Alaska Dispatches
# 16  —  9 April 2001

Passover

As the only Jews in town, we realized that we were going to have to improvise for our Seder plate this Passover. Dried seaweed, the closest thing to parsley I could find in our cupboard, served as the Karpas. Standing in for the shank bone was a piece of dried salmon (we had foolishly thrown out some roasted seal bones the day before). I found eggs, a rarity, as well as horseradish – I have no idea why – in the local store. Leisy made Maror out of our last two Granny Smith apples, and the Matzos my mom sent up rounded out the symbolic offerings.
We invited Greg, Hannah and their kids over for their first Passover experience. Leisy roasted a turkey while I assembled the makeshift Seder plate and tried to figure out how much of the Haggadah to cut. The locals don’t really do dinner parties. Often we will receive a call at dinnertime: “Have you eaten yet?” It is a good day when the invite comes before we have prepared our supper. We almost always feel like we have overstayed our welcome; standard behavior is to eat and run. So to expect folks to come over at dinnertime and to sit through a couple of hours of ritual before partaking would be a bit much. Adding the language barrier, partial with English and total with Hebrew, I figured it best to just cover the main points.
We lit the candles and said the blessing over the first cup of grape juice. Our village is bone dry, so we all had to live through the ordeal without the benefits of four cups of wine. Elijah must have been disappointed as well.
It was hard to tell how things were going over. I quickly realized that words fundamental to the Passover story, terms like redemption, bondage and affliction were Greek to our guests. We hastily worked our way through the symbols on the Seder plate and the Four Questions. Had it been up to our guests, the four questions might have covered more basic ground. Rather than dealing with the finer points of twice-dipped bitter herbs, I imagine we might have been talking about just what a Jew is anyway.
When we came to the story of the Ten Plagues a lack of energy seemed to permeate the table. I wasn’t sure if this was a result of boredom, hunger, not understanding the vocabulary or unfamiliarity with the story. Many villagers are regular churchgoers and very familiar with bible stories, although it appears that the local implementation of the Moravian religion deals solely with the New Testament. Hannah was raised Catholic in a neighboring village, and the story of the exodus eventually seemed to strike some distant, muted chord. I struggled to find an appropriate balance between being patronizing and confusing. Ironically, it is a key part of the Passover ritual to retell the story, and to hear the story again no matter how thoroughly one knows it.
By the time we dug into our Hillel sandwiches we were all palpably ready for dinner. It occurred to me that this is always the case, and perhaps part of the tradition itself. No matter how abbreviated the Seder, one is always anxious to get to the Matzo ball soup. I hoped that we had gotten across some basic message of the tradition, or at least some semblance of it.
Leisy and I pondered whether we had had the most pathetic Seder anywhere (because of the time zone, we certainly had one of the last). We quickly realized how asinine that notion was. Ours wasn’t anywhere near the most pathetic Seder, especially considering what must have passed for Seders throughout history. We considered Holocaust victims trying to carry out a Seder in the concentration camps; we wondered if and how Jews facing persecution celebrate; we remembered how fortunate and blessed we are.
Greg called later in the evening to say how much he had enjoyed the Seder and how much he learned. He mentioned that he was thinking about Yup’ik culture and how it related to the theme of oppression as well as some of the other things we had talked about during the Seder. I only wish he had brought it up at the time. Oh well. Next year in Piniq?

©2001, Michael Thornton Wyman