Post pesach fug has cleared…
Pre-pesach, the country seems to go through a moodiness phase. I am not kidding. I saw friends of mine, usually happy, chirpy people wandering around looking seriously miserable before the chag, and I wandered what on earth was wrong with them. They just seemed so down! The minute the chag is over, kids are back in gan and normal routine resumes, I see the same people back to themselves. It really does seem as if nobody likes pesach. I am told is culturally unacceptable – as in – nobody who keeps the festival really admits to this.
Amusingly for us olim, we say These Israelis Have it Light. I mean, most of the main supermarkets stock what they need to purchase – no need for special trips to the kosher deli, butcher, fishmonger… etc. They do pre-pesach deals to make things that bit easier. If you eat kitniyot (and the majority of the country do, it seems) then you can eat almost anything you would normally eat (if you are happy to ignore vastly inferior quality just for the experience of eating pasta on the feast of Matzot), lots of companies close for chol hamoed which makes it a true family holiday, there are plenty of pesach-friendly restaurants and cafes, and for goodness sake its a WHOLE DAY SHORTER with only ONE seder night that starts at a far more reasonably time! What’s the fuss???
One issue – it does get quite difficult to explain things to children, when people try to make everything kosher for pesach. For example, my 3 year old has a book produced in the US, with pictures of what he can and cannot eat. Pasta is featured. How do I then explain to him that everyone in the cafe we are sitting in is eating pasta and pizza and its ok?? I noticed when I took him to the toilet that pretty much every kid in the cafe was eating this – no exceptions – presumably in previous years small children simply starved on pesach?? (No I didn’t order them pesach pasta. Ugh.)
We who traipsed across the world to live in this holy land are laughing. After all we would have to do all this work in the old country with far more bother. Not to mention the awkwardness of explaining why one had arrived bleary-eyed to work because one had been scrubbing ones oven at 3 in the morning, or other such nonsense.
For us olim, it really is a true exodus from slavery. We drink our 4 cups with gusto. Amen.