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In #6 Kosh's Shadow said: What, you aren';t looking forward to choking yourself with dry matzah? Oh, I like matzah just fine, and don't mind a week of it in the least. That's no biggie. It's switching out the pots and pans and utensils and dishes, putting the other stuff away, etc., that gets me down. The holiday itself has much to recommend it; as with Purim last month, it basically connects one to the largely-lost rhythms of an earlier time. Purim is the "spring-cleaning, kick off cleaning for Passover" holiday; in the era (not so long ago) before you could get practically anything you wanted to eat all year round regardless of season, people counted on their stored dried, salted and pickled foods to carry them through the winter. Purim was the celebration that you'd actually made it through the winter---and the celebration was taking all the stuff that you had left, and was probably going off a little by then, and cooking it up in a big feast, swapping it your neighbors, drinking up what had gotten fermented in the meantime, and baking up that flour before it started getting weevily. End-of-winter/we survived/let's start Spring/Passover cleaning by getting rid of all the rotting or about-to-be rotting stuff. Passover is a week of matzah, which has been cooked in such a way to make sure that it's NOT going to be moldy or weevily or whatever. It's got elements of fasting, certainly, but it's also meant as a transition to the foods of, and celebration of, Springtime. Consider that the little green sprigs of "karpas"---usually parsley, nowadays---the fresh leaves that are dipped in salt water, and the romaine lettuce that is often part of the "Hillel sandwich" later in the Seder, would have been, in effect, the first ritual tasting of a piece of fresh greenery after the privations of the salted/preserved/pickled winter diet. We gloss over them today, because of what is available, but not long ago they would have been celebratory luxuries. Likewise, it is useful to consider that prior to 1500, the European diet did not have potatoes, tomatoes, avocados, hot peppers, maize, or chocolate. Well, maize is excluded from the Passover diet, but remove chocolate and potatoes/potato starch from the modern Passover cuisine and you'd find a huge, huge hole. I think it is useful to keep these things in mind during the holiday.
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Kosh's Shadow
3/14/2021 4:28:50 PM
buzzsawmonkey
3/20/2021 6:59:42 PM