My vegan family Seder

Passover is one of my favorite holidays, and I usually spend it with my fabulous crazy vegan cousins.

Even before the Seder itself, it was like an Oscar Wilde comedy.

I arrive at 6:00, as requested.  Jeffrey and Dylan, the boyfriends, are sitting on the couch watching the History Channel's show on engineering disasters, this one on the Deepwater Horizon.  They report that I'd just missed the show on underwear.  It took me a minute to realize this was not something in the engineering disaster series.

Lynne reports that Marty and Carol aren't coming.  She's upset.  Andy tells his daughter, Chloe, that Marty gave him the number of someone who works at an ad agency and that she should call him.  She looks at him like he's crazy.  He says, "Why can't you be normal and call him?" She says, "Because it's not normal to call people you don't know.  You email them."  Andy had neither his email address nor his actual name.

Lynne tells me I'm leading the Seder.  What a treat, although had I known before I would have pulled some material.  She says we're starting as soon as Rochelle arrives.  This is good: I want to start asap because then we won't be rushed through the Seder; everyone else wants to start asap so we can eat soon.

Mickey and Barbara arrive.

Rochelle arrives.  I'm eager to sit down and get started.

Andy gets on the phone to call Marty to ask him for the email address of the ad agency guy.

Lynne remembers that we need a pitcher of water and a bowl for handwashing and digs out a pitcher.

Chloe announces that we are going to Facetime with her sister now.

Lynne asks Chloe to corral everyone into the dining room.  She corrals them into the kitchen.

We discover that there are two extra chairs around the dining room table.  We debate whether or not to remove them.

Andy is not there.

Andy arrives, but Lynne has to get up to get something.

Lynne returns, but I remember that I have a great story on my phone I could read, so I run and get it.

Richard starts talking about the Breslov Haggadah and how it reminds us that we should find our ways out of our own narrow places and that we need to teach future generations about this.  My reaction is that he's just led most of the Seder, and I wish I didn't have to now because he's been so eloquent.  Also that what he said isn't unique to that Haggadah by a long shot.

Mickey says we should share our narrow places with each other.

Chloe's phone rings as she tries unsuccessfully to Facetime with her sister, and she asks her dad why the internet connection keeps cutting out.

All this before the Seder officially begins....

I love my family.

Growing things

About ten days ago, I took a workshop on how to make challah.  Ever since, I have been trying to make one successfully.

When I was in kindergarten, my little sister went to a Jewish nursery school, and every Friday they made challah.  She would come home with a hard twist of carbs, and, even though my parents laughed at it as not real challah, I thought it tasted good.

I have been living my sister's legacy this past week.

I get everything about the form right.  I braid a gorgeous round challah.  I roll the raisins inside so they don't burn.  I use a glaze of egg, cinnamon, and sugar. If it could be a sculpture, it would be perfect.

My realization yesterday (I am on my fifth and sixth loaves) is that I need to not think that I am making bread but that I am raising yeast.  Like my plants, which I examine carefully, making sure they are getting the right combination of light and, well, no water, I have to think of this as an exercise in growing something.

To grow, yeast apparently requires:

• Proofing.  I wince as I say that.  What a weird use of that word, but apparently it is something people say.  My recipe didn't have instructions about it, but yesterday I combined yeast, sugar, and water warmed with meat-thermometer accuracy and watched the slurry bubble.
• No drafts.  There is also something about covering it with plastic wrap.  My immediate thought is that there was no plastic wrap in the shtetl, followed by a thought that if you cover it tightly the yeast will ferment anaerobically, and that can't be good.  Apparently in the shtetl they used a damp cloth ... its purpose, as I'm trying to respect this time around, is to reduce drafts.  Drafts?
• Patience.  My recipe says to let it rise for an hour or so.  So I set the chicken(-shaped) timer for an hour and take a break.  It's supposed to double in size ... I look at it and think, well, maybe I forgot how small it was beforehand.
• Warmth.  Everyone I've talked to about my challenges tells me that their grandmothers put the dough in the oven with the oven light on, that that is the perfect temperature for rising.  

Last night: I proofed the yeast, put the dough in a cooling oven, put the light on, was patient, and left it there all night (which apparently also happened in the shtetl, although somehow I think perhaps they didn't have oven lights).

I woke up this morning and finally understood what rising means!  This is an entirely different dough than what I've experienced so far.  I've now grown some great yeast.

However, and perhaps this is the deeper source of my problem and my impatience, the part I really care about is not the growing, not even the eating, but the kneading.

The only time I ever saw a family member knead was when I was very, very little, and I watched my grandmother make kreplach.  When I had my first wonton, it sent me right back to my grandmother's kreplach.  Interestingly, my family laughed at my grandmother's kreplach, too, so that's probably why I only had it that once.

I love kneading.  Delightfully, challah involves two risings and therefore two kneadings.  When I started this process of learning how to make challah, kneading for just a few minutes was hard.  Now I can easily go 10 minutes (and I'm not supposed to go longer, sadly), standing on solid shoes; sometimes literally pounding the dough with my fists after the second rise, breathing rhythmically, kneading with my palms and my fingers.  Turn, fold, breathe, punch.  It's meditative.

The two that rose

There are still dragons

My friend, A., is a Targaryen.

Tonight, she and I were part of a challah baking class.  We pounded the dough, broke it into three pieces, made them into strands, and braided them.  A. had a little tiny bit of dough left over, so she made a ball and put it in the middle of the baking tray.  "That's the challah!" someone said.

During Temple times (2000 years ago), the Jews were required to break off a piece of bread and give it to the temple priests (whose meals were gleaned from the various sacrifices, since they had no resources of their own).  Apparently, after the destruction of the Temple the tradition became to tear off a piece of dough and burn it in the oven in memory of the gift to the priests.  This is still a practice for some people.  "Challah" means portion, so technically it describes that piece, not the whole loaf.

When the challah loaves came out of the oven, A. reached over to the tray and picked up the little ball.  She tore it off a piece to taste and then handed the ball to me.

I tried to tear off a piece, but the ball was just too hot for me to hold.  As she took it back from me, she joked about having asbestos hands.  "I take things out of the oven with my bare hands," she said.

She'd only seen a few episodes of Game of Thrones, so she wasn't aware of Daenarys Targaryen's imperviousness to heat and fire.  I explained that fire cannot hurt the dragon, and she said, "Oh, then I'm totally a dragon."

A. has pale blonde hair, blue eyes, and skin so fair you can practically see through it.  Apparently, there are still dragons.

No raspberries in the Torah

Last week, during the rehearsal for our adult b'nai mitzvah next week, I had a panic attack while reading the Torah.  I didn't realize it until the next day, when I said to someone, "When I was reading the Torah, I got all flushed and sweaty and couldn't breathe or think."  I had thought it was some sort of "Raiders of the Lost Ark" God moment.

I had had the same experience last time I faced the Torah for the first time to chant a passage, last summer.  I figured that this was a repeat, that something like a divine wind, a ruach, would rise from the Torah and strike me every time I approached it for a new reading.  After the initial experience, the Torah turns back into a fairly normal awesome bit of parchment and ink, but those first experiences are spectacular floods of energy and adrenaline.

I'm kind of bummed that it's just a panic attack, since Raiders is one of my favorite movies.

This week, I had a different experience.  I'd gone back and practiced with the Torah twice during the week, I'd been rehearsed by an expert friend of mine, and I was ready.

My portion is Va'era, specifically Exodus 7:19-25.  There I was, chanting along, feeling really confident and relaxed.  And then I got to the hardest word in the portion.  You can see it here in typeface Hebrew, fully vowelled and cantillated.

Va-YAY-ha-fe-koo.  Five syllables.  Most Hebrew words are three or fewer, so this throws me off.  I don't know Hebrew, so every syllable is unfamiliar.  Looking it up, it means "and they were changed."  It's approximately the middle word of my portion.  It has a standalone trope, tvir.  In the actual Torah I'm reading from, in calligraphy and with no vowels, it looks like this:

Easily confused with other words, right?
Last week, the rabbi spent some time with me after my panic attack, helping me with the places I was most stuck.  This word.   He told me to really rock the second syllable, YAY, to celebrate that I am embracing this challenging word. 

This week, in my confidence I cruised right over the word.  My mind told me it was a different word, and I chanted something else (still in tvir, however!).  Because every word must be pronounced correctly, the rabbi, reading along with me, quietly corrected me. 

And out came the raspberries. That word!

We were practicing with the sound system, so the incredibly obnoxious noise I made echoed throughout the sanctuary. 

The rabbi turned to the three other b'nai mitzvah and said, "Now, we know that that is exactly what we are not supposed to do during the service when I correct you, right?"

I cruised through the rest of my portion, no issues, giggling all the way.  No panic attack.  I think I will be OK next week.

A Kindle for ???

Happy Chanukah. Merry Christmas.

After a vacation with the family in Mexico, where I debated bringing a big, heavy hardback book (Clash of Kings) and instead brought a medium sized hardback library book (Someone to Run With), and everyone else brought Kindles, I decided I must have a Kindle. Sure, I have my iPad, which it becomes harder and harder to separate myself from, but an iPad screen is pretty bad for reading books.

Feeling under the weather, which made me want retail therapy as well as to climb into bed with a good Kindle, I braved Best Buy this afternoon. I was focused, asked for what I wanted, got what I needed, and got in line. While in line, I examined the impulse buys: a pink Hello Kitty iPhone case (I was tempted); a Star Wars license plate in a pack of gum (like baseball cards); various cases for things. Then I saw it: a gift bag. The perfect size for my Kindle, not Christmasy, white with purple and blue designs. I bought my impulse bag.

In line, I also second-guessed myself. Buy the Kindle on Amazon and pay no sales tax? Buy it at Target and save 5% with my Red Card? I forced myself to stay in line, calculating the value of my time and my need for instant gratification.

I went home, wrapped the Kindle in white tissue paper and put it in the bag, and thought it was the prettiest present ever.

Now what?

When you give yourself a gift and you know what it is, when do you open it?

When you are on Day 5 of a holiday that lasts eight days, on which day do you open it?

When it's Christmas eve, and it's fun to open presents on Christmas day, what do you do?

Most of all, when you're a grown-up and can eat Pop-Tarts for dinner if you so desire, what rules do you even need to follow?

Since it was so pretty, I decided to wait until after lighting the Chanukah candles tonight. I was going out to dinner at 6:00; the sun set at 4:something. Do I light the candles and open the Kindle before dinner? My nap until 5:00 answered that question.

I went out to a traditional dinner at a Chinese restaurant with friends; more friends walked in at the end, and I hung out with them; they invited me to their house, and I thought, "Cool, I'm really waiting to open that Kindle sitting at home." (Also that I loved all the friendly spontaneity of the evening.) I didn't end up going to their house, and I came home, lit Chanukah candles ... and opened my pretty gift bag to find my pretty little Kindle!

It's a little weird to have in my hands a portable device that has buttons and not a touch screen (I keep touching the screen), one that is not made by Apple, one where it's actually functional when it's disconnected from the internet. This will take some practice. Luckily, Clash of Kings, The Magicians, and Pirkei Avot are already loaded on it from my iPad adventures, so I can begin practicing right away.

Vacation and Shabbat

The reason I am so bad at planning vacations is that I second guess myself.  Maybe I should fly out this day ... what if my plans change ... what if the hotel isn't good....  One of my vacation days back home -- the entire day -- was spent researching Hong Kong hotels.  It's not like I didn't already have hotel reservations.  But just in case I was unhappy with the fact that I had to pay for wireless or didn't like the neighborhood, I had to research it all.

The hotel I stayed at this week, the Metropark in Wan Chai, was great.  My second hotel, for the vacation phase of the trip, the Jia, was in Causeway Bay, and while I was excited to stay in a Philip Starck hotel (because design is cool), I realized I really don't want to stay in Causeway Bay, which is where I stayed last time.  It's crowded, confusing, and too far from what I planned to do.  I went to visit and found the hotel to be snooty and not homey. 

So two days ago I opened my spreadsheet (generated from all that other research), started googling, and found a place that was not on my original list.

I canceled the Jia (and had to negotiate away the penalty) and made a reservation here.  The Lang Kwai Fong Hotel (not to be confused with the Hotel at Lang Kwai Fong).  A boutique hotel in SoHo (not in LKF, luckily, which is like North Beach).  Walking distance from everything I want to do.

And it's so wonderful!  The room is the size of a postage stamp and beautifully crafted to feel luxurious and cozy at the same time.  I did have to spend 15 minutes figuring out where to put my suitcase once I unpacked it so I wouldn't have to step around it. (It wouldn't fit: behind the bathroom door; under the desk; next to the refrigerator.  I figured out to put it in the closet on top of the safe.  It just fits.)

The service is so gracious.  And after puttering in my room, there was a knock at the door -- a plate of welcome fruit.  More fruit than I eat in a week: a banana, grapes, an apple, a persimmon, and strawberries.

My view from this inexpensive, well-located, high touch service postage stamp is of Victoria Peak, many of the city's skyscrapers, and the harbor.  I am on the 29th floor, which is quite high because we are partway up the mountain.  The skyscrapers' lights are coming on now, and it's glittering outside my window.  It's been cold and foggy, so there have been no good photo opportunities either from here or from the banks' offices.

And then I think, "Thank God for Jews" and, of course, laugh.  I'm going to go to Shabbat services, as I sometimes do when I travel -- it's perfect for meeting people when traveling alone.  I googled the UJC (United Jewish Congregation of Hong Kong), the shul I'm going to, and the rabbi is from San Francisco via Baton Rouge.

To get there, I get to take my favorite form of public transportation here, the Mid-Levels Escalator.  Actually, I don't have to take it because the shul is two exits away -- and that means two blocks.  With having to navigate to and from the escalator, it's probably four blocks away.  But I'll take the escalator anyway with all the commuters.  Since the escalator is one-way, I will walk home afterwards.

The walk will send me through LKF itself, which will make it particularly fun.

The bet's to you, Rabbi.

I just returned from a retreat in northern Marin county, a weekend with people of all ages, organized by my synagogue.  A fun weekend, like being at summer camp again.  The most unexpected delight of the weekend, though, was Candyland Poker.

Our rabbi wanted to learn how to play poker so he could join a rabbis' game he knows about.  So a group of us taught him how to play Texas Hold 'Em.  (A bunch of guys and me.  It was bizarre for me to be the most knowledgeable in the bunch.)  Once we taught him the rules, we realized that without betting it wouldn't really be teaching him poker.  But:

• We had no chips
• It was Shabbat, so we weren't supposed to be gambling with money.

Frustrated at this, the rabbi walked off and came back with a Candyland set from the child care area.  Per his idea, we used the Candyland cards as chips, and the rabbi delighted in each bet.  He was so excited about the Candyland cards that he wanted to value them differently based on color and number of squares, with special value for the "princess" cards: the candy cane princess, the ice cream princess, the gumdrop creature, etc.  We talked him out of it; he insisted, though, that when we bet we turn the Candyland cards face up so that we could at least celebrate the colors and princesses.

There was something infectious about the fun of Candyland cards: if someone bet with a double color or a princess, we trash-talked about it -- "Oh, he must be feeling confident!"

The rabbi also suggested that we play what he called "kibbutz rules."  Since we weren't playing with money, and we didn't have very many Candyland cards, the rule was that if you ran out of Candyland cards after a hand, the person with the biggest stack had to give you half.  (There was a brief discussion of welfare policy: Should we tax all equally, or should donations to the cashless be voluntary from the group?  Were we creating incentives to be lazy?)

The rabbi is fine with us calling him by his first name, but no one did in this scenario: it was too much fun to say, "Bet's to you, Rabbi."

A friend had brought his guitar and played and sang for us.  How many people play poker to live music?

There was a lot of wine involved.  We played for three hours.  By the end, the rabbi was telling people to stop the chitchat and just bet -- he was totally hooked.  (The second night we tried playing using candy from a huge bag as chips, but the phrase, "Pass me a Tootsie-Roll" quickly showed that to be a bad idea, and we returned to the Candyland card model.)

Three of us in the poker group, plus our guitar-playing troubadour, formed the Candyland Poker Band.   During the adults' open mic night, we brought the house down (which had been listening to unbelievably lame jokes) by performing a couple of Beatles songs.  Apparently, I can sing well.

The Candyland poker group is going to reconvene back in civilization.  We may end up using chips and money.  I hope that we can still hang on to the levity we found on Friday night.

Torah study: VaYera

My favorite moment from Torah study this morning occurred when we were hanging out afterward drinking coffee. D. was really annoyed at the God in this week's portion, who does things like enabling the exile and almost death of Ishmael, telling Abraham to kill Isaac, and destroying Sodom and Gemorrah even though there were probably good people there. "Isn't God supposed to be about forgiveness?" D. asked. Together, 70-year-old M. and I looked at him and, in a tone that implied "you're crazy," said, "No."

I gently suggested to yeshiva-trained D. that his ideas about forgiveness and turn-the-other-cheek stuff come from a different religion. Sure, we have Yom Kippur, when we atone for our sins, but that's about ourselves, not others. While I'm certain there is something somewhere about forgiveness in the Torah, it's not one of the ten commandments, it's not a mitzvah, and it's not part of the endless dietary and cleanliness laws. To have God be forgiving, to have God say that we have to be forgiving of others, and then for us to obey is too easy. To me, it is better that this petulant, vindictive, error-prone, laws-obsessed God is leaving room for us to choose how we all behave toward each other. Forgiving is something we do out of our own free will, not because we have been told to do so.

D'var Torah class

Tonight I sat for two hours in my first d'var Torah class, a class to learn how to provide an analysis of a Torah portion, or parasha. I've been looking forward to this for so long. The analysis of the Torah portion is always my favorite part of a service. I sometimes go to Torah study, where a member of the congregation explicates that week's portion (last week, Bereshit, when God creates the universe, was explicated by a Berkeley astrophysicist who pulled in the prophet Einstein and tried to teach us about 11 dimensions, among other things).

It is said that, since there were 600,000 people at Mount Sinai when Moses received the Torah, there are exactly 600,000 interpretations of it. Or of each passage. Or of each word. Or mark. I couldn't help but think of physics analogies: those 11 dimensions, all rolled up so we can't see them; fractals, which retain their complexity no matter how close you get to them. Jews have been analyzing Torah, and then analyzing the analysis, for more than two millennia. And yet there are always new approaches: apparently there was an instant classic analysis done at Torah study this past year when someone took a passage in Deuteronomy where someone got stoned and analyzed it in the context of pot, ending with Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35." That counts as one of the 600,000. We are also going to learn how to recognize when we've found 600,001st, the one that is wrong.

And I am so humbled. One man in the class had three translations in front of him. Another would suggest sort of historical analysis that the rabbi said needed to be tabled because of their complexity. One woman could read the marks on the letters and chant the passages correctly. I think the purpose of the session tonight was to give us a framework for understanding how to approach a Torah portion. But the content of every sentence was so full of new information for me that I took a ton of notes and feel like I know nothing.

Not to mention how to take notes in English and Hebrew when they are written in opposite directions. I really wanted to write a "bet" (the first letter of Bereshit, a letter that is written larger than the others and that certainly has had 11 dimensions worth of analysis), and I couldn't for the life of me, even staring at the printed letter itself, resolve how it should show up on my paper.

The class itself was enchanting. We jumped back and forth through Genesis and Exodus, taking apart passages and pieces of passages and names of passages and diacritical marks on passages ("Abraham | Abraham" versus "Moses Moses"). At one point, the rabbi decided we needed to look at the real sefer Torah, so he reached into the ark and pulled it out; we rolled it out on a tallis. (It was startlingly casual. Where was the standing and singing and praying?) He wanted to show us that there are gaps, like paragraph breaks, in the Torah and that they are so important that they are indicated in the book form of the Torah we are using.

I've got degrees in literary studies. I can take apart any text using a variety of methodologies (Marxist being my favorite). I've been doing this my whole life. But to analyze the Torah is an entirely different process.

It reminded me of when I started playing hockey a few years ago. With absolutely no athletic experience or talent, I knew from day one that I was in over my head. I knew I was pretty bad. I immediately made plans for extra practice -- I had to work three times as hard as my teammates just to keep up with them. Saturday morning 6:15 practices, stick time, skating clinics, hockey camp. And I did succeed in keeping up respectably in beginner's hockey.

So I asked the rabbi for extra work so I can start feeling like I have traction. He was kind enough not to say, "Learn Hebrew," but I will at least brush up on my numbers so I can follow the verse numbers (hah -- I know how to count to one) and my writing (which is screwy because I can write in script and not print, but even most of my script letters are gone). He gave me the name of a book to read and an online Torah to take a look at. This is like starting from scratch. I do not often feel this far from understanding what can be understood.

What I love is that it is a central principle of Judaism that it is all connected. Everything in the Torah has purpose and meaning. Our job is to work to understand it.

The butter holiday

Most people think of Passover as the time of year when we eat matzah. And I love matzah: matzah brei, matzah ball soup, charoset on matzah. But, really, it's the butter holiday.

Growing up, it was the one time of year I was allowed to have butter, and my mother served Land O' Lakes sweet unsalted whipped butter in a tub. The rest of the year, we had margarine. But the corn oil in margarine isn't kosher for an Ashkenazic Jew. So we had that special treat of sweet butter.

On matzah. I became expert at perfectly evenly glazing a matzah with this butter. Amazingly thinly, too, because if I was caught eating too much of the butter I'd get in trouble. And then: the salt. My second favorite food, after butter. I'd coat the thin matzah with the thin layer of butter, then with a thin layer of salt. It was art. And I ate as much of it as I could.

In a perfect Hallmark moment, my oldest friend K. and I had a long phone conversation this weekend. While we spoke, she was cooking for her family in Philadelphia, and I was painting a wall of my condo here in Emeryville. (Boy, have we come a long way since second grade in Cleveland!) We took turns putting each other on speakerphone. She told me about her own memory of my mother providing sweet unsalted whipped butter.

(I will be making K.'s recipe for matzah kugel tomorrow. At her recommendation, I won't use the full 1/4 pound of butter it calls for.)

Several years ago I finally broke from sentiment and bought sweet salted whipped butter. I don't really know why my mother bought us the unsalted version. I got tired of the art involved, and now I just slather it on.