Tag: Holidays Page 1 of 5

Passover 2024

On April 7, 2024

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.

Passover 2023 in a new place

By Hilarie

On May 25, 2023

In Uncategorized

This spring was the second time me and my J.A.P.S. have been able to meet to celebrate Passover since the world stopped for Covid 19. This year was different than previous years because we met in a new place – out in Skarpnäck, at a beautiful party house. Thank you, Carly, for offering to host us there. It was lovely. And as usual, I had a few words to say before we started our wonderful ritual of reminding ourselves of who we are and where we came from.

I want to welcome all of you here to celebrate Passover with me once again. This year we are starting a new chapter, with a new place to meet. We have been doing this Passover thing for a long time now and it is always my wish that we can gather together to celebrate this holiday.

When we read our Haggadah, we discover that this holiday, Passover, is all about the desire for freedom – the wish to be free.

But you have to be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it, says a lot of memes out there on Facebook and the internet. While my mom never stressed me about it, I know that she really wished I would find someone and get married. Well, she eventually got her wish. What she didn’t expect was that it would be to someone who would take me all the way across an ocean. Be careful what you wish for, Mom.

As a curly red head, I always wished for straight blond hair…just like our curly-headed friend Barbara did. And about 5 years ago she got her wish, but it came as a wig and was due to developing cancer. Now, my reddish hair is grey but still pretty straight as long as if I keep protecting it from the weather and luckily Barbara’s curly red hair is once again growing back. But, we have to remember to be careful what we wish for.

I have been involved in Progressiv Judendom I Stockholm since 2006. And since Progjud started, the wish for having our own Rabbi has been at the top of the list. Well, now we have one and I find myself drowning in work for Progjud that I didn’t really expect. Be careful what we wish for, right?

For 2000 years the Jewish people had wished for their own homeland and finally in 1948 it happened, bringing with it both great happiness and great heartbreak. Be careful what you wish for because peace…is something still at the top of all of our wishes for Israel.

While wishing for things is not specific for us as Jews, we always need to be a bit careful. Wishing for family, and different hair, and Rabbis, and a homeland, and peace are nevertheless good things to be wishing for.

In the Haggadah story we are about to retell, we hear that in the beginning, the Jewish people were slaves in Egypt. They had started out as a small group of free people who because of famine had migrated to another land to find food. They eventually ended up there as slaves. The story tells us how Moses led them out of Egypt to freedom – how Pharoah was vanquished and the Jewish people crossed the red sea towards a new life. And that’s where it ends. That’s like me telling my mom, “I met a guy and I’m getting married” But I leave out the part that he is Swedish and I will be living in Stockholm. She got her wish…but… it wasn’t quite what she expected.

And so too the story in this Haggadah. Yes, the Jewish people were freed but… being free looked hard – many wanted to turn back, they had to wander through deserts, they didn’t know what they would eat, their leader disappears up a mountain and they don’t know what to do without him. Maybe freedom isn’t all its cracked up to be after all. You have to be careful what you wish for.

So, as we begin our seder, with the story about becoming free in our past, let us keep in mind what freedom, to be who we are today as Jews, means, both the difficulties and the joys. And we need to think about how we continue to be Jews, tomorrow and the day after and the day after that.

Because it all works out in the end- I got married, my hair is straight, Progjud has a rabbi, the Jewish people have a homeland – and here we are today still telling that same story and I find myself wishing that the children I see here today, will continue to do so, too.

Now…Let’s start our seder.

Passover 2022

By Hilarie

On May 3, 2022

In Jewish

Photo by Danielle Shevin

Finally after almost 3 years of isolation and pandemic, my group of American/Jewish/Swedish friends could meet in person and celebrate Passover together again. We gathered at the Party House on Reimersholmen as we usually have done for many years now and sat down to an organized dinner. It was so great to see all who could make it. This year our Seder plate had two additions on it. I am generally a traditionalist and don’t like changing the contents of the Seder plate to suit current politically correct modernity but I made an exception this year. This year we added an orange and a beautiful sunflower blossom – the orange to symbolize women leading services once usually reserved only to men and the flower to remind us what is going on in Ukraine at this moment.

Here is what I had to say before we started our service.

It’s so nice to see all of you today. It’s been 3 years since we met to celebrate Passover in person. Technically it’s not really Passover any longer. Yesterday was the last day so I guess Passover has passed over us. Passover is over but here we are…

Here we are. Think about those words: here we are. We almost weren’t. I waited too long before trying to book the Party House and when I went to book our usual day, Good Friday, I discovered someone else had booked it before me. Saturday, påskafton was also booked, as well as Easter Sunday. Today was the only available day this weekend, so here we are.

This holiday which we celebrate every year, is especially apt this year, given what has been going on in the world right now. Passover reminds us how we had to pack up what we could carry with us and leave a land that we had been living in for many generations, at almost a moment’s notice. We didn’t even have time to let our bread rise.

A similar exodus is happening over in Ukraine right now. I can’t stop watching CNN show me how Ukrainians are being forced to flee from their homes and escape to other countries. While they aren’t being chased out by horse-drawn chariots and their bread comes in plastic bags from grocery stores, their hasty and dangerous exodus reminds me of the Passover story. It tells the tale of a people who want to be able to live in freedom and self-determination just like the Ukrainians do today.

The Passover story of the exodus from Egypt, 13 centuries before Jesus, was the founding myth of the Jewish people. But, it was just the first of many such expulsions. 7 centuries before Jesus, the Assyrian empire sacked the northern Kingdom of Israel and deported the Jews to Assyria. Then a little over a hundred years later Babylonia, besieged Jerusalem, destroyed Solomon’s Temple and carted us off to Babylonia. It took fifty years before the Jews were allowed to return to their homeland and could build a new temple. That Temple got destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD and once again Jews were scattered across the ancient world far away from their home. This time the expulsion would last for 2000 years.

During those centuries Jews were given the choice to either leave or die, by cities or countries throughout Europe and north Africa. During the early middle ages, Spain became a haven of prosperity for Jews only to be ended with the devastating expulsion by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. I’m not going to list all the places that first welcomed us only to later expel us. You can look it up on Wikipedia.

But in spite of all that moving around, the Jewish People survived. We learned how to carry with us our culture, our religion, our history – to not tie it down to the place we were living in. In today’s world, forced migration is getting more and more common. Sometimes because of war like in Ukraine, or because of environmental catastrophes like forest fires in the American west or rising sea levels for island nations or desertification in sub-Saharan Africa. With each new place the Jewish people were forced to move to, we learned to live there within the new rules of the place and also as Jews and when we had to leave we took with us the influences from that place and incorporated them into ourselves without losing ourselves in the process. This ability to adapt and change and still remain true to our heart is something we can teach the rest of the world in these days of involuntary migration.

So, here we are, sitting here, today, as Jews still do, in a small building on Reimersholmen, remembering that very first move. Granted we are not all here – some of us, from my group of J.A.P.S., couldn’t make it today. Hopefully next year we can all be here together once again.

So, let’s start the seder.

Giving Thanks

By Hilarie

On December 26, 2020

In Uncategorized

Thanksgiving had always been one of my favorite family holidays. There would be lots of food; everyone talked at once; someone would argue with someone; someone would leave the table in tears. This was accepted as normal and might be repeated each year. I missed those family gatherings. So when I moved to Sweden, I decided that I would roast a turkey and try to celebrate Thanksgiving even though my original family lived far away. The idea of giving thanks was less important to me than the idea of family gathering together.

In spite of the fact that large turkeys have not always been that easy to get a hold of in this country and when you finally find one, it’s extremely expensive, I intended to invite friends who have become like family, to our place to share a bird and all the fixings with me. Since everyone here worked on Thanksgiving day, we would gather on Saturday instead of Thursday. The first few years it was only Håkan and me eating the small turkey I might manage to find. As I settled in to life in Stockholm and our circle of friends expanded, the number of invited guests grew.

My first large turkey weighed 11 kilos (24 lbs). I had to order it in advance from a shop that specialized in eatable fowl of all sorts. The man behind the counter asked me how large I wanted my big bird to be and when he saw the uncertain expression on my face he suggested 11 kilos. My unfamiliarity with the metric system meant that I was unable to judge how big 11 kilos was. The number 11 was smaller than the number 25 which was around the size in pounds that my mother’s turkeys often were so I said yes. When I went back the next week to pick up my turkey, I discovered just how heavy an 11 kilo bird was as I schelepped it back home with me on the subway. It barely fit in my ancient oven. Four invited guests, two of whom were also American, shared that bird with me and my husband. We had leftovers for 6 months.

Despite that rather shaky beginning, I roasted a turkey each year. Sometimes in the early years when our apartment was small, my husband and I might drive a large, roasted, warm and well wrapped turkey to a friend’s house to share at their more spacious dining table with a large group of our mutual friends.

As our apartment grew larger, so too has the number of people whom we have room for. Our open-plan living room fits two tables and 15 chairs. I would order an 8 kilo bird at the Stockholm store that specializes in turkey products. When they stopped offering such large turkeys I ordered them from a farmer who raised a small flock of free range turkeys. He even delivered them directly to my door! I always ordered one around 8 kilos. One year he appeared at my door very apologetic, saying that that year the birds had grown rather large and was it OK if the bird he was delivering was just under 9 kilos. By that time I had a new oven and 9 kilos fit just fine.

Only twice have I missed my annual ritual.

I served no turkey in 1991. Our son was born in November that year and with one thing and another, as new parents, making a turkey and having guests took a back seat. I have no memory of what we ate that year. There was no big dinner party in 2014 either because that was the year that my husband got sick. After spending 2 months in hospital, Håkan was allowed home for the weekend at the end of November and Bevin, Håkan and I were finally together to eat the boneless turkey thighs I made at the last minute. With sweet potatoes and gravy and much thankfulness.

And now this year there is the Covid 19 pandemic. All our friends are staying safe at home so there will be no large gathering at our place to eat turkey with us. But turkey must be eaten. I bought a frozen 5 and a half kilo turkey when my husband and I spent some time at our country house and put it in the freezer there. On Wednesday, we packed up the car with all our laundry, left-over food, 2 cats in their cages and ourselves and drove back to town. As I loaded the apartment fridge with the left-overs I realized we forgot the turkey! We drove back out to get it two days later but this meant it was never going to defrost in time for Thanksgiving Saturday. No matter. It wasn’t like I had invited a crowd of friends over and now needed to rearrange plans with a lot of people. This year our only guest was our son, who had moved out to his own apartment 6 months earlier… and he was flexible.

So on a Tuesday evening, the week after the official Thanksgiving day, the three of us sat down to a table loaded with turkey, stuffing, mashed sweet potatoes, gravy, corn, salad, cranberry sauce, and a pecan pie for dessert. As I finished putting everything on the table and stood at the refrigerator to take out a bottle of Julmust, I stopped for a moment and looked over at the well laden table and my two boys loading their plates and gave thanks that my little family could all be together, healthy, safe, and able to share this meal with each other.

PS…I make a great Pecan Pie, served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.