Always Time

Completed Work.

It IS Time Travel - with Poppets! - 3rd Panel

The Future panel.

Past and Present are posted immediately below if you missed them.

Where Both Sides can Agree

A pious fool is he who sees a child struggling in the water and says, "I'll take off my tefilin and then save the child." - Talmud Jerushalmi: Sota

This Will Fix it

"Hmmn, she's sick again, how tiresome that must be for her. Some strawberries should help."

"Don't be silly, she should have Whipped Cream, it fixes everything."

"Strawberries have anti-oxidants and Vitamin C, what good will Whipped Cream do her?"

"It's pretty and it tastes good. See. And she's just sick again,  she doesn't have cancer. Just bad luck with bacteria this month."

"It does look prettier this way."

"Told you so."

"Something's missing though. I don't really think this will do it."

"You may be right, but what's missing?" 

"We Know."

"It is Mandatory. We shall get started immediately. This will fix it."

"Well, if they're going to do that, we should certainly do this."

"Hey! That's not healthy!"

"No but it's chocolate and it goes with coffee. It's the rule of 4."

"There's a rule of 4? I don't know that rule."

"Well then you just weren't paying attention. Coffee, chocolate, strawberries, whipped cream. You see how it works?"

"Not really."

"Trust me. The chocolate will make sure that this will fix it"

"Trust you?"

"OK! Everyone ready? Let's call her down - she'll be good as new in no time, or at least happier."

"Shouldn't she be writing for the Embarrassed Embassy tonight?  She might not get to it if we interrupt her." 

"It's OK. We'll make an announcement. Announcements solve everything that Whipped Cream and chocolate don't cover."

"And Coffee"

"Coffee is Mandatory."

"Righto"

Attention, 

This Blog will be temporarily distracted by Dessert. Normal Blog Functions will resume when Dessert has fixed things.

Thank you.

The Poppets

Free At Last . . . .

Break out the Chametz!

Oreos Away . . . . 

OK - That might be a bit over the top . . . . Bread - free for a week isn't really that bad.

However, in the great Tradition of things that bewilder non-religious people the end of Pesach means that everything I did last week I have to undo as soon as it's over. And it wasn't over until 8:17 last night, which is why the modern American tradition is to desperately order pizza and use paper plates to eat it. 

So until I revert the kitchen and switch the Pesadik stuff (kosher for passover in Yiddish) like the pots and pans, silverware, dishes and mixing bowls, I can't cook regular food in the kitchen. Then in the kind of thing that makes observant Jews think that maybe Reform might have had the right idea on some stuff, tonight is Shabbat which means it's time to light things on fire and have another festive meal and indulge in no-commerce for 24 hours. All of which is solemnized with TWO BIG FLUFFY LOAVES OF BREAD! 

Right- so since I am Working Woman we went out for breadsticks and Alfredo sauce at Olive Garden, which I personally capped off with some Tiramisu. Got home by 10, too tired to switch kitchen, send out the Hordes to school and work from 6am - 8am then work for me - Shabbat will start at 8ish tonight so I'll have about an hour and a half to change all the stuff, to make sure I don't contaminate the Passover stuff by accidentally touching it with stuff I shouldn't.

Yetzair Ha-Ra is laughing at me, covered in Oreo Crumbs, because he knows that I will accomplish the wine, fire and probably the kitchen switch and challa ( bread) but tonight's festive meal is gonna most likely be pizza ordered before sundown and paid with a credit card so that I don't exchange money during Shabbat. 

(Burning Man and Shabbat have a lot in common, participation is required, no commerce and fire is mandatory).

It's cool though, Pizza and Red Wine are excellent together, but yeah I can totally see why people who aren't doing this think observant people are nuts. But I get pizza and red wine tonight, and I lost six pounds last week (which means maybe I should eat a few less baked goods out of the work vending machine, because those were six out of ten recent pounds that I was very unhappy about) and no one loves Olive Garden's breadsticks and Alfredo Sauce like Jews who are coming out of Passover. For that moment they are sublime.

Blessed are you, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who provides the capacity for both chain restaurants and delivery for those of us who are trying find a midway. Blessed are you, who allows us to crack jokes while we are dealing with our Exoduses, large and small, internal and external, whether you are actually there or not. 

Hopefully, I'll be able to sneak in a new Tiny Alien Episode before Shabbat too. What? I've already decided to order Pizza  that knocks an hour off my timeline right there.

Whyfore is this Brain Different than all other Brains?

So yesterday, I told the story about how the Poppets learned about Pesach, which is Passover. This is the next part of that story, so if you missed it you, can start here, assuming that you like to read things in order. 

Remember how Question Everything tried to convince Gingerbread that she was Chametz? I realized that Question knew what chametz was by that time but maybe not everyone reading does. The story goes that since the Pharaoh was known for changing his mind very suddenly, even after the really nasty plague with lots of death, everyone was still afraid that Pharaoh wouldn't really let anyone go, so even though they were supposed to have enough time to outfit  500,000 or so people for a journey to no-where Moses got a heads up to leave before the provisions were fully ready, so where bread usually had a chance to rise and most likely they used sourdough type starters, they left ASAP, which means the bread was flat and most likely really dense, like a fallen souffle. 

What it was not was leaven-free.  It had leavening in it that wasn't allowed to do what leavening does. So in remembrance of the speed with which they had to leave we cut out all leavening. So no yeast, baking soda or baking powder, even though baking soda and baking powder are minerals not leaving. Even the rabbis at OU will tell you that you can have baking powder now, but that's kind of freaky after so many years of doing it the other way, even if the other way was wrong so most Jews still eat the edible cardboard we call matzah exclusively.

Clearing the Chametz

This is the day that Choco Poppet arrived at the house, the frosting is a family recipe for Mocha Butter Rum Frosting. She approved and helped us make sure that none was left.    One of the really awesome things about the time leading up to Pesach is that you  bake a lot of cakes and cookies to use up all of the non-Pesadick stuff before the holiday.

So we were doing pretty well with the whole "no-Chametz" thing in the House, and we had reassured Gingerbread that she could stay since she contained no yeast, but it was still the day before, which is the day of the Seder because we're all Lunar like that,  and not only did I have to switch the EVERYTHING, I had to make all the food for the Seder itself.  I couldn't start cooking until the kitchen was switched. And then I had to go back to work because of the Things That Conspire.

The House Reds usually live on the painted chest where Shabbat is celebrated, and hang out in the Shofar, which I'll explain some other time. but they knew that every Friday, we cover two loaves of bread, and light things on fire and sing with some wine.The Poppets really wanted to start ahead of time and the one thing they were pretty sure of is that they could put away the Challah cover.

 The bread was definitely chametz and so they figured they were safe getting started with that.  

I came home in time to see them sizing up the ingredient bowls in the cupbord, they were about to call Spike to go look up the instructions for what had to go and what could stay, but I was able to tell them that the Rabbis felt that glass, being transparent was OK as long as it was mikvahed.  Don't ask, it's another magic spell. Luckily I have a living stream nearby.

But then we got to the more complex part - remember that six set of dishes thing? Yeah. I tie off the dairy dishes, replace the meat and use my good china for the Seder and my other good china for dairy during Pesach. 

All of the regular meat dishes get put away and then out come the Passover dishes and silverware. 
                  When I was growing up we didn't do this.

But we did have special china for the Seder. There are two real world things that happen when you do this. One, your cabinets get fully cleaned once a year. You'd be surprised how you can manage to get dust bunnies even when you use a space every day. I freely admit that I would not have known that if it weren't for Pesach.

The other real life thing is the "religious heritage" one. By changing everything, on a timeline, even though it's not the same thing as our ancestors were doing, it disrupts our lives. It forces us not to relax into systems we take for granted, we have to spend a little more time thinking about how we're going to manage in the world and even in our own kitchen. We might not have everything we need because we didn't switch it in time.

I used to think the Rabbis were interfering nudnicks when they made up these rules, but that was when I didn't have the experience of following some of them. After a year or two, I realized that it was a "body lesson" forcing you to walk the walk of the story, in a small way. It was connected. It was connected to my grandmothers and their mothers, who did this for years, and my mother, who did not do it but still taught me that it could be done. It doesn't mean that the Rabbi's weren't interfering nudnicks, but it does mean that perhaps there is sometimes more value in things than I might recognize immediately.

There are lots of lessons about how to treat others and how to move on from being humiliated in the Exodus story. Some people handled it well, some did not and some, like most humans, did both. I love the fact that Torah does not hide the imperfections of messy humanity in these stories, nor does it claim perfection for God, who is depicted as not being omniscient, but it omnipotent. The modern religions, including mine, have difficulty with that but I respect it. 

We only see the fragments of something that could be a God, we might not be able to understand it, but I can change the dishes and remember that three millennia ago, the people that were there had held on to the idea of freedom after generations of slavery. That amazes me. It was not easy to follow through and they wanted to stay long enough for their bread to rise. Freedom was an abstract, bread was real. Freedom with no land was scary and bread was comfort and safety and health. 

I can change my kitchen for a week.  I am still connected to those terrified people 3 millennia ago who sort of knew what freedom was, but weren't really sure that it could happen for them, or that it should. They asked to go back.

How many times do we ask to go back instead of choose the path that will give us growth or freedom. How many times do we want to stay with the devil we know?

Moses and Pharaoh gave them very little choice. I would not have been Moses or Pharaoh. I'm sure that I would have been one of the women wondering how we were going to feed all these people on the road. God told us to move, and we still wanted to make bread, but God didn't promise us food until he was reminded that we needed it. That's who I would have been, the one reminding the Prophets and Politicians and Divinities that we needed to eat or we would die out there just as surely as Pharaoh would kill us all here.

This is what I think of when I change the dishes. I share some of this with the Poppets, who think it is fascinating and notice that the Passover Dishes are very pretty. We are beautifying the mitzvot again.

Everything seems to be in place, but if you read any of the links from yesterday's post you know it's almost inevitable that I left some chametz in the house by accident. Especially since I didn't vacuum out everywhere like I usually do. So the Rabbis, with whom I frequently disagree, but still respect for what they were trying to do, gave us something to cover our butts just in case.

The Magic Spell

When you do everything right and you follow the whole 4 week plan, the husband comes home on "eruv pesach" with 10 pieces of chametz that he brought in from outside the house. Then he hides them and everyone in the family has to find all 10 of them, they dust them up with a feather into a wooden spoon and burn the whole thing with a special blessing that basically says. "If we missed anything God, please pretend it's not there and we will too. Thanks bunches, really!" 

The Girl of the House, has at least once in her life used the fact that I recite this incantation every year as proof that I am not a Muggle. I continuously reassure her that I am an ordinary wife and mother, just like all the other wives and mothers out there. Then she saw Pippin. Now when I say it she just smirks.

For very complicated reasons, I have a ritual feather that was given to me by a Native American engineer, that I use for this ritual, so here's the weirdness, I wasn't going to do the ritual completely correctly this year, so I wouldn't use the purifying feather he gave me, because it wasn't right. God, if concerned at all, was certainly going to be OK with what I was doing, but I didn't want to disrespect the person who had answered me truthfully when I asked a question and made me a gift with that answer. No half-assed rituals with that gift. It would be wrong. (Of course the original practice had you burn the feather too. So my regular version had already modified the version my grandparents did. but hey, it's a living religion. )

My house was not cleaned in time for us to play Hide The Chametz. Which, by the way is a lot of fun when everyone in the family loves each other, but can be a battleground in dysfunctional orthodox families. I always think of that when I perform this ritual too. In the back of my head I am thankful that I can find my own way, with the support of those around me and that at least in my family my beliefs are used to empower me as opposed to disenfranchise me. I am thankful for that, and hopeful that others will be able to escape things that oppress them, even if those things are the religion that I love. 

This year the Yetzairs helped us with the magic spell. Sweet little Babalonyian Rabbis, they knew about the asshole husbands even back in the day, and this was one of the ways that they used to prevent domestic violence and emotional abuse, that's why some things that look really weird on the outside are supported even by extreme Jewish rationalists like Maimondes. 

So complicated, so much to teach. So much more to learn. It's important to know that the reason Rabbis who made the Talmud knew about asshole husbands was that occasionally one of them was the asshole husband. The Talmud doesn't hide that either, but your teacher might. Nobody's perfect, even if they are righteous. 

Now it was time to set the fortune cookie on fire. 

Judaism is all about Food and Fire. Sustenance and Spark and since we just had the spark it was time to move on to the sustenance part.

Cooking the Festive Meal

There is nothing more Jewish in the modern world than chicken soup with matzah balls. I have made them at Burning Man, my matzah balls have risen in the desert. Me and Miriam - we rock the desert lifestyle. Maybe someday I'll dance in the desert with Timbrel. The entire section of Leviticus that deals with the movement of the camp makes so much more sense after my sojourns in Black Rock. My real-life Rabbis are very supportive of my fusion of extreme art experience and Judaism. Once again, I am lucky, I know not everyone finds the support to dance on the edge of heresy in order to get closer to Being.

But Pesach needs to push me to the edge at least as far as Burning Man does. Otherwise I'm cheating. I need to increase my radical self reliance and push my art to it's limits. Violet helped make the soup and was fascinated while studying the color and interplay of radishes.

I made "from scratch" soup. I usually take short cuts. There were none this year. It is my personal penance for rushing everything else this holiday, I even let Whole Foods make the Charoset, which is incredibly obnoxious of me. I needed to make sure I did at least one thing right. And the right thing might as well be delicious.

Setting the Seder Table 

While the soup was cooking, it was time to bring out the things that will be used on the table to perform the Seder. There is a moment when you dip bitter herbs in salt water to remember the tears cried by our ancestors when they were slaves in Egypt and they could not ever imagine being free.
The Shamrock Poppet who came to the House by way of my Perfectly Normal Irish Mother-In-Law, suggested this year that I use another gift she had given me. 

The Tyrone Crystal bowl she had given me from her latest trip to Ireland had never been used for anything else, so we were able to put it's first appearance out on the Seder table. Also I think the Irish know a few things about tears and longing.  It was perfect. 

Winter brought out the Matzah Plate that I had acquired quickly to handle a difficult situation. It reminds me of how far we in the house have come from our own story of Exodus. 

The Kindergarten Poppet throughly approves of our Matzah Cover. Remember the Challah cover that the Reds and Violet put away? This is the same thing, but for Matzah, it was made by the Boy in Kindergarten, it is finer than any silk and more beautiful than any tapestry. Especially now when he's many years older and looking towards the time he will leave. It's captured Time. There will never be another matzah cover on my table. If he has children, they can make one for him. When I'm no longer here they can have this one. But not until then.

 *

The Table is set. The Seder Plate has it's own story. I have not found the way to tell that story with distance yet, although it has been several years. Once we were slaves in Egypt, but now we are free. Once we were caught in bondage but now we can sing a great song, Alleluia.

It's close enough. 

But I do love my Seder Plate, and I love the fact that it's mine specifically. So now we will get to the part where the Orange Brain saves the Day. 

The Orange on the Seder Plate

There is a story, but it's not true.

That story goes, a Male Rabbi told a woman that a woman belongs on the Bimah like an Orange belongs on the Seder Plate. (Bimahs are where you lead services from/its like a pulpit but it's not). I never heard that story until I read it. 

I had heard a story that went like this, "A Rabbi told one of the student Rabbi's that gays belong in the synagogue like and Orange belongs on a Seder plate." That story was closer. The real story is this. While working to increase the inclusion of Gays and Lesbians in traditional Jewish practice, and activist female rabbi suggested that individuals show their support by putting a crust of bread on the Seder plate. A well known feminist Rabbi thought that this reinforced the idea that being homosexual was like being chametz, unacceptable, a violation of the law. She wanted to do  something that showed that just because the Rabbis who wrote the Talmud hadn't thought of it didn't mean it wasn't kosher.

So she said, why don't we place an orange on the Seder Plate. It's wonderful and delicious and appropriate and kosher. So I thought that was wonderful. My real life Rabbis taught me about the Orange. I usually use a mandarin orange, or a tangerine. It's been three years since my flavor of Judaism ruled that openly gay clergy could serve without restrictions and I think it's even more important to put the orange down now, so we remember that it wasn't always so. It's an important part of what I want my kids to think about when they are making seders of their own, or visiting other seders if they choose a different path than me. 

It was an hour before the Seder, I did not have an orange, no way of getting one. Then one of the Junior Partners pointed out that he happened to be orange.  

Even better, on all sorts of symbolic levels.  

So that is what happend at Passover at the House this year. Every year we tell the story of what happened in Egypt in the first person "This is what Elohim did for me, when he brought me out if Egypt". But we never tell the story of preparing. We should share it, we prepared in Egypt and we prepare each year and those stories are the stories of our families and ourselves. And it's families and individuals that make up a People. 

Having the Poppets made me think about each object and it's place in our Order, our personal Seder.  That's worth sharing here. Because when years go by, and the kids grow up and might forget why something was important to us, they can always find it here, in the wilderness of the internet. It's where you go after you've been freed. 

The Poppet Haggadah of Preparation for the House.

It's like writing names on the back of pictures. 

I wonder if we'll ever go back to a plain old orange on the Seder plate ever again?

Passover with Poppets

It's Pesach here at the house ,and because of All Of The Things That Conspire Against Me, I have been busy straightening out other people's houses and businesses and things that require bringing forth Order from Chaos.

Interestingly enough the word "Seder" means Order. 

To get to the point where you have Order for the Seder you have about 4 weeks to get your house ready.

I didn't manage to do that in 4 weeks. I actually started about 48 hours before Pesach ( which is the real word for Passover). This is not good. I'm usually much more on top of this but the Things That Conspire were very active this year.

There were no Poppets in my life at this time last year - odd to think about, isn't it? So the little guys were very amused at the sudden spate of ridiculous cleaning and a five hour shopping trip, reported upon by The Most Adventurous Red, who accompanied me on my desperate search for the right gefilte fish jars.  Poppets, at least the ones in my house, don't really seem to have any knowledge of Judaism and while they like to hang around the ritual objects in the house and appreciate that we set things on fire every week, this looked different to them. Some of them wandered around with questions. I couldn't really help them out,since I was trying to compress time and space through frenetic action, so I gave them some books to look at until I was done with the first round of emergency clean up.

The book they started with was the Moss Haggadah which is a beautiful book of art. There were times that observant Jews felt that you couldn't make images of things that were divine, and that included people, because people were divine, but at the same time there is a commandment to beautify the items that you use to fulfill the mitzvot. (Mitzvot means commandment - there are 613 of them so that's a lot of beautifying).

Haggadot ( the plural of Haggadah) were one of the few consistent places in the history of Jewish Visual Arts that were truly reflections of tastes and talent and locality. It was important to make them beautiful and it was heavily influenced by the regions that the calligraphers lived in. The Moss Haggadah is all hand calligraphed by a single artist in that tradition, and it is a wonderful teaching tool for the history of the Haggadot. I thought they might like it.  It belongs to the Boy of the house, because he earned it and it the source of one of my great joys in life when he finds something in it that he thinks is really cool and tells us about it in his out-loud voice.

Question Everything really has a lot of doubt about the whole religion thing and certainly had even more doubts when he noticed me checking the pockets of the coats in the closet for bread crumbs. 

He wondered about all those commandments and why we followed them and why other people didn't and why I was considering vacuuming the keyholes. Since I was in the process of skipping the whole keyhole vacuuming thing I explained to him that there was a whole section of the Haggadah about asking questions and why you should answer questions and taught our children that when they wre old enough to study on their own it was their religious duty to ask questions. So  really, in Judaism that made him the Holiest Poppet of all.  And then I left him to read the whole section while I set the oven on fire. It was on purpose - it's OK.

Question Everything was pretty impressed. Throughout the whole ritual book people were asking questions, and getting answers and disagreeing about the answers, and then asking more questions. He wondered how a religion could function that way, but I was busy reading labels for signs of autolyzed yeast extract to get them out of the cabinets and then scrubbing them down with bleach so I told him to let someone else have a turn with the book. You see very much like Jack Bauer I WAS RUNNING OUT OF TIME!

Violet found a really pretty page that matched her perfectly but it was all Hebrew, so she asked what it was. I explained that it was the 10 plagues, she was standing on the section of the Haggadah where when we read the plagues that Egypt suffered we remove a drop of wine from our glasses and drop them on to the napkin beside us. They were very pretty purple plagues , but Question Everything wanted to know why, so I did take the time to tell him. Even though the Seder celebrates that we were freed from oppression, many Egyptians suffered and died because of the actions of their ruler, and God and the plauges, so for each plague we remove a drop of wine from our glass to reduce our joy and mourn their lives and suffering. We need to remember that what we accomplished came with a cost, and they need to be respected, mourned and remembered too. 

Violet decided that the plagues were still pretty, even if the whole thing was a little creepy and the Drunken Poppet called out from the mantel that it was a terrible waste of wine, but a stern look from Winter, and he apologized. 

Meanwhile, Question Everything had moved on to another book that explained how to get ready for the Holiday by cleaning in a special way, and when he got to the section that explained why I might have wanted to vacuum out the keyholes, he asked me if I was going to Hell if I skipped it. 

I sighed, and told him Jews don't really have a Hell, and besides there's a magic spell at the end that makes everything OK just in case. I had to leave them alone for a bit while we put away all the things that aren't kosher for Pesach and brought up all the things that were. You see every year we clear out all our cabinets and pots and pans and dishes and silverware that touched things that rise, and replace them with pots and pans and dishes and silverware that never touch things that rise. It's like spring cleaning on steroids. And it leads to a lot of jokes about why in hell a desert God would command us to carry six sets of dishes. But of course it's a joke, because the six sets of dishes are not part of the mitzvot, they're what a bunch of Rabbis decided to agree on after they had asked a whole bunch of questions and argued about a whole bunch of answers, and that desert God wasn't talking to them anymore so they just sort of guessed and Voila! six sets of dishes. Someday I'll talk about me and God but today isn't that day, let's just say I'm sure that God didn't ask us to do a bunch of this but I do a whole bunch of this anyway because there are better reasons than "God says so" but they are complicated so it's easier for people to think that's why I do it. 

Well, I shouldn't have left Question Everything along with the rules for leavened versus unleavened things. Leaven is chametz and you have to have a chametz free house before the Seder. So the next thing I know, I walked past the living room and there was Question Everything reading aloud to the Gingerbread. Silly preoccupied me, I didn't think anything of it until I saw that the House Reds had pulled down my How To Run a Jewish Household book.

It seems that he had wondered aloud if

Gingerbread was allowed to stay in the house because she might be chametz. Since I wasn't around they asked Spike to figure it out. Spike corrected the misconception. He's very educated. Gingerbread was a Poppet, not a cookie, so she was fine to stick around.No one was going to be able to ingest her on a bet. 

Except for maybe Cthulu or something like that, and Spike was pretty sure I wouldn't invite Cthulu to the Seder.  Actually, Spike was a little off base there. If Cthulu comes to the door and asks politely to join us I'm supposed to feed him and make him welcome because he's a stranger here and we were once strangers in the land of Egypt. Of course I'm only going to let him in after he promises to behave and tone down the whole causing insanity thing. I'm not obligated to martyr myself for hospitality or anything. So really it's all up to Cthulu, but I digress. I'm sure Question didn't mean to upset her, it was my own fault for leaving them alone with multiple books and no moderator.

They sort of were getting the gist of things now, having split the reading between them, but certainly the ones having the most fun were the Poppets who chose to read the Kosher by Design cookbook. They spent a decent amount of time wondering if you could really have dessert without cake. However since the dessert menu for the Pesach week read " merengue cookies, coconut sorbet, toasted coconut marshmallows, strawberry mousse, chocolate mousse and ice-cream sundaes",  the Pumpkin Spices, Chocos and Coffee Poppets agreed that you weren't really  suffering for desserts during Peasch and you weren't really likely to lose weight during the eight days of the dietary restrictions either. 

Now that they had the gist of things they realized that I was really rather insane trying to get everything that normally took the better part of two weeks accomplished in 24 hours with one full day of regular office work thrown in, and they decided that even if they didn't understand why I felt the need to do it, they would help. They enlisted the aid of the only actively Jewish-like Poppets in the house and began by Kashering the new kitchen that came in recently for Poppetropolis. 

When they were done they waited until I got home from work and helped me with the six hours I had left to set up for the actual seder. 

The Poppets learned alot more about the whole Seder thing then.  And our Orange Brain saved the day - more on that tomorrow.

And Now A Word From Our Philosopher . . .

Every one entrusted with a mission is an angel...

All forces that reside in the body are angels.

- Maimonides, "Guide for the Perplexed"

Brought to you by the Yetzer Ha Tov