Passover is an annual Jewish holiday that commemorates the biblical exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt. You know the story: you've probably seen The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston playing Moses, yelling at Pharaoh, "I'll give you my rifle when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!" Something like that. After Charlton joined the NRA, he kind of stuffed up the memory for me.
Anyway, the first night of Passover is next Monday and I'll be going to my parents' house for a big Passover meal with family and friends – think of it as a Jewish Christmas if the ham was brisket, the paper hats were skullcaps, and the cracker jokes were written by Judd Apatow.
And I quite enjoy the whole Passover experience even though I'm not religious at all: I'm what's known as a twice-a-year Jew – just Passover and the Annual Bagel-Eating Race sponsored by Glicks.
But I really get into the ceremony: I say the prayers, sing the songs, eat the Matzo balls, which are dense particles of collapsed gravitational matter sucking in all light and energy from the cosmos, but saltier. And I read from the Haggadah, the official ceremony handbook – think of it as the Footy Record of Passover, with comprehensive stats, match scoresheets and player previews.
My parents have an old set of Haggadahs and they hand one out to every guest at the table. They've had the same books since I was a kid, so all the pages are marked with decades of Katz family wear and tear. Food stains, drink drips, baby dribble, kiddie smudges, and yellow mystery blotches, possibly urine (it's a long night and you don't want to get trapped in the corner seat beside the bookshelf).
The first few pages of our family Haggadahs are mostly spattered with wine. You're supposed to drink wine during the ceremony, but my family are not big drinkers so the moment they inhale their first molecule of alcohol vapour, BANGO, they're knocking over wine glasses, giggling like idiots, slumping over in their seats and nodding off, which explains the candle burn-marks on some of the page edges. The next few pages are mostly creases and paper-rips.
This is a section with a line of text that goes "thy breasts have become firm, and thine hair is richly grown, yet thou art bare and naked" and every year my brother and I would start snickering, and every year mum would clomp us on the back of our head with a book.
Mum hit hard: if you look close at some copies, you can see dried-up clumps of bloodied scalp hair. Thankfully we only did this during our immature teenage phase – between the ages of 12 to last year. The middle of the book is a disaster. This is when the food is brought out, so every page is a painter's palette of soup spatters, meat juices, pickle brine, chicken grease, gefilte-fish ooze, and a red sneezed-out spray-effect, the result of our traditional Passover "game of dare" involving a tablespoon of ultra-hot horseradish-sauce and an unsuspecting new guest.
Mum and Dad's Haggadahs tell the story of the ancient Jewish people, but they also tell the story of the ancient Katz family – each page a spattery record of memories and moments, newborns and old friends, teenage smirking and tipsy giggling, ex-partners and next partners, strange edible delicacies and bad kosher wine, horseradish pranks and permanently-ruptured nasal cavities. These books are precious to us: they're our very own Dead Sea Scrolls. But in much worse condition.Â
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