What Am I Doing In Detroit: Pesach in Israel

When I bought the restaurant, the first mistake I made was buying it two weeks before Pesach (Passover). We thought it was smart to take over before Pesach, so we could get the profits from the Pre-Pesach rush. We might have had a chance if the two key employees hadn't quit right away. Long story short, it was a disaster and I was going to sleep every night at 2-3AM panicking about how I would get through the next day. Needless to say, I didn't have any time to clean my house for Pesach. I don't know if I ever knew how the house got cleaned, I think my mother and sister did most of it without telling me. When Pesach finally started, I felt such relief. For a little over a week all the stress of the restaurant was gone and forgotten. Ever since then, Pesach has been my favorite Yom Tov (holiday). With my parents owning a bakery, Pesach was also the one time a year that the whole family was on vacation (more or less).

Now that the restaurant is temporarily closed and I'm living in Israel, I wasn't sure how I'd feel about it. It's kind of a tough holiday. Cleaning for a ~~month~~ ~~week~~ ok fine it was only about a day for me, eating tons of Matza and drinking tons of wine (wait, was I trying to say this as a bad thing?), ~~coconut~~ fingernails in everything! Turns out, I still love it (not the coconut). Even though I don't have much work related stress these days, I still felt the relief when Yom Tov started, maybe it's like muscle memory or something?

On Erev Pesach, I went with my Father in-law to burn the Chametz. In Bayit Vegan there is one big city approved fire that the fire department ensures is done properly and safely and he insisted we go there as opposed to one of the hundreds of (illegal) fires around the neighborhood. Normally, I'm not one to be overly concerned about rules, but based on what I saw around town, I completely agree with this one. You would think in the aftermath of the tragic story from Brooklyn where 7 kids died in a fire, we'd be a little more careful than normal around fire, sadly not. There were fires everywhere, with young kids playing around them unsupervised. Then entire city smelled and just in my quiet neighborhood I saw two fires that rekindled over Yom Tov, as they were not extinguished properly. Oh well, I still have Lag Baomer to look forward to.

Pesach is an enormously expensive holiday. I only bought matza, wine and snacks for our house and spent a fortune. I did splurge a little on the matzah and wine and I have to say, I've never had better. We ate all the Yom Tov meals by my in-laws, who were nice enough to host not just us, but my sisters and their friends as well! I don't know how they did it, we didn't even make it over there to help prepare (I hope my mother isn't reading this).

Eating with the in-laws brings up a few complications. As permanent residents of Israel, they only keep one day of Yom Tov and we keep two. Still, they made us a whole seder for the second night. They're also sefardim and can eat kitniyot on Pesach, while we ashkenazim cannot. Once again, they sacrificed for us. Going off on a tangent, because I was less busy this year, I had more time to see what was going on in the world (ok, fine, just the internet world) and lots of people are going crazy over kitniyos! Personally, I don't get what's so hard about going a week without, but people are freaking out. Quite a few ashkenazim (especially in Israel) have done away with the minhag and started eating kitniyos. I'll keep my opinions about that to myself. What bothers me is that I see some of these people insulting others for being so stupid as to continue their minhag to not eat kitniyos. Why is it so hard to respect other people's choices, especially when you want people to respect your choice to eat it? Things like this drive me crazy, I'm even considering making Schlissel challah this year out of spite.

One fun part about keeping two days Yom Tov is that I got to lead the second seder for my wife, two sisters, two seminary girls, my Mother in-law's friend Harriet and cousin Joe (everyone knows cousin Joe, right?). I thought I'd speed through the seder and get to sleep early, since we stayed up till 5am after the first seder talking about...leaving Egypt or something. The downsides of keeping a second day are that 1. The closest shul with a minyan is a half hour walk up the mountain. 2. All the lights on the stairways of the apartment buildings were turned off and we had to climb the stairs in the dark.

On Chol Hamoed we hoped to go on a number of outings. The first trip we planned was to Masada. We were going to go on Monday, the first day of Chol Hamoed for us and the nicest weather day of the week. Unfortunately, Nehama couldn't walk so well due to an unfortunate issue related to her trying to wear fancy shoes for Yom Tov, so we delayed until Tuesday. The forecast was for 90 degree sunny weather, so I wanted to go early in the morning and be done before the sun was at it's peak. Oh well. With delays and traffic, I started climbing just after 1PM when it was already 90 degrees out. The rest of the family took the cable car to the top and I thought I'd meet them there after a short 2KM hike. The guy by the entrance to the hiking path told me to expect it to take an hour to walk up. Of course I was determined to do it in 45 minutes or less. Due to an unfortunate mix up between the 2KM distance and the pace I set with my iPhone in minutes per mile (not KM), for the first 15 minutes I walked significantly faster than I needed to and burned myself out. I ended up needing to stop for breaks every time I found shade (which was not very often). All told it took 45 minutes of walking and 20 minutes of breaks to make it to the top, but I did not die! :-) One of the more interesting things about the trip was hearing my FIL's take on the story of Masada. He doesn't believe the popular story to be correct. It's very interesting and I would share it with you, except this paragraph is very long already and I probably won't remember it accurately.

We planned several other trips, but ended up staying local, going to the Kotel and that's about it. I made Fried Matzah (or whatever you might know it as) for the first time and I couldn't believe how easy it was. I think it's going to be a regular year round meal for me. We were worried about what Matis would eat over Pesach, but he loved my mother's recipe for Matzah Apple Kugel so much that I had to make two extra 9 x 13 pans for him (I have my suspicions that someone else might have snuck a few pieces).

For the last days, we only had my sisters as guests, so it was a bit quieter. Also the last day for us fell out on Shabbos, so it was almost like my in-laws were also keeping it also, we didn't have to walk up the stairs in the dark, which was nice. I didn't take as many pictures as I normally do, but here are the few that I got.