Lurching toward Passover
Between a visit to a nursing home and an appointment in my office today, I stopped into one of my favorite food haunts here in central Queens- a wonderful pita bakery on Main Street in Kew Gardens Hills. All week long, each and every day, they bake fresh pita, laffa, and a variety of cookies and cakes.
But come Thursday, in advance of the coming Shabbat, this bakery broadens its menu of offerings, and to walk anywhere near it is to smell something truly extraordinary. It’s a taste of heaven in this world.
So between the nursing home and my office, I stopped in to get one of the many varieties of stuffed pitas that they make- Jewish fast food- and my favorite counter woman, a lovely Israeli woman whom I’ve known for years and love speaking Hebrew with, says to me “You really have to taste this- it’s just wonderful.”
“Oy,” I said aloud, “one more temptation. What is it?”
“It’s a hamantasch,” she said. “But a wonderful one. Raspberry filling, and great dough. Who do you know who makes raspberry hamantaschen?”
I tasted it, and of course, she was right. It was delicious, and a welcome diversion from the ubiquitous prune and apricot fillings. But then I paused, and said to her “Hamantaschen? Already? It was just Tu B’Shvat! Purim’s not for a few more weeks!”
“Yes,” she said, “of course. But isn’t it wonderful to think about Purim? Because just a few weeks after Purim is Passover, and then it’s spring, and don’t you love spring?”
That’s about when she lost me. As a religious Jew, I of course appreciate the significance of Passover, not to mention of Purim, and who doesn’t like spring? But when she said those few sentences so easily and earnestly, I realized exactly how much my anticipation of the coming cycle of spring festivals is tinged with more than a little cringing. Passover has its own gravitational pull, and once one is, if you will, sucked into it, there is a certain loss of control that is professionally daunting. Purim spills into Passover, which spills into Yom Hashoa, which spills into Yom Ha’atzma’ut… and by the time the whole cycle has played itself out, many, many hours of work later, I inevitably feel as if I’ve been through the ringer and then some.
All of this was going through my head when she said “don’t you love spring.” I stood there in place, kind of frozen. “Well, don’t you,” she said?
“Yes,” I said, “of course I love spring. But I’d love to just once try a version of it without the chaos that it brings.” She laughed and handed me another hamantasch. Such a lovely woman… In a million years I don’t think she would understand what I was saying, and there was absolutely nothing to be gained by trying harder.
The truth is, I depend on her, and people like her, to be exactly the way they are, because they remind me to enjoy myself a little as I’m going through that ringer. And I usually do.
But I rarely look forward to it…