matzah and mushrooms and maror, oh my!
Leon Kraiem
Hi friends,
Moadim l’simcha. A few reflections on my seder, and on the holiday, and on etcetera.
I write to you surprisingly well-rested, having basically recovered from staying up all night Wednesday-Thursday expounding on the Exodus, just like those famous rabbis did in B’nei Brak those many years ago. I’ve heard that the story told in the Haggadah is actually code for those rabbis’ mobilization for the Bar Kochba Rebellion, and that’s possible, but I can also now confirm that holding seder until the time of the morning Shema is not only possible but actually quite satisfying.
Of course, you need a special gang to commit that hard to the bit. And this was about the crowd you’d expect: The hosts – a friend of mine whom we’ll call Ziv, and his girlfriend, whom we’ll call Natalia – had carefully curated a seder of five: the two of them, plus me, plus two of Natalia’s friends, wonderful people whom I will refer to, for these purposes, as “earnest Pardes-types,” and those who understand will understand.
They’d also curated a seder for the seder, so to speak, to facilitate the vibe: before sitting down we baked our own matzah, hurriedly rolling the dough, frantically perforating it with forks, and throwing it into the oven, while one of Natalia’s friends used the stopwatch app on her phone to ensure that the matzos were removed from the oven within eighteen minutes of the flour’s first contact with water.
Ziv also brought with him some wild lettuce that he’d foraged from San Simon Park, which – according to scholars, according to him – is the most likely candidate for the original bitter herb used by the rabbis at the time of the Second Temple. It is apparently extremely and entirely bitter, in a way that even horseradish is not.
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I say “apparently,” because I didn’t myself partake of the authentic maror, just as I didn’t partake in the (microdoses of) psilocybin tea that the other participants drank at the start of the seder, or even in our own homemade matzos, in deference to my own anxiety -- lurking just around the corner, waiting to pounce -- over what these contributions to the seder might do to my body, mind, and soul, respectively.
But it’s important to note here, and to underline and to highlight, that my refraining from ingesting any of those three substances did not, in any way, place me outside the circle of the seder. Not only was there no peer pressure – that common, everyday sort of enslavement, which (like that of the Jews under Pharaoh) is not really in the power of its executor, but nevertheless requires of the victim a leap of faith if it’s ever to be overcome – but I was fully and truly an equal part of the entire night, including the little tea ceremony prior to Kadesh, which Ziv had invited me to lead, after I’d suggested to him that he incorporate the Traveler’s Prayer into his agenda for the night.
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What I told those gathered around the long, low-to-the-ground table – we were sitting on cushions on the floor, illuminated largely by candles and Christmas lights, because of course we were – was that, from a religious point of view, we are all, already, on a drug. We are souls who have taken a drug called Body, a wild psychedelic that puts LSD to shame; it disturbs our awareness of the relationship between consciousness and stuff, produces hallucinations of things that don’t exist, and has us genuinely believing that other things, which exist as much as anything possibly can, are hallucinations; what's more, Body's most extreme effect – ego birth – is experienced by everyone who takes it at anything but the most minimal dose (so small that it’s measured in months, rather than years) -- and that sort of microdosing has gotten a lot less common these days anyway.
Occasionally – including, sometimes, through the use of more-or-less powerful trip-stoppers like mushrooms or what have you, we achieve a moment of lucidity, even while under Body’s influence. But for the most part, the best we can do (and it’s more than enough) is to remember that we’re on a drug; that we’ve only been on it a short while, and that it will soon wear off; that we made all the necessary preparations before taking it; that we had an intention going into it which, though not consciously-rememberable, we are still aware of intuitively; that our trip-sitter, who loves us, is right by our side, even if we can’t see her, and she would never let us wander off a bridge, even a very narrow one; that so long as we don’t try to fight the drug – which is futile – we won’t have a bad trip, though we may have a hard one; but that what we’re doing is serious business, and if we spend the whole time chasing visuals and goofing around with the texture of the sweater we’re wearing, we will have squandered a vital opportunity to grow.
In reality, my friends were taking hardly any psilocybin (probably the equivalent, in Body terms, of a miscarriage-dose), so this was more of a general intention for the seder itself. If we were lucky, I said in so many words, then we’d at least sober up for a moment when it comes to that one, specific drug-induced confusion that has us forget we were all literally present when God took us out of Egypt. It can’t have happened more than five minutes ago, in reality – we just can’t remember, because we’re on drugs.
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Now, as the above choice of metaphor suggests, we wouldn’t have been able to stay up all night discussing the Four Sons as an Internal Family System were we not a group of unmarried 30-year-olds with few obligations in life, thousands of miles from our families.
At an ordinary seder, with tired old people, crabby teenagers, an along-for-the-ride gentile neighbor, and – most especially – little kids, whom you’d be lucky to park at their seat for long enough to ask four questions (or even just one question, stretched out 4x) – you’d have to get to the eating, then get to the leaving, a lot earlier.
It’s important to recognize that, from the perspective of actually fulfilling the mitzvah, that latter situation is the ideal, even if it does involve passing over all the Hebrew, quashing any attempts at textual analysis, and rushing through huge chunks of the Haggadah. What, after all, does ‘Haggadah’ refer to? And you should tell (v’higadta) your children, on that day.” The Torah does not say, you will expound to each other, on that day.
This whole being-taken-out-of-Mitzrayim business (we use the word yetziah, but it seems to me a more apt one would be hotza’ah) is not (only) a metaphor for each individual breaking the bonds that prevent him from self-actualizing, or even just the plot of the book that we all love to study together. The story of the Exodus is, as Shais Taub puts it, the theme song of the Jewish people.
It isn't enough to recognize that without the story of the Exodus, Jews wouldn’t be Jews. One must internalize that without the Exodus, we Jews wouldn’t be. And if we were, then what we, and our children, and our children’s children, would be, is slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.
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This year, it was easy to have a fun seder, and to talk about the Exodus, and the Haggadah itself, and to become a little untethered from that particularist-and-not-metaphorical ground truth of the seder without doing something unwashably profane. It wasn’t that way last year, or the year before.
In 2024 and 2025, There were no magic mushrooms, or foraged maror, or home-baked matzah. Nor did a guy from my minyan – let’s call him Betzalel – make with his husband a long, running-water Sea of Reeds, cradled inside a hand-crafted riverbed, to bisect his living room, such that every participant had to physically cross Yam Suf in order to start the ceremony. There wasn’t, in other words, all the fun and joy and in-consistency,-creativity of ritual.
Last year, before heading to New York, I stopped at the Hostages and Missing Families Forum tent on Azza Street, and I saw that they were offering special Haggadot. Then, I noticed that they were separated into two stacks – one, containing a stapled, ‘paperback’ version – that you could pretend was made in a hurry, for one-time use – and the other a bound, ‘hardcover’ one – which they unmistakably had a lot of time to work on, and seemed to be made to last. I took the one that was less unbearable.
Now, to be clear, this year has its problems too, and it is not one in which we are all truly free – tens of thousands of guys are in combat in southern Lebanon as we speak, in addition to pilots flying over Beirut and Tehran, and while Jerusalem is fairly quiet, people elsewhere in the country might get a dozen missile barrages a day between the two fronts.
But it is one that, on the national level at least, has some access to the expanse of past, present, and future, after so long living within the tunnel-vision that is adaptive when trauma is not yet post-. A case in point is that certain words – like, in the preceding sentence, ‘tunnel’ – don’t immediately cry out with an upsetting association the way they always used to.
On Wednesday night – around 1 or 2am, I’d guess – we spent a while on the statement that even in the Messianic Age, we will still tell of the Exodus from Egypt. The straightforward explanation for this is something like: We aren’t free people, who used to be slaves – we are slaves, whom God has freed; if you are really redeemed, then redemption can’t exist merely in the simple-past tense. This year, it’s easy to feel that pull to forget.
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There was one moment that bears noting, though, when the current situation – still not exactly peace – became more palpable. Around 3:20 a.m., shortly after we’d finally started eating, our meal was disturbed by a missile attack.
As the sirens blared around us, we hustled out the door to the apartment building down the block, and made our way into its narrow little shelter, where everyone else had already gathered, sleepy children on tired parents’ laps. And one couldn't help but reflect, in that moment, that this experience was probably not unlike that of the Israelites, staying inside, blood on their doorposts, as God went house to house above them killing each Egyptian family’s firstborn.
As the interceptions rattled the shelter, one felt both protected, and in the midst of something from which protection was necessary. After enough time had passed, we hastily scurried out and returned to our feast of freedom, reclining and expounding, expounding and reclining, and that much more able to remember what it was like the first time around.
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Two addenda:
One: I’ve made a second Pesach playlist. Maybe I’ll even manage to write up a commentary for it before the end of the holiday, we’ll see.
And two: I have made it a Sefirat HaOmer practice this year to read one perek a day of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Book of Mercy,’ a collection of something-like psalms. There are fifty of them, so it works out. If you’ve never had a look at it, I recommend ordering a copy this year.
As always, I am alive, and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are –
Chagim u’zmanim l’sasson,