Surviving Passover - Mixed feelings and suggestions for next year

by Abigail “Abi” Weissman, Psy.D.

I’m not a Rabbi or a medical doctor. I’m here sharing what this holiday was like for me in the hopes that you can gain some nuggets that might be helpful for you. I will say that it feels extra odd to be publishing this blog post on Holocaust Remembrance Day while eating a prune Hamantashen, defrosted from Purim earlier this year. I’m posting anyways because being Jewish has often felt wonderfully complex and this year was no different. I love that I practice a religion that values questions (at least, the Jewish religion that I grew up with does) and goodness, I love to wrestle with them. With no further ado, here is my blog post on Surviving Passover - Mixed feelings and suggestions for next year.

I have mixed feelings about Passover. On one hand, I adore the holiday. It’s really a chance to completely alter my life by changing what I eat for 8 days. It makes me extra aware of how I utilize food in my own life, as comfort or as nourishment or as both. Do I skip lunch or take the chance to have meaningful time to sit and be with my body as I consume my meal? 

And Passover is one of the few times where I have strong rules around food besides being a vegetarian.

This has been one odd Passover for me.

I tried to prep early. I got lots of different kinds of foods that were pre-made or prepackaged from various online sources. I didn’t want to have another year where I couldn’t find matzah anywhere. 

I decided early not to go vegan this year. While going vegan is fabulous, going vegan during Passover, has not been a successful endeavor for me in the past. 

Happy Passover text with images of a Seder (festival) plate with matzah nearby over an orange background. Seder plate has the usual things on it (bitter herbs, charoset, an egg) and an orange in support of lesbians, a beet in place of the shank bone as a vegetarian substitute, flowers to support and celebrate sexuality, and olives to support peace in the Ukraine.

I also decided to cut myself some slack this year and eat kiniyot. Instead of feeling guilty as an Ashkenazi Jew (aka a Jew whose ancestors were originally from the central and eastern Europe area) who eats like a Sephardic Jew (Jews whose ancestors were from the Iberian peninsula) and consumes beans and corn, olives and rice,  I decided to do something different. I made the decision early along in the prep time that I was going to allow myself to listen to my body and eat kiniyot. Instead of being miserable trying to find new ways to eat matzah (unleavened cracker-like product), I enjoyed a bowl of quinoa, black beans, and sweet potatoes and felt good in my body AND in my Jewish practice.

This lesson was right in tune with the next one. Eating too much matzah for too many meals made me feel bloated and gross the next day. So, this year, I decided to not eat matzah for each meal. Or if I decided to enjoy matzah for breakfast and lunch, to return to my body and check in with how I felt before eating the next matzah-centered meal. 

I decided to stop freaking out over labels and whether or not each item I put in my body was listed as Kosher for Passover. I’m not Kosher at any other time of the year, so why now do I put myself through this? I used to bring salad dressing to restaurants when I would eat out with friends during Passover as a teenager. I was so afraid that I would eat wheat by accident, that I would order salad without the dressing and bring my own dressing and my own matzah to the table. It was okay and what I needed then, but not now. Now, it is too stressful to worry about all the labels all of the time.

Next year, I want to remind myself to save money for eating out or taking in food at those places that offer Kosher-enough for Passover foods for our family that will help my family eat. For us, this meant ordering a bunch of Himalayan lentil soup with rice that my kiddo could eat on for several meals.

I learned to be mindful about traveling on Passover. I am grateful for the ability and the access to visit others on Passover AND it was difficult for me to remember that I was easily tempted by non - Kosher for Passover food. Even the pretzels in the airline looked fabulous in their neat little packages. I might have drooled as I passed my pretzel packet along to another airline guest. I’ve had lots of practice being a vegetarian around meat eaters so I incorrectly thought that it would be easy to be aware of this difference too but it was not.

I learned again and again that I needed to be very very aware of each small way that I lived for those few days of travel. I was hungry and more so, I felt alone, like I was living in a world where no one else was Jewish and following these practices. It wasn’t true - I mean, my kid was following these statutes. My wife was going along with our traditions too. And, still, when I looked around the bustling airport or the lunch table, I felt so different. It was hard for me to remind myself over and over again how to honor these traditions. It was emotionally exhausting. To help me cope, I wrote (like this very blog post) and mediated more than I usually do.

There have been some wonderful times too, this Passover. Like my child’s amazing Passover farm camp experience, or doing the Seder (festive meal) with plague finger puppets. Recalling the stories from my past and from my People’s past and sharing this knowledge with my child and my loved ones has been incredible. I took more trips to the ocean too, something that often enlivens me.

I have to say that as it is Yom Ha’Shoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), I have also been reading stories from survivors and I am so so grateful that I can practice my religion without much fear. Sure, there are people who are often surprised to meet a Jewish person where I live and yes, many people have tried to convert me, but I still continue to practice, even when it’s hard. Today, I happily wore my This Is How I Roll Chanukah sweatshirt that I bought at a large business last December and didn’t get one negative comment. I was also unafraid to move out about in the world and no one asked me where my Star of David was or tried to burn down my home.

I am grateful that while I struggle at times to practice Judaism the way that feels most meaningful and most right to me, that I am pretty darn safe compared to my ancestors who barely escaped their European worlds and those neighbors who didn’t make it out at all.

Next year, I’ve decided to continuing to prep early and to take off time from clinical work during Passover. If I need to travel, I’ll do it with gratitude for the opportunity and prepare more salads for the road, or to go on a Kosher for Passover trip of some sort (it’s a dream to have all K of P meals prepped for me). I’ll schedule more time to emote because this holiday brings up lots of emotions for me and I’ll continue to be grateful for all the moments of joy and contemplation in between.

To those that celebrate, I hope that you and yours have had a meaningful Passover (Pesach) holiday and to those who don’t, I hope you learned a bit about some of the holiday’s traditions.