Salivating for Seder

As a child, my familiarity with Jewish culture extended no further than any information I’d managed to gather from a calendar featuring extravagant bar mitzvahs (including parties held in top Chicago hotels). And as for Jewish cuisine, kosher was simply a foreign term, indicating something I didn’t eat. My mom (who had been the assistant to two conservative rabbis) told me “kosher” meant she was guilty of eating chicken salad in the synagogue’s kitchen. 

My next lesson in Judaism came from a girlfriend’s invitation to her Passover Seder. She taught me that the Seder shindig had a set menu, included periods of reclining, and featured enough matzos and wine to feed gentile friends. I thought wine and reclining sounded sexy, but she reminded me we were talking religion, so I repressed my baser visualizations with the familiar childhood image of an old man in a robe feeding me bread and wine from the pulpit.

My girlfriend helped me understand pieces of the Seder puzzle, so hopefully the next time I’m invited for Seder, I won’t do something like walk into the kitchen and bite into a hardboiled egg before the proper time (as I did), since now I understand—duh!—it’s a symbol for sacrifice.

The Shank Bone
The official meat for the Seder came from a lamb offered as the sacrifice on the afternoon before Passover, then prepared and refrigerated until placed on the Seder plate. My girlfriend kindly replaced the dish with a chicken neck on the plates of any of her guests (me) who might have run out of her apartment at the first sniff of any charred lamb.

The Egg
My girlfriend cut me some slack when I pulled that sneaky move with the hardboiled egg and informed me that the egg was meant to be both an offering and a symbol of mourning for the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. She showed me how we would (in due time) dip the eggs in salt water before we continued with the meal. I sat in mourning as I contemplated the possibility of sneaking another egg when she went back in the kitchen.