragraph both in Hebrew and in English. (Well, she noticed the English, and I confirmed the Hebrew.) The haggadah text has been remarkably stable over the past 900 years, but how much has the birkat hamazon changed? An extensive two-volume set of commentary on the haggadah that I just acquired has no discussion at all of the lengthy birkat hamazon, going straight from the afikoman to the third cup. The inclusion of the birkat hamazon is treated as simply a pointer, implying that as the birkat hamazon changes in regular practice, so should it change in the haggadah.

Over the years, I’ve heard various ways to try to understand this verse other than simply rejecting it. The most heartening is that we should treat the verse as a reminder that we must never leave a child begging for bread. The only way we can truthfully say that verse is if we have responded to hunger whenever we have encountered it. But regardless of the interpretation, some explanatory note should be added to the haggadah if the verse is included. The haggadah is far more widely read than the birkat hamazon, and it is important to provide some explanation of this verse other than the simplest and cruelest one. So, a new version:

I have been young, and now I am old; and I have not turned my back on the forsaken, nor ignored a child who was begging for bread.

Or as Siddur Sim Shalom puts it:

I have been young and now I am old, but never have I looked on at one righteous and forsaken, and allowed his children to go begging for bread.

Though a closer and completely different reading of “I have not seen” might be more appropriate as a confession for Yom Kippur (and quite at odds with the surrounding paragraph):

I have been young and now I am old, and I have been blind to the righteous who have been forsaken, and their children begging for bread.

Last meal before Passover: comments

One week until Passover, and shopping becomes harder. I don’t want to throw out tons of bread and other chametz next Saturday, so I have to pay attention to how much I put in the grocery cart. But almost as important as planning the seder dinner is figuring out what to have for my last non-Passover meals.

This isn’t a familiar problem for everyone, I know. Some people don’t keep kosher for Passover. For others, dietary restrictions mean that it’s Passover the whole year. What about you?

Auld Lang Syne

From Rosh Hashanah to Lessons and Carols, 100 posts. It’s the new year once again, in this syncopated rhythm of overlapping calendars. The winter turning of the year is necessarily full of work concerns: tax planning and royalty statements and such. But tomorrow evening that will all pause, and a few moments of peace will settle slowly over my world as the ball descends.

Thank you for reading, for commenting, for taking a few moments to be here over the past several months. Happy New Year!

8 nights

We study in secret, worship in secret, and wear our faith well-concealed. Is that not the foundation and history of our faith? The Lord heard us cry out from our suffering in Egypt and left us in slavery for 200 years more. Ten generations learned not to cry out.

When our ancestors furtively marked their doors and stayed inside to avoid the Angel of Death, they survived to escape Egypt. We told their story year after year so as not to forget a time of redemption, and claimed their story for our own. We tell that story still, and we tell ourselves we are free, but we tell that story at home with fewer outward signs than were dared by a people enslaved. They at least marked their doors as they stayed inside.

For 8 nights in midwinter, we light a menorah so that it is visible from the street. For 8 nights in midwinter, we celebrate the reclamation of a village, the reconsecration of our temple, the miracle of the lasting flame that should not have lasted, a representation of the lasting faith that should not have lasted. For 8 nights in midwinter, we make a specifically outward sign. We may bet on when the candles will go out, but we know the faith will last. And maybe with more openness, we find more freedom.

That freedom is a difficult road is a Jewish story, but it is also a human story. So to all my readers, Jewish or not, Happy Chanukah.

Christmas means seeing: comments

This is a comment thread for the current poll. Whether or not you celebrate Christmas, most people have some break in their routine because of the day. For me, Christmas used to mean going out to see a movie matinee. Now it means visiting Lisa’s family in Maine and maybe a trip to L.L. Bean.

Thanksgiving

Kamila Shamsie has written a wonderful short essay entitled “Martin Amis’s views demand a response.” Two sentences particularly stood out as being important and broadly relevant:

The failure to express outrage cannot be easily distinguished from a lack of outrage.

and

But in worlds without censorship, the way to respond to odious views which are given space in the press is to, well, respond!

These moral requirements cannot be satisfied by any one person. There is more we should express outrage about and more we should respond to than any of us can possibly react to, even if we were to devote all our waking time to responding. Much of a well-lived life goes beyond public discourse. Within the realm of public discourse, we should spend time envisioning and describing the world we actively want, not just the world we don’t. But if each of us heeds Ms. Shamsie’s call to speak up, our collective voice could be strong enough to push back, express outrage, and respond.

We may give thanks for many things at Thanksgiving — time with family or friends, a good meal, a holiday parade, or our own good fortune. We may help others in a soup kitchen or a shelter. We may just enjoy the day off work. I know my friends are celebrating the holiday in many different ways. I’ll start my Thanksgiving here and now. I give thanks for the freedoms we still have, and I hope for the endurance to still feel outraged by those who have taken away the ones we’ve lost and who are denying freedom to others. Above all, I hope we will all keep the courage to respond to that which outrages us, so that our failure to express outrage cannot be taken for a lack of outrage. That is how the world will improve, and that is how we will have thanks to give next year.