The thing about Passover, other than not eating bread for a week,
unless you’re at work, or you forget, or you just can’t be bothered
not to, is about ‘telling the story’. You have to tell the story of
when Moses led his people out of bondage in Egypt, over to safety,
passing of the Red Sea, 10 plagues, slaying of the firstborn, blah,
blah, blah. And of the 92,487 (conservative estimate) ‘rules’ that
Jews have to run their lives, this one, the ‘telling of the story’ is
the only one I’m prepared to do. Mainly because most of the others
involve some form of mindless sacrifice, blind adherence, missing
football matches, limiting options, being really bored for protracted
periods of time, so I don’t bother.

So at passover you get together with family and/or friends and you
‘tell the story’. And I like it because its fun, to a degree, its
mainly in English (as opposed to Hebrew which we can all read but only
the few actually understand and they’d be the ones in the black hats)
and you get to eat lots of nice things.

Even when I lived in Los Angeles, in 1982, a group of friends got
together to do the passover thing. We interrupted a whole load of
other stories (mainly sex and drugs and rock’n’roll) to tell this one.
That could only be described as ‘an alternative story-telling’ but we
did it anyway. Force of history? The strength of family programming?
Who knows. As Nike say: ‘just do it!’

So last night was Lila’s first experience of The Seder (as it is
known). Not sure exactly how much of ‘the story’ she took on board
because without teeth you really miss out that whole ‘matzoh’
experience. But she loved it. I could tell. And as it just kind’a
passes down through the generations, that’s really what its all about.

In another room, some sinner had switched on the tv, muted, obviously,
so it didn’t interrupt ‘the story’, so that we- NO, not ‘we’, so that
HE could keep track of the Arsenal match being played on that holy
night. And what happened there, on the tv, live from Selhurst Park,
was every bit as amazing as what happened in Egypt all those thousands
of years ago.

Because God, being a Spurs fan, was Royally pissed off with Arsenal
for playing football on a night of such holiness, so He abandoned
them. Just left them floundering like fish out of water, flapping
haplessly. These weren’t the Jesus fishes, different ones. Ozil-fish,
Sanchez-fish, most certainly Walcott-fish. Nothing you’d wanna eat.
And He smote them. Its what He does. Smote them good’n’proper.

Shame. Hmmmm…

Happy daze

A xxxx