Just Hilarie

Passover 2025

On April 24, 2025

In Autobiographical, Family, Jewish, Life

This spring I had the pleasure of attending 2 seders. The first one, on the first night of Passover was a small intimate one and the second night’s seder was a large, noisy one.

The small seder on Saturday night was held out in the suburbs of Stockholm and my only responsibility was to pick up and deliver the gefilte fish that had been pre-ordered. There were 6 of us there, gathered around a lovingly set table in the middle of a small living room. The oldest other guest at this dinner was a friend who had recently turned 40. I felt so honored that these young people had wished to share their seder with me. It was the first time for Ben (who did an excellent job) to lead a seder and the Haggadah we used was a relatively simple one, all in English. This of course was perfect for me – since for me, the Passover story is best told in my mother tongue – with bits of transliterated Hebrew thrown in. Because it was a Saturday we started late, after sundown at 9pm. The food, cooked by Ellen was delicious and the conversation during the evening was lively, with me adding, my old lady feminist and Reform Jew opinions, when I felt they were needed. Afterwards, all the guests were driven home through a quiet and dark Stockholm, landing me back at my apartment around 2.30 in the morning.

The first night of Passover

Twelve hours later, by 2pm in the afternoon, Håkan had deposited me and Bevin in Skarpneck for the next Seder.
This Seder was the annual Seder that I lead for my group of Jewish/American/Swedish friends or J.A.P.S. for short (Jewish American Parents in Stockholm). We have been gathering for over 25 years to celebrate Jewish holidays together and this is my Jewish family here in Stockholm. We celebrated Passover together for the first time in 1998.

This year, we were 26 people, of whom 6 of them were small children and a 3 month old baby. When we first started out so long ago, all our kids were small children. Now some of those “kids” are having kids of their own. It fills my heart that these young people still want to join us to celebrate, bringing their own children with them.

Bevin and I arrived loaded down with stuff for the seder: 8 haggadahs, boxes of matzah, a seder plate, a silver goblet, 1 Elijah cup, 2 matzah covers, candlesticks w candles. And of course food: Chicken soup & matzah balls and charoses, and the ritual foods for the 3 seder plates – parsley, horseradish, 3 roasted eggs, 3 lamb shank bones. Everyone else brings the rest of the food: raw veggies to munch with hummus or chopped liver, hard boiled eggs, lamb, roasted potatoes & parsnips, kugels, salads and a bunch of wonderful desserts including a real sponge cake. I haven’t had a real Passover sponge cake in a zillion years!!! Thank you Berta!

Finally after all the tables and chairs were in place and decorated and everyone had arrived, we sat down to tell the story of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt and to remind ourselves how important freedom is for everyone.

As every year, I have something to say before we start the seder. Here is what I said this year.

Passover Speech 2025
I want to start off by saying welcome to everyone. We made it! We are here – gathered together! Pheewww…

Every year I like to start our seder by making a small speech. Maybe that’s very vain of me – to think that I might have something important to say, but that’s the way it is. And every year, when I sit down at the computer, trying to write something, the words take a while to come.

Every year… That is probably one of the most important and yet invisible, themes of Passover. Every year we gather. Every year we tell the story. Every year we go through the same rituals of eating parsley, and charoses and matzah. And every year we talk about Freedom – to live our lives as we wish to, free from constraint.

As some of you might know, the past couple of months have been difficult for me – causing me to question my ability as a leader, as someone who can be in charge of doing things, of getting things done. For this reason, I have been giving some thought to Moses. To Moses and the idea of leadership. Moses is the invisible guest at our seder table. Moses is the person who got the whole ball rolling and yet he is the one person we do not name at our Seder. We talk about Jacob moving his clan to Egypt. We mention that Joseph became a great lord there. But Moses…nobody mentions him, at least not in the Haggadah. Its like we are not supposed to be grateful to him for what he did.

Over the last 3000 years there has been some commentary written about why he’s not mentioned in the Haggadah.
So let me name a few of those ideas:
First, maybe we don’t mention Moses, in order to emphasize that it was God that was the big kahuna.

Or maybe we don’t mention him because Moses was a humble kind of guy and didn’t want to folks to make a big fuss about him (because remember…he was present at the very first seder a year after the exodus and for a whole lot more of them while the Jews wandered in the desert for 40 years).

Or even maybe because the part that Moses played in the story was just the physical action part which took place 3000 years ago and the Seder we do today is more about the spiritual, idea of freedom, of setting oneself free.

Whatever the reason is…we still don’t mention him.

So what was Moses? Who was he?
To start with, he was a man born into one culture (race, tribe, family, clan, folk, minority or whatever you want to call it) that of the Israelite slaves, and yet he grew up and was raised within another one. He was an outsider – a favored part of Pharoah’s family but yet always knowing he was not truly family. And when he escaped Egypt and went to Midian, he married the high Priest Jethro’s daughter, Zipporah and lived there a long time with her, tending sheep. But he wasn’t a Midianite, he was still an outsider.

We also know that he had a strong sense of justice and a violent temper – He killed an Egyptian that he saw unfairly beating a Jewish slave. This was the reason he had to flee Egypt.

And he must have been humble – when the burning bush that was God told him to return to Egypt and free his people, Moses asked in his most Woody Allen voice, “Why me? I am no one and I don’t speak well”. He felt inadequate to that job but God convinced him that together with his brother Aaron’s help he could do what God commanded him to do. Like so many of us, he rose to meet the situation he was handed.

So why am I thinking this year about the invisible man at the Seder table?

I think the story of Moses as an outsider who was able to make a new home for himself in all the places that he lived is an apt story for us J.A.P.S. in general. Like Moses…Risa, Janet, David, Barbara, Marina, Sam & Rebecca, Naomi & Matt and myself, have all left our families and our countries to make a home in a foreign land. We have raised our children in this strange new place and they have grown up to call it home. This is something that Jews have been good at doing for over 2000 years.

Moses’s anger also comes to mind when I think back to some of our previous Pesach seders and how I allowed the stress and my own crankiness to get the better of me and how others have had to drag me off to a corner to cool down. I guess I’m happy I didn’t murder anybody.

And finally, I am thinking of Moses, the leader, and I ponder what does it mean to be a leader when your task is done.

In 1997, when I placed an ad in the American Woman’s Club magazine, looking for Jewish mothers to help me celebrate the Jewish holidays together, I had no idea that 28 years later we would still be sitting down together to celebrate the Passover holiday. Some of the faces around the table have changed, some have moved away and new faces and families have joined us, but, as a group we are still here and with a new generation of small bubbelas at our table.

When I placed that ad, I wanted for me and my son, Bevin, to be part of a group, a family. Granted, I have been the one bullying everyone to do what I wanted of them – when to meet, what to eat, who brings what, and how we celebrate. I feel like, just as Moses led his very unruly group of Israelites into freedom, I have led the J.A.P.S. into being Jews, celebrating our Jewishness together. I don’t know how long I can continue doing this. Eventually others will have to start to take over the tasks and I am beginning to feel like that possibility will happen. Sooner or later, we pass the torch to someone else.

I can’t say how Moses must have felt by the time he sheparded his Israelites to the edge of the promised land, but I can say that I feel proud of the work I have done to get my J.A.P.S. this far and I am sooo very glad that I have you all here, my created family, here in this foreign land to celebrate with me.

So…now that we have gotten Moses out of the way, lets start this seder like every year, by lighting the holiday lights.

J.A.P.S. Passover Seder 2025

Sleeping late

By Hilarie

On December 30, 2024

In Uncategorized

I’ve never been a natural early morning riser. There is something so nice about waking from a poor night of sleep at around 8 in the morning, going out to the bathroom to pee and then coming back to bed to once again fall back to sleep, to dream, to wake again around 11 to start the day and eat what others would call lunch but I call breakfast.

This kind of routine was of course impossible once I had my son. Back then I woke at 6am, got myself ready for work, woke the boy at 7 to get him dressed and fed and then it was off to take him to Dagis or school and then be at a heavy day of work by 9. When he was still in Dagis we picked him up at 3pm. Once he started school, we would pick him up just before 5 from his after-school program. The hours at home were filled with making dinner, bathing the kid, doing homework with him, putting him to bed and often, many nights, going back to the computer to finish the work I didn’t get done before leaving for the day. And finally getting back into bed myself until the next day started bright and early. Well, maybe not so brightly during Stockholm’s dark winters.

But those days are gone – its rare now that I have to be at an early morning meeting – I can still do it if I have to – if it is out of my control to plan it. I don’t like it, but I can still get up early if forced to.

In 1974, I was working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the upper east side of Manhattan. It was just part-time. I was still attending art school at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn – it was my last year there, my fifth year actually. I had switched from the Fashion Design program to Commercial Art after my second year at Pratt and in the process had lost a number of credits I needed to graduate. I had a choice of stuffing my final fourth school year with those extra needed credits or spreading my last batch of credited courses out into a fifth year. I loved being at Pratt and I was not in any great hurry of being out there in the real world, plus… I was and still am, a bit of a sluggard. So I decided to take that extra year and work part time at the Museum at the same time.

The way I worked at the Met was called per-diem, meaning on a day by day basis. The Admissions Department (the department where I worked, not one of the fancy curated art departments) gave me a schedule of days and times I was to come in, based on when I had no classes. But they could also call me at the last minute and ask me to come in to work on the same day. I skipped a lot of classes by going in to the museum instead of appearing in a classroom. It was the early 70s which were really still the 60s, so nobody really noticed if I was sitting in a classroom or not. I preferred to sit at the cash register giving out buttons to everyone who paid to visit the museum.

If you have ever seen or been to the Metropolitan Museum you would know that the front of that massive, pale stone building is faced with a wide array of many low steps leading from the front door to the fifth avenue sidewalks where all the hot dog venders sell their wares. We used to joke that the vendors filled their carts with water from the fountains that sprayed water on both sides of the staircase. They probably didn’t but I never bought their hot dogs. I mean…why take a chance. The stairs were the perfect place for natives and tourists alike to sit there in the sun to rest and chat and watch the stream of people walking by.

Back then, in 1974, when called in to work, I would take the hour long subway ride from my dingy and very slummy Park Slope Brooklyn neighborhood to exit the underground darkness at the 86th Street subway stop in the very fancy Upper East Side. A short walk got me to the museum on Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street. I would bound up the staircase, often taking 2 steps at a time, to finally arrive at the entrance where the guards nodded hello and let me in.

But that was then. Now when I find myself faced with a flight of steps, I immediately go looking for the elevator or escalator. At 73, stairs have become something to avoid if possible. It doesn’t mean that I am unable to climb them – I still can. But slowly.

And it seems that everything else I do is happening slowly too. Just getting out of bed is taking longer. Getting dressed too. If I don’t need to be anywhere past the borders of my island of Reimersholmen for days at a time I will just wear the exact same clothes over and over again. I rarely spend hours in front of the closet, deciding on how to assemble the perfect wardrobe for the day. Now it’s just a matter of taking that old cotton shirt and the cat hair covered sweatpants from the chair in the bedroom that they were tossed on the night before and if it’s chilly in the apartment, adding the bulky black cable-knit sweater that I bought with my mom the last time she was here visiting me in Stockholm. The holes in the elbows are now big enough to fit an entire cat through them but if my long sleeve t-shirt underneath is also black…who’s gonna notice. Just the process of putting everything on takes longer. And now, I make sure to sit down when putting on the pants.

I used to move quickly. I was spontaneous. I reacted to things instantly. I spoke rapidly, having been taught by growing up in my family to never let anyone finish their sentence. I was damn quick on my feet as I moved in three dimensional space. But that seems to be all gone now or at least on its way out the door. Except for the talking. I still talk fast, still not letting people finish their sentences. And this is something I get reprimanded for, especially here in Sweden where it is considered an unspoken sin. But I can’t fight upbringing.

So now…no longer moving quickly and frequently checking the ground while walking – I don’t want to be surprised by some uneven stretch of earth that will send me sprawling. I used to be able to hop over obstacles – now I go down like a sack of potatoes. And getting up again. That takes a lot longer. I no longer turn around suddenly – I might lose my balance. I check that the chair is under my butt before I even start to lower it. Chairs with arm rests are a great invention – as are railings along staircases. And things hurt when I walk. Thanks Mom for passing on to me your arthritic knees. Last week the back of my calf started to hurt when I walked – it started at the back of my ankle and slowly worked its way up to the middle of the calf. How did that happen? I don’t remember twisting anything or spraining a muscle. It just appeared. Was it because my leg wanted to remind me that I had a calf? Just in case I had forgotten?

All this slow moving is very tiring. It takes a lot of effort to just get started doing something. I spend a lot of time thinking about what I want to do. And then by the time I am done thinking about it, it seems to be just the right time to take a nap. And I can sleep as long as I want and dream about racing up a long flight of stairs.

Passover 2024

By Hilarie

On April 7, 2024

In Uncategorized

Every year at my Passover Seder here in Stockholm with my J.A.P.S. (my Jewish American Parents in Stockholm group) I say a few words before we start. This was what I said this year.

I want to welcome you all.

I am very glad to see you – glad that we can join together to celebrate Pesach, in these difficult times. And they are difficult, but I won’t say anything else about that.

To us the word, Pesach means to pass over, and that comes from the idea that the angel of God passed over the homes of the Hebrews, as our people were called over 3000 years ago, when we were slaves in the land of Egypt. That is why we call this holiday Passover.

But recently I have just learned an interesting thing about that word, Pesach, that Hebrew word. Now I don’t speak or read Hebrew. I sort of know most of the letters in the alphabet and can follow along the Hebrew words in the prayers in the prayer book. But this is what I just learned…The first letter or syllable in Pesach is Pe. And as a word all by itself Pe means “mouth” and the second syllable “sach” means speak. So, the word Pesach, also can mean something like “using your mouth to speak or to tell”. And that is what we are gathered here in this room to do tonight – like Jews all over the world do. Tonight, we will tell the story of the Exodus – the journey of the ancestors of the Jewish people from slavery to freedom.

And we don’t just tell this because maybe we might feel like it – we tell the story because in the torah we are commanded to tell this story, every year, at this same time of year. We keep telling the story so that every year it gets passed down from generation to generation. We are expected to tell this story to our children, so that they can tell it to their children. But even in places like Jewish nursing homes, they still hold a Pesach seder, even if the youngest person in the room is 75 years old and has heard the story many times. A reform Rabbi named Arthur Green explains “Even if we all know the story, we are commended to tell it again. The act of “Storytelling” for its own sake, you might call it, whether there is anyone “new” who needs to hear it or not. You might call this the miracle of Pesach.” Says Rabbi Green.

This year, this night, we are missing a bunch of our second generation of J.A.P.S. They are off doing other things and cannot be with us this year. I hope they will be with us next year. But as I look around this room, I see a whole new generation sitting here – ready to hear the telling of this story.

So, let’s begin.

The stories we tell

By Hilarie

On December 28, 2023

In Uncategorized

I recently spoke with a very dear friend who I have known a very long time on a one and a half hour skype call. We spent a lot of time talking about family and discussing our past. She told me some things about her parents I hadn’t heard before and I told some of the stories from my family. And this got me thinking about the stories that are passed down from our parents and grandparents. The way we tell them. The way we tell them as if they were true. I told her that the story as she heard it from her father might not have been the way it really happened. And she answered me by saying that that was the way it happened – her father wasn’t a liar, he told her the truth. I told her that I wasn’t calling him a liar but that his story of what happened in his life was just the way he remembered it. But it didn’t mean that that was actually what happened. He wasn’t a liar – he was human. Like the story from my grandfather about the boat he took in his travel from Poland to the USA in the early 20th century. When my cousin researched his history, she couldn’t find him on that boat. But another boat was in New York Harbor at exactly the same time and on that boat’s list was his name. He had seen that other boat when he arrived in America and instead of remembering the name of the boat he was on, he remembered the name on the side of the ship he saw when entering the harbor to his new world. He wasn’t a liar – he was human.

Humans tell stories. Well some of us do. Not all. Some are just silent, unable to make sense of the life they are living, unable to recreate it in words, unable to examine what their life is. But I think most of us humans tell stories. We have a need to explain and understand ourselves. Did a person not choose to go down a path in their lives because they felt it was better to stay at home or was it because they were afraid. Did a person become successful because their own father encouraged and supported their choices or were they just lucky? Did someone not follow their dream because they just didn’t want it bad enough or because they weren’t strong enough to buck a domineering mother?

Life is never a straight shining path. It is a crooked, winding, bumpy road with all kinds of divergent paths leading off to different directions. What fork you choose to take at any of those branches determines the path of your life – you rarely get a chance to backtrack and redo your choice. You can only move forward. But your mind can redo those turns you took. You can think back and tell yourself “I took that path because your father was there and I chose to marry him”. But years later, well along on the chosen path, deep down, you know that the reason you didn’t follow the path of your dream was because you weren’t brave enough to do so, and so, you took the easier path. And yes in many cases, having encouraging parents or advisors who can help you decide what is the best choice for you to follow is definitely an asset. Many of those forks in the road get walked without any forthought whatsoever. We humans just go where our feet lead us and then spend decades mulling it over and telling the story which we, with our human memories, remember about it. And that is the life story that our children or our friends get to hear and to pass on to others.

I think I must have been born a sceptic (or at least someone who was unwilling to accept at face value what others told them). Maybe not since birth but definitely since I was four years old. I was four years old when I needed to have my tonsils removed. The very nice doctor told me it wouldn’t hurt and afterwards, I could eat all the ice cream I wanted. When I woke up my throat hurt a lot and when I tried to eat the ice cream my mother gave me, it hurt even more. That very nice doctor lied to me!! And I don’t think I ever believed anyone else, or the stories they tell, wholeheartedly, ever since.

I know people who never fail to say how much they loved their parents or how much they respected them, or admired them, or looked up to them or miss them greatly once gone. And I have to admit, this makes me feel a bit jealous. Because I am unable to use any of those words to describe how I feel about my own parents. Now don’t get me wrong…my parents were not not horrible people. They didn’t beat me, they didn’t starve or torture me. They did the best they could with the limited means they had that were a result of poor decision-making earlier in their lives. I definitely loved them but… By the time I was 14 or 15 I was sure I wanted to live my life and make choices completely differently than what my mother did. And I give my mother credit for encouraging me to do exactly that.