A Half-Baked Holiday

Noah Arbesfeld, Prozdor Grade 10

It was April yet again, and for yet another year’s Passover celebrations my entire family was seated around our kitchen table. Although the meal, roast chicken, had not varied since my birth, this Passover was to yield a different experience than any other Jewish holiday in my life. As the food was passed around the table, the matzah, square-shaped unleavened bread, appeared in front of me. I, a glasses-free fourth grader at the time, felt obligated to take a piece of the chalky-white material, and place it on my plate. Taking a bite, I winced as the cardboard-textured substance slowly fought its way down my throat. Staring down at my plate at the half-eaten matzah, I became filled with dread. I could not believe that this bland alleged ‘food’ was supposed to sustain me for the next eight days. This was to be my first year of officially observing Passover.

Throughout the weeks leading up to the Jewish holiday, our fourth grade Hebrew school class, had studied Passover, Pesach in Hebrew, in great detail. We had all believed that we had become experts on the holiday; we knew the story of how Moses delivered the enslaved Jews out of the hands of the Egyptians and into the ‘promised land’ of Israel. And our class of seventeen kids was well aware of the dietary restrictions Jews had to follow over Passover: absolutely no grain, or any food item that rises when cooked. We were taught that these laws derived from the original Passover story: Pharoah, the Egyptian ruler at the time, allowed the Jews to leave Egypt for only a brief time, so the Jewish did not have enough time to allow their bread to rise, forming matzah. This ancient story meant that we could eat no wheat, rice, grain, beans or even corn for an entire eight days, a punishment that seemed unfair to me simply because our ancestors had to eat a different type of bread for a few days. While some of the ten-year-olds in class felt no shame in passionately announcing their intentions to eat bread, those of us who wished to be perceived by our Jewish community as ‘good Jews’ decided to forbid grain from our diets for one week. However, now, at our kitchen table, as I was eating the pale matzah, I wondered if others in my class felt the same longing and dread as I did.

My question was soon answered. After two torturous days of watching my non-Jewish friends all devour sandwiches loaded with bread, I was present at our class’s Hebrew school meeting that Tuesday. We all checked in on each other’s progress; some had inadvertently (or not) eaten noodles, while others had drunk Gatorade, a source of forbidden corn syrup. My only offense up until that point had been a bag of Cape Cod potato chips that cleverly hid the warning ‘may contain corn oil and/or cottonseed oil.’ I quickly convinced myself that this bag contained one hundred percent cottonseed oil. I could not let little slip-ups like this influence my friends’ opinions of me.

I did not last the week. The half-baked cardboard bread could only satisfy a ten year old for so long. By about the sixth day, the craving for high fructose corn syrup grew too strong and I drank, in secret, a glass of apple juice. In tears, I confessed to my parents the second they returned home from work, however, nothing happened. I was not smote like the Egyptians, nor was I turned to a figurative pillar of salt. In fact, when I came clean to my classmates at Hebrew school on Sunday, none of them seemed to have any reaction. Contrary to what the Bible had taught me, my bad deed had gone entirely unpunished. Although the sanctity of Passover had been violated, neither my ancestors, nor my extremely old Jewish preschool teachers, were rolling over in their graves. As soon as I returned home, I ran to the cupboard and devoured a slice of the matzah, leaving crumbs on the floor all around me.

Today, my family and I observe very few of the six hundred and thirteen Jewish commandments. We don’t keep Kosher, we don’t observe the Sabbath, and we frequently use the lord’s name in vain. However, I have attempted to adhere to the anti-grain laws of Passover each April ever since my experience in fourth grade. I am no longer afraid of divine or parental retribution; rather, the opposite is true. That Passover, the Jewish community changed from a place of constant scrutiny to a place of acceptance; regardless of whether or not I ate pork. Passover, although being one of the more torturous Jewish experiences, has now become one of the main ways in which I identify with Jews in my family, in my synagogue, and throughout the world. And if eating matzah is what forges this connection, then so be it, even if it tastes like cardboard.