Pesach or Passover: would smell as sweet (Spiele 2020 pt. 1)

Part 1: Why is this night different (to me)

I love Pesach, or Passover, how I grew up saying it. I grew up very differently to how I am now, and something that isn’t addressed much is how even my words have changed. In addition to knowing and using more Hebrew than I ever did—or more accurately, could—in a general basis, something that I don’t think is discussed often enough for Baalei Teshuva like me, who had only cursory religious involvement for what’s still at least 2/3^rds of his life or more, is that I had vocabulary all over the place. I used the English Passover, a fair amount of Yiddish where my current friends use Hebrew, and pronounced the final letter in the Hebrew alphabet and indeed my name in a sort of ad hoc way—knowing only charoseT but also briS for instance—and those were just whatever I picked up by chance over the years on the few occasions when it was relevant. In that sense, it was required for me to do what few others have the opportunity to do: to pick how I wanted to speak. I love speaking—no one writes 5 spiele for Pesach in the middle of summer if he doesn’t—and my interest in linguistics has helped move me along I suppose, but as I learned Hebrew (if you’ll permit me to call what I’ve done learning Hebrew) I went with the Ashkenazic pronunciation in this and on other arrangements. The fact that I learned Yiddish before even looking at Hebrew made that somewhat of an easy decision, since a fair amount of Hebrew is built in, and built in with a specific accent, but you can see that having had to reflect on the specific languages, and then even the specific accents of those languages (including English as well), it should be sufficient to say that I’ve had to choose almost everything else.

What I didn’t choose, not really anyway, was my feelings toward Pesach. I had no idea about what Shavuous, Lag B’Omer, Tisha B’Av and the others were, and probably even at 15 I could not have given a sufficient explanation of Rosh Hashana or Shabbos. What I did have though, even if it wasn’t in the way I would do it myself now, was a Seder. It wasn’t kosher, and it wasn’t until I went to meet the parents of a girl one year that I realized how much we lacked in terms of songs and prayers, though that year and those memories only added to my current nostalgia and jubilation at the chag. I had to develop new feelings to all of those other things, but despite being limited in my diet beyond the ordinary restrictions, and being limited in activity for several days, and everything else that comes along with this, I still have a very dear love for the holiday—no one writes 5 spiele for Pesach in the middle of summer if he doesn’t—whether that be the single Seder and car-ride home of my childhood or the 8 days (plus the next 42) that it is to me now.

I couldn’t say why this year I was particularly nostalgic. Writing the bulk of this in Austria in the hot summer months away from my family perhaps made me think of home, and of lost Jewish connections. Perhaps I realized that I had already had the last Seder hosted by my family—though corona proved that wrong—and that I am becoming my own man who will have to think of how he wants it for his own family one day, Bezras Hashem, but whatever the case, while everything has changed around Pesach for me, it has always meant most of the same, steady things.