Passover is a wondrous time of year. No it isn’t. It is an important holiday for Jewish people but it is not wondrous. At least not when you are a kid in public school. Easter happens around the same time of year as Passover and the difference between the Jewish kids and the gentiles is never more stark than the lunches kids are eating in school.
Gentile kids have left over ham. They have chocolates and jelly beans. The kids who get their lunch in school are eating pizza or macaroni and cheese. Maybe the kids are eating a nice big submarine sandwich piled high with all sorts of meats. Not so for the Jewish kid. You know what I brought to school for lunch during Passover? Gefilte fish in twenty year old Tupperware and a plastic fork. Listen even if you like gefilte it is not a glamorous lunch. Gefilte on its best day is an appetizer until you get to eat something better. Try explaining what a gefilte is to a bunch of kids. “It’s a fish. Does it swim in the ocean? No. Does it swim in a lake? No. Okay it isn’t a real fish. It is mashed up pieces of a bunch of cheap fish. They make it into a loaf and then preserve it in this weird gel. Hey, where are you going? Come back!” Yeah gefilte is a hard sell. Say you don’t have gefilte. You are bringing Matzo. Matzo is not ideal for sandwiches. It is even less ideal for sandwiches that need to be packed. It is dry and has no bend in it. A little bit of pressure and you don’t have matzo…you have crumbs. So if you want to have a matzo sandwich you are going to need to be able to build it on the spot. While your friends are half way through their sandwich you are unwrapping the matzo in tinfoil, opening up the Tupperware of tuna fish, and then spreading the tuna on the matzo. You ignore all your friends who are staring at you wondering why you are putting tuna on the largest cracker they have ever seen. Now you are ready to take a bite of your sandwich. And you take that first bite and the rest of the tuna and matzo crumbles into your lap. Matzo can’t withstand much…including the pressure of a human bite.
Well you know what you didn’t want to eat anyway. You clean the tuna and matzo from your lap and get ready for dessert. I mean everybody loves dessert. Your friends are eating left over Easter candy. They have chocolate rabbits, and jelly beans, and peeps. What do you have? A dry macaroon. Listen macaroons are fine. They have all sorts of new flavors like Rocky Road and chocolate, chocolate chip. Perfect for noshing on after school. However, let me perfectly clear, a macaroon no matter the flavor, is no contest when compared to a peep. Food coloring, marshmallow, and sugar beats coconut every day of the week. And Passover desserts are always dry. If you actually managed to eat your whole matzo sandwich chances are you have no water left for dessert. That means your macaroons are the equivalent of sand.
So yeah Passover is cool because God took the Jews from Egypt to relieve their suffering. However, if he would have given us a few more minutes to leave the bread could have risen and Jewish kids would not have to eat odd lunches thousands of years later. I mean c’mon man you are God, you get to do things on your time and then we get to eat peeps!