That Was the Week That Wasn't

Passover may not be my favorite Jewish holiday--that honor goes to Simchat Torah, when we dance around the Torah scrolls--but it certainly is the most meaningful. The story we tell each other around the seder table each year is the founding story of the Jewish people. This is not to denigrate the stories of the patriarchs in the Torah, only to note that the story of our liberation from Egypt is central to our narrative and consciousness in a way that, say, the binding of Isaac is not.

These days, the Jewish community boasts every type of seder you can think of. There are women's seders and men's seders, gay seders and interfaith seders, family seders and community seders. Since the Civil Rights Movement, we have even had "freedom seders"--a term I find incongruous since I can't imagine what kind of seder is not about freedom, though I support the concept of using the seder to promote support movements for freedom around the world. Over the years, I've experienced seders large and small, right-wing and left-wing, in communal halls and in tiny Upper West Side apartments.

But this year, I experienced no seder at all.

I tried too late to find a seder here in Kansas. The week before Passover, I called the local synagouge, which referred me to the local Federation. The Federation said it could send out an e-mail but wasn't hopeful, given how late I had asked And in the end, I never found a seder.

The rest of Passover has been essentially non-existent as well. I have no idea where to obtain matzah here in Kansas--in New York, you can find it in practically any grocery store--and so have made no effort to observe a Passover diet.

I imagine next year, Passover will be a bigger production. It's hard to imagine what a seder in Moscow might look like these days. So much of Russia's Jewish community has emigrated to Israel or America since the fall of the Soviet Union, and yet Jewish life in Russia is, by all accounts, reviving. The Russian government may be hostile to missionary efforts by Jehovah's Witnesses and other "new" religious groups, but it respects longstanding "historical" religious communities of Russia, Judaism included.

But I don't imagine I'll encounter the choices in seders I had in New York.