Passover me, Please

Unleavened Lisa

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Hello and welcome to the Pooh Poo Pooh Podcast. I'm Lisa Mayer, and this is a Passover edition, and the name of the story is Passover Me, please. Every Passover my parents and sisters and I went to Uncle Max and Aunt Jenny's for the first Seder, the first meal of the holiday. Their Seder was the first night, much more exciting. Ours was the second night, much fancier food. The Seder was a huge deal, hours of singing, eating weird vegetables, dipping things into other things, Latsamatzah, and reading from the Passover Haggadah, which parses the thrilling story of our people's exodus from Egypt into the most boring and belabored analysis of exactly how many plagues were exacted. Except for one part. There is one phrase in the Haggadah, the Passover story, that tortured me for years Shadaiim Nachonu, meaning my breasts are growing, and the rest of it continues while I remain naked and bare. It was our family custom to go around the table, each person reading a paragraph. And guess who was in the middle of puberty? And guess who always got Shadaiim Nachonu, the phrase about the breasts growing? Even now I can see Uncle Max calculating, giving someone else around the table an extra reading, skimping on another, so long as the my breasts are growing part landed on me. Unlike the slaves in Egypt, I couldn't escape. The satyr at Aunt Jenny and Uncle Max's would continue for many more hours. My cousin Danny was studying at Karem Biyavna, a prestigious yeshiva in southern Israel, and had a ream of paper next to his plate, and each paper had a different Var Torah, a word of wisdom or a passage of intellect from the Torah, and of course Uncle Max wanted to hear them all. Another year one of the guests, Uncle Max and Aunt Jenny always had guests, had a custom to shove a huge amount of matzah in his mouth, eat it all in nine minutes, and swallow. My mother spent those nine minutes in horror, staring at the young man's wife who was trying to keep up. She did. When she got that last piece of matzas down, even my mother cheered. I remember walking home at three or four in the morning because we didn't drive the car on the holiday. One Seder night, our family got a police escort like we were stars of the movie The Ten Commandments. Oh Moses, Moses, Moses. I truly love the second Satyrs my husband Srly runs now, as rabbi of Temple Shalom in Auburn, Maine. Lots of people, a cater dinner, satir plates on every table, lots of wine and matzah. I love how the Hebrew school kids sing the four questions, the Manishana. Why is this night different? And I love that Srulli hides the Afikomin, the special middle matzah, and the kids go crazy looking for it all over the Schule. There are prizes involved. We play some rockin' songs too. My sons Zachary and Aaron and twins Johnny and Charlie play music with us and our new shul band, and it is so crazy joyous, and I am so inebriated by the time I get to lead the Who Knows One song that I sometimes mix up the four are the mothers and three are the fathers. Ah but this year for the first time I am going to hold my brand new granddaughter Nishama for as long as I can at the first Seder at Zachary and his wife Rabbi Eliana's home. And something tells me that this year again this new Bubby, this new grandmother, is going to get a certain reading that is magically gonna land on her. Last year Eliana did Uncle Max Proud. I could see her calculating, giving someone else around the table an extra reading, skimping on another, so long as the my breasts are going part landed on me. Zachary even wrote a new melody for the occasion. I will always miss my childhood satyrs, the old Mishigas, crazy excitement, Avadim Hayinu, once we were slaves, and it's hard not to be enslaved by old memories. But we're making new memories now for our own children and grandchildren. Ata Ata Bene Chorim. It is time to be free.