This day is like every other but also irreplaceable. Part of a continuum never to be repeated. The day you’re supposed to notice that and ask about it. Is there a God, does she care about us a smidge and if so why not intervene, or why intervene this way. But to undercut that pessimistic bullshit the baby kid who can’t ask directly is asking questions with his face, checking in with his eyes and waiting for the green light to smile and laugh.
So we name and check suppositions. Best not get hung up on G-d in a Jason mask, horrors plagues etc., it's choose our own Exodus. If Israel implies too mercenary a nation-state to inspire, let’s say California’s the promised land and New York is Egypt, go down Rt. 80 and show them what they’ve done. Let’s add back-door syncretistic Christian Zoroastrian or Pagan shit, hide everything from the seder plate and run a Passover hunt to start the festive meal. Leave the door open for Elijah, the Easter Bunny, and penitent golden calves.
There are so many questions that they infuse the objects on the table with their own life and self-consciousness, their own questions. The Manischevitz skips like rams, the kugel, also like rams. (There was a run on lambs). The bitter herbs have bitter questions. What’s your problem, you lame-assed self conscious idiot, not when do we eat but when do we die and let New Jersey Pac Man eat our stinking corpses.
The shank bone is all Ozymandius-am-I, I was hot shit/coulda been a contender but how did I get so dead? The boiled eggs just want to talk abortion. The Gefilte fish want to know how much is Yiddishkeit and how much is religion, want to know street addresses in the Bronx or Brooklyn, precise GPS coordinates of shtetls in second-century or 1930s Poland, whether anybody else remembers that fetching Golem and where it got to when it was needed most.
The Matzoh is itching to get out on the road and keeps asking about travel destinations, alternating that with gossipy questions about things folks and deeds it thinks might be Chametz. The Haroseth and the spring vegetable are outnumbered but they’re trying to keep it positive, aren’t we lucky to be here at all, guys? Isn’t it amazing, that unbroken chain of survival from here to us, everything that had to go right for us to make it to this dinner?
The chopped liver has more ontological concerns; wants to know how it got here and what it might be called, the meaning of life, etc. What am I? Am I chopped liver? What am I, chopped liver?
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