Baby Moses Salad

We had friends over for Passover and for the first course of dinner everyone was invited to make themselves a Baby Moses Salad.  Everyone had a lettuce leaf to use as his floating basket.  From there things got pretty creative.

This one is mine, which I prepared as a demo.

Dale had a Baby Robot Moses.

Jordan had the brilliant idea to use matzah as a blanket.

Jeremy's should have been the least unnerving, since it actually had a face, and yet it wasn't.

Astonishingly, the kids ate more of their Baby Moses Salads than any other part of dinner.

The Four Children

The Haggadah text about the Four Children has always bothered me.  I think part of the intention is to illustrate that there are different kinds of people and different ways of engaging with the holiday, but do we have to be so extremely judgmental?  Here's the version I grew up with (abridged):

The wise child asks, 'What are the precepts, laws, and observances which God has commanded us?'  In response we should explain the observances of Passover thoroughly.
The wicked child says, 'What is this observance to you?'  Since he says 'to you' and not 'to us,' he rejects the unity of Israel.  Thus we respond sharply:  'It is because of what God did for me when I went forth from Egypt -- for me, and not for you... for had you been there, you would not have known redemption.'
The simple child asks, 'What is this?' To the person of open simplicity, give a straightforward answer: 'With a mighty arm God freed us from Egypt, from the house of bondage.'
With the person unable to ask, you must begin yourself, as it is written:  'Tell your child on that day, saying, This is because of what God did for me when I went free from Egypt.'

What kind of parent does this text invite us to be?  Approving, rejecting, informing, initiating.  It's not much of a palette in my book.  And the level of rejection, in particular, seems just inexcusable.

At the kids' seder at Aaron's school last night, our rabbi spoke about this passage.  He admitted it is a difficult text.  He offered a different translation of the Hebrew word that is translated as "wicked":  he said he prefers "insolent," a characteristic of many children and probably all teenagers, at one time or another.  He said in his way of thinking, there is a little of each of the four children in each of us, and that the important thing is that they are all at the table.  Even the surly one.

His statement got us curious about the word "wicked," and Dale's somewhat chilling guess was correct: "wicked" is from "wicca," same root as witch and wizard.  So it's pretty rude of us to use it as a synonym for "very bad."  The Hebrew word often translated as "wicked" is rasha, which apparently means "to depart from the path and become lost."  It's the opposite of tzaddik, which is translated as "righteous," but has a more concrete meaning of "one who stays on life's path."

Well, now, that is more palatable.  We can all go off the path.  And we can imagine parenting a child who is somewhat off the path.  So, at tonight's mini-Seder, Dale and I shared what we had learned with the kids, and I felt more able to discuss the Four Children without rancor.  

R:  What if there was someone who visited our Seder who had gone off the path and maybe had very bad manners?  What do you think that person would say to us?

J:  He might say, "Can we just eat?"

A:  He would say, "This food is stupid."

R:  How about someone who never heard of any of this Passover stuff, just never saw it before?
J: "What are all these different things here?  What do they mean?"

A: "And everything looks very yummy."

R:  What if there was someone very smart with nice manners who already knew a lot about Passover, like maybe one of the teacher's aides at religious school?  What would they say?

J:  "When can we start?  I want to do everything."

Jordan is Seder-savvy and knows the right answers, but I still appreciated both of their contributions.  I forgot to discuss what we should say back to these personae.  Then I found this fine little video, which someone should have shown me thirty years ago.

Making matzah

This year for the first time, we tried making matzah.  Crackers are easy, and matzah ought to be especially easy as it is made of only flour and water.  What better project to do with the kids, right?  

I knew from the get-go that our matzah would not be kosher-for-passover.  For that, the flour needs to be watched from harvest to kitchen to assure that no moisture touches it, and the water needs to be spring water, not tap or bottled.  Not to mention that your whole kitchen needs to have been changed over to meet Passover standards of purity, which mine was not.  But I figured we would at least honor the rule that there should be a maximum of 18 minutes from when the water hits the flour to when the matzah emerges from the oven.  The whole point of matzah, after all, is to remind us that the Israelites had to leave Egypt in a great big hurry and so their bread didn't have time to rise.

The 18-minute thing was more challenging than I would have expected.  The kids are slow stirrers and slower kneaders, and the dough was pretty stiff.  Toward the end I was frantically rolling out the dough and shouting, "The Egyptians are coming!  Quick!  Quick!"  The boys thought this was wonderful and spent the next half hour running around the house in a mock panic.

The resulting matzah was more like shoe leather than a thin cracker, but we enjoyed it, as much as one can really enjoy the bread of affliction.  While I was chewing, I reflected on the meaning of the rules for producing true matzah.  The thing about watching the flour from harvest to kitchen, I like; it seems like it would build your awareness of where your food was coming from and what happens to it along the way, a little like Michael Pollan did for the Omnivore's Dilemma.  In my own life it is possible to almost simulate this by at least buying wheat from the people that grew it.  The thing about getting water from a spring, though... I don't have access to a spring.  Would rainwater be spiritually similar?  If not, then I'm annoyed, because I think that these things should be accessible to someone like me, who is willing to do things from scratch but who lives in a city.  If I really can't do it myself, then I am being told that food produced by a factory is more spiritually elevated than anything I could possibly make myself.  How can that be right?  

Don't get me started on the Passover industry, which puts out all manner of highly processed bread and cake and cookie substitutes that conform to the letter of the law.  There is too much delicious real food in the world for that, chametz or no chametz.  And it's only a week.

Passover

We are having a terrific Passover.  Several days in advance, Jordan declared that he wanted to keep Passover, in the sense of eating no leavened bread.  This is not something we attempted last year (at least, not as a family).  I said I loved the idea, but reminded him that he normally has waffles for breakfast every day; did he have other ideas for what to eat?  He said, "Mommy mommy I want to have that Passover stuff, what is it called, charoset!  Charoset for breakfast."  What a great idea!  Apples, walnuts, honey, and cinnamon, chopped together in a sort of a relish; I can hardly imagine a better breakfast, maybe with some yogurt.  That and cheesy eggs, and we're good for the week.

Last weekend we undertook a bit of pre-Passover cleaning, not as much as last year, but still.   I tried to make the most of the fact that religiously required cleaning is much more exciting to our children than just plain old cleaning:  here they are enthusiastically scrubbing spots off the kitchen floor with rags.

For the first night's Seder, we maintained our custom of holding the rituals in the playroom tent, where we can properly recline while pretending to be nomads in the desert.

As if that weren't experiential enough, Dale actually used the days off school to take the boys camping.  They had picnics of Hillel sandwiches and leftover root-vegetable kugel on Pacific Northwest sand dunes.

They kept an eye out for approaching Egyptians.

The boys came home with glowing reports of how much fun it all was, which Dale was glad to hear, because from an adult perspective the experience was somewhat mixed.  Too many places that Google maps identified as parks turned out to be nothing more than a rotten picnic table and a boat launch.  I texted Dale that I thought the Israelites probably had similar problems:  "Shoot, I thought Menachem's  cousin said there was an oasis here, but this is nothing but a wet spot!"

They were only gone for one night (one very, very peaceful night, back here in the house).  When they returned, we headed right down to the large kid-friendly passover hosted by Aaron's school.

And we have several nights to go!

Yoga poses

Jordan's afternoon activities at school include not only music and art and PE, but also yoga.  He learns yoga as a mind-body exercise:  each yoga pose has a phrase that goes with it and is useful for certain moods.  He would like to share what he has learned, so we took photos, and now he is sitting with me here ready to explain the poses.

"This is Lotus Blossom.  It makes you calm."

"This one is just for Cirque du Soleil.  I don't remember its name."

"This is Tree Pose.  It is for feeling balanced and calm."

"This is Mountain Pose.  It is for being connected to both the earth and the sky."

"This is just a fun pose.  It's called Rock and Roll.  You roll back and then your body forces you forward."

"This is Tiger Pose.  It's for getting your angriness out."

"This is Volcano Pose.  It's just something fun.  You start in Mountain Pose and then you jump up high."

"This is Elephant Pose.  The saying that goes with it is, 'I feel curious and excited.' "

"This is Butterfly.  The saying is, 'I feel happy and carefree.' "

"This is Advanced Candlestick.  I don't know how it helps your body."

"This is Proud Warrior.  It helps me feel strong like Dragon Pose."

"This is Dragon Pose.  It's different than Proud Warrior Pose because of the feet."

Reproductive science

Jordan has had a lot of science questions about reproduction lately.

J: What happens when a robin has puberty with a blue jay?
R: Um.  Can you tell me what you mean by puberty?
J: Like when a robin is the mom and a blue jay is the dad.
R: Oh, that's called mating.  Actually, different animals don't mate.  First of all they don't want to, and second of all if they did, nothing would happen.
J: Nothing?
R: Nothing.
J: You wouldn't get partly blue jay and partly robin?
R: If the animals are only a little bit different, then the mating could work and you could get a mix of the parents.  Like with different kinds of dogs.
J: But could science do it?  Like, instead of mating, could you do it with chemicals?
R: Actually Daddy does that at work.  You remember how the genes are the information in your body that tells your body how to grow?  Daddy takes genes from one thing and puts them in another thing, and that mixes them a little bit.  He especially likes to take genes from a jellyfish that glows in the dark and put them into his zebrafish, so then his zebrafish glow in the dark.
J: That is SO COOL.

*    *    *
J: Do plants mate?
R: Some of them do, yes.  It depends on the plant.  You know how flowers have different parts?  There are girl parts and boy parts in a flower.  The pollen is the boy part, and the, um. the other part that the pollen sticks to, that's kind of like the girl part.
[This is already more botany than I had at the tip of my tongue, and was starting to make me wonder what I mean by "boy parts" and "girl parts" for plants.]
J: What about grass?
R: I'm pretty sure grass is different than flowers.  I think maybe it just makes seeds, but without mating?  I don't really remember.  This is a really good question.
[The conversation changed, and I texted Dale.]
R:  Jordan wants to know if plants mate.  I said angiosperms, basically - not all plants.  Is that right?
D: Actually they pretty much all do.  Some ferns have mobile sperm that swim.  No joke.

*    *    *

J: Do crabs lay eggs?

R: Yes, they do.

J: I would not think they would do that because I don't see that they have any private parts.

R: Actually they do have private parts.  Get this:  They keep them on the inside.

J [laughing]: Whaaat!

R: Yep.  A lot of animals do that.  They keep them inside, and just bring them out when they need them.  Then when they're done they slide them back in.

J: [laughing hysterically]

R: It's a very good system because they're protected in there.  

J: Wow.  I did not know about that at all.