Why do I (almost) turn into someone else on Passover?

I admit that I am fairly uptight about what foods I will serve my kids. We buy mostly organic produce, local dairy and eggs, and absolutely no foods with trans-fats or high fructose corn syrup. The effect on my daughters’ taste buds has been uneven. My five year old loves vegetables and brown rice and actually squeals with delight when offered seaweed for a snack. My three year old likes treats, treats, and more treats, with a few more treats thrown in for good measure. She subsists on a lot of fruit and string cheese, with cereal, scrambled eggs (with spinach – ha!), and the occasional smoothie. And, of course, a steady supply of Trader Joe’s bars.

But for some reason, come Passover I am tempted to buy the strangest, and most uncharacteristically crappy, foods. I did my annual Passover shop last week, driving over an hour to the nearest large Jewish community. I had perused the sale flyers and had a mental list of everything I needed – turkey, chicken, your basic array of matzoh products, jelly, cooking wine, and some macaroons. Understand that the supermarket closest to my house has a Passover table. They cobble together a few boxes of matzoh, some jars of Mrs. Adlers gefilte fish, those strange but ubiquitous jellied fruit slices, and whatever else looks Jewish (usually some leftover chanukah gelt and quite possibly some chametzdik egg noodles.) But the Waldbaums? – they had AISLES of Passover food. AISLES. And as I wandered down those aisles, my friends, I mysteriously turned into someone else’s mom.

Marshmallows and chocolate bars? We need those. (I actually imagined my family sitting around a campfire, making matzoh smores.)  Kosher for Passover Italian Ice? Only $9 a box? Definitely a must have. A tiny jar of curry sauce for $7? How could I possibly live a week without curry sauce, even though I haven’t bought curry sauce since I left Brooklyn 15 years ago? When I picked up the brick of hydrogenated cotonseed oil labeled as Passover margarine and considered it for even a split second, I should have realized it was time for an intervention.

While I stood in line at checkout, I regained at least some of my senses. Just because I can eat it on Passover, doesn’t mean I have to eat it on Passover. I did hold on to two bags of Joya sesame candies and a tub of Sabra vegetarian chopped liver, but I put back the rest of the non-essentials. (Chocolate chips are essential since I wait all year to stuff my face with matzoh toffee crunch.) I’m now planning menus that involve all of the foods we normally eat – fresh produce, fish, poultry, dairy, a few more potatoes than usual, and a limited number of whole grains. (Well, one, anyway – quinoa.) 

What’s the strangest (or most exciting) Kosher for Passover purchase you’ve made?

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Overheard

5 year old: Get OUT of my chair.

3 year old (in tears): You’re acting like Pharoah!

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Home-shuling at Shul

small, but so beautiful after our ikea-remodel!

Our house is very small – two bedrooms, a 13×13 eat-in kitchen, a living room and a sunroom, but no dining room. Consequently, it’s very hard to have more than one other family over for shabbat dinner. In fact, hosting even one other family of four requires exiling the children to eat in the sun room.  It would be easier in the summer, when we could eat in the backyard, if only the mosquitoes didn’t strike with a vengeance. (I like to throw a big sukkah party every fall to make up for all the entertaining I don’t do the rest of the year.)

So last night I threw a big shabbat dinner. Many of my favorite people in town came with their kids, and I didn’t have to cook, pay for it, or clean up very much. I even had babysitters!

What was the secret? I volunteered to organize a shabbat potluck for my shul. I made a flyer, reserved a room, and asked for a small budget to buy grape juice, challah, and hire two teenagers to play with the kids after dinner. Eleven families attended. We began with some quality together time – I led/taught a few shabbat songs before dinner, then we all lit candles together (I bought a bag of votives) and we stood in a circle and blessed our children. After all the brachot, the kids took off almost immediately for the playground, and the adults sat around eating delicious vegetarian food and having grown up conversation. Someone even brought beer!

I complain sometimes (ok, fairly often) about the lack of resources for family programming at our shul. The flip side of this arrangement is that volunteers are welcome and given a fair amount of latitude to create, well, anything, if they are willing to take some initiative. So, while I may not have a dining room, I do have plenty of initiative. I’m looking forward to creating some more off-site home-shuling, at least until they hire a new family educator.

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More Alef-Bet

Every month I write a column about Jewish children’s books for the PJ Library newsletter. My new column about Michelle Edwards book, Alef-Bet, came out today. It goes something like this:

When I was a child, the very first stories I read about Israel were from K’tonton in Israel, a book about a thumb-sized boy who travels to the Holy Land as a stowaway in a suitcase. I learned many things about Israelis from Ktonton. First of all, they recite a lot of quotes from the Bible. They also go to receptions at the president’s house, ride goats, eagerly invite foreign visitors into their homes, and work the soil with their bare hands. Then they usually recite more quotes from the Bible.

Like it? You can read the rest here.

 

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This Jewish Life

did you know he makes great balloon animals?

Many years ago, there was a story on This American Life about some guys who attempted to use scientific data to create the world’s most annoying song. Admittedly, I love almost everything on this American Life, and it’s not just because Ira Glass was the magician at my 4th birthday party. (Really! It’s true!) But this story was one of my absolute favorites – I listened to it again at the gym last week and elicited suspicious looks each time I laughed aloud on the elliptical. The team conducted research to determine the musical elements that people find most distasteful, and then recorded a song using just about all of them, including synthesizer, children’s music, holiday lyrics, accordion, bagpipe, tuba, opera, rap and, of course, cowboys. You can listen to the song streaming here, but be forewarned, it’s both awful and  strangely difficult to turn off.

I was reminded of this episode yesterday, after opening up the review copy of Dayenu, a new children’s haggadah and accompanying cd from KTAV publishers. Why is it that so much contemporary Jewish music seems to draw its inspiration from the same research as the guys on This American Life? Overly earnest children singing atop synthesizers, with lyrics that try to cram way too much information into way too few beats. (At least there’s usually no opera-rap.) I may not be crazy about dayenu and chad-gadya, but I have no desire to replace those classics with “Moses was a shepherd when he saw a bush a-flame” or “free to be LIKE you and me” which seems criminally close to Marlo Thomas’ glorious soundtrack of my own childhood.

I would not, in a million years, use this haggadah at my seder. But, believe it or not, I like it anyway. Sort of. As I type this, my daughters are listening to the cd for the fourth time in two days. (This time, with the door closed, thank God.) My five year old is belting out the Mah Nishtana, and after one listen, my three year old, who knows next to nothing about the story of Passover said “can we listen to the song about Moses and the burning bush again?” If they like it, I like it. If they are learning something, even better. Or to paraphrase Tevye, “God bless and keep this haggadah….far away from me.”

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Making seders kid-friendly: A contest!

 

i hate these

As Passover approaches, I’m seeking your best ideas for making the seder fun and meaningful for children. Last month I wrote a column for the PJ Library about our family’s re-enactment of the Exodus from Egypt. You can read it here.

 

What’s worked (or backfired) for you? Share your ideas – I’ll choose the one I consider the most creative and original and I’ll send the winner an autographed copy of my book A Mezuzah on the Door. A helpful hint: anything that involves joyfully tossing artificial boils or dead cattle across the table automatically loses.

The deadline for submissions is April 5th.

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And the winner is…..

Phyllis, aka Ima on the Bima, whose name was selected from the list by Random.org! Enjoy your Alef-Bet Yoga for Kids poster, compliments of Kar-Ben.

Mazel Tov!

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Something Jewish about breastfeeding

I spent the afternoon with my friend Tanya today, who writes a fantastic breastfeeding blog for Motherwear. I promised I would write “something Jewish about breastfeeding” for her.

 “The child grew and was weaned, and on the day Isaac was weaned Abraham held a great feast.” Genesis 21:8-21

 

not my child, not my breast

It might be hard to imagine throwing a party to celebrate weaning. Many of my peers breastfed their children into toddlerhood, and even then had palpable ambivalence about ending the nursing relationship. But when I came across this passage in the Torah, shortly after my daughter Ella stopped nursing, I was struck by the idea. If only I had celebrated reaching this milestone rather than apologizing for it!

My first daughter Ella and I had a very rough start with breastfeeding. She came into the world jaundiced, and consequently, very sleepy. With no lactation support, I didn’t know that I should pump during this time in order to build up a strong milk supply, and at a few weeks old she was diagnosed with failure to thrive. I was deeply committed to exclusively breastfeeding, and met with the lactation consultant at the local hospital (who had been on vacation during our extended hospital stay) as well as every La Leche leader in Southern Oregon. I tried every recommendation, but because of our late start, nothing made a difference. Ultimately, and with a broken heart, I gave into her doctor’s insistence that we supplement with formula. Even then, I continued to seek solutions, and after another month of pumping every three hours, day and night, with a hospital grade pump, I was able to increase my supply to the point where my daughter began refusing the formula.

I share this to say that I fought hard for the privilege of breastfeeding my daughter. But, on her first birthday, when she refused the breast, I breathed a sigh of relief. While I probably wasn’t ready to initiate the weaning process, I was really, truly ready to stop breastfeeding. Despite all the progress I had made, I never stopped being anxious about breastfeeding. I never stopped worrying about how much milk she was getting, and I never really gained confidence as a nursing mom. So when she refused the breast, with the stubbornness that she now displays as a kindergartener, I comfortably glided into “don’t offer, don’t refuse” mode. She never reached for the breast again.

I poured my attention and energy into other forms of care-giving. I felt liberated, confident, and ready to try to get pregnant again. But I also felt self-conscious, just as I did in those early weeks of her life, when I would take out a bottle of supplemental formula. I worried other mothers thought I wasn’t quite committed enough to giving my daughter “the best.” I delivered long explanations about self-weaning to anyone who would listen, and they felt an awful lot like excuses.

Instead, we could have thrown a party, as Abraham did for Issac. Dear friends, let’s celebrate this child who has grown and thrived despite impossible odds (according to the Torah, Sarah was 90 when she conceived.)  While at first I questioned why Abraham held the party instead of Sarah, I realized that party must have been meant to honor her as well. Loved ones gathered to celebrate a mother who found joy late in life, and would probably not live to bear another child. Yet, she was allowing her son to move on with grace to the next of many stages of increasing independence.

Zoe was born 10 months later. Determined to do a better job, I pulled out my Medela pump at the first sign of jaundice and had her weighed several times a week until we were convinced that all was well. I was jubilant and for the first time, felt great about breastfeeding. But at her six-month checkup, when she was still nursing exclusively and on demand (and refusing any kind of bottle with a now familiar stubbornness), we discovered she had actually lost weight over the last two months. All my anxieties returned, and once again, I became a slave to the baby scale.

I didn’t have a party when Zoe weaned, either. But I learned something from Sarah and Abraham. Weaning didn’t need to be a time of mourning, but instead of time of celebration. I gave myself permission to initiate the “don’t offer, don’t refuse” process as Zoe approached one year. When she quickly weaned, I didn’t make excuses and I didn’t feel remorse. I was proud of the obstacles I had overcome to raise two beautiful, healthy daughters and was pleased to take a tiny step back to watch them grow.

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Using up chametz

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be trying to use up all of our chametz – the wheat, oats, barley, rye and spelt products in our kitchen – to prepare for Passover. (The rye and spelt part will be a snap.) Whatever we don’t consume, we give to non-Jewish friends, but I enjoy having an excuse for a month long carb-fest. (Despite the axiom, I could, in fact, live on bread alone.)

Tonight I made a tray of blueberry crumble bars which use up exactly 3 cups of chametz. Fortunately, when I got home from tutoring the tray was already half-gone, so I can make another batch soon. We never get sick of these. Here’s the recipe – I usually substitute whole wheat flour for the white in order to convince myself that it’s ok to serve them to my daughters for breakfast. I use Trader Joe’s frozen pesticide-free wild blueberries and frequently skip the lemon juice part. They come out looking sort of like this:

 

I did not take this picture. I did not make this bar.

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Should I stay or should I go?

A couple of weeks ago I posted a listed of reasons to join a shul. My #1 reason? It’s not going to get any better without you. But what if you’re starting to wonder whether it can get any better, even with you?

We’ve been members of the same synagogue for almost as long as we’ve lived here. I’ve held various teaching positions there, and run several family programs as a volunteer. Our younger daughter was named there, I celebrated the release of my first picture book there, and I go there to say kaddish for my father. For a home-shuler, I’m fairly attached to my shul.  I can live with the lackluster services, not enough children’s programming, ugly wood panelling and even uglier turquoise carpet. It’s like a quirky uncle who wears leisure suits and tells bad jokes – he’s tolerable, and even kind of charming. But what if he unexpectedly punched someone in the nose. Wouldn’t we stop visiting? 

Last week, two staff members were treated in a way that I found extremely troubling. I emailed the presidents of the board, and when their response didn’t feel satisfactory, I went to the board meeting last night to speak out against their handling of these personnel matters. It made me feel a little better to speak up, but in the end, it didn’t change a thing and no one responsible expressed any regret.

So now I face a dilemma. Do I continue our family’s membership, even though at this moment it feels very distasteful to write a check to the institution? Or do I resign on principal, even though it’s the only game in town in my denomination-of-choice (and we live right around the corner?)

Has there ever been a time when you considered leaving a shul on principle? And in the end – did you, or didn’t you?Please share your stories and maybe I can learn from your wisdom.

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