Friday, April 15th 2022

What can you eat on passover?

What’s the answer? Meat. And it ain’t going to happen.

What can vegans eat on passover?

38 Vegan Passover Recipes We Love

• Cauliflower Rice Recipe. …
• The Best Roasted Potatoes. …
• Eggplant Caponata. …
• Pickled Carrots and Fennel. …
• Grilled Tricolor Hasselback Potatoes With Romesco Sauce. …
• Gluten Free Quinoa Paella. …
• Braised Eggplant in Fresh Tomato Sauce. …
• Beet Salad with Horseradish Alioli and Caramelized Walnuts…

Guess what? Out of season supermarket food. It ain’t going to happen.

Let’s be fair about some of these Jewish traditions. Yes, everybody has their traditions and everybody follows them. I can’t leave my property without locals telling me all of their wonderful traditions of meat eating and alcoholism and rape and imperialism. We get all that. And I even get something about eating on the go. The time of slavery was over, everybody was in motion, you have to deal with being a traveler and eating what you can. And yes, traveling sucks for vegans unless you agree to be a supermarket guy. Eating local and seasonal is really hard in the winter time or early spring.

But you know what else is stupid? Not lighting fires on shabbos or on shabbos for Passover. I suppose if you live in the desert where it’s generally warm and y’all don’t get too much snow, it’s really easy to be Orthodox about these things and follow the traditions and groove along with it. Get your Jewish ass thrown out of a couple of countries and end up in the white, white North and you either become a fire lighting expert or you suffer. And please, don’t think that this wasn’t part of the plan. Judea might be warm, Germany and Russia get cold in the winter.

I’ve got some potatoes and onions and cabbage. I’ve got a box of matzah. I could go without beans for a day but I’m not going without being for very long because I cannot survive on nothing but starch. I’m not making any kind of a statement about my personal preferences, I’m diabetic and I lead a physical life. I am very happy with a reasonable protein intake and that means beans. You take away those billions, my blood sugar starts doing some funny things. And believe me, this white flower Mazda doesn’t help at all.

But then again, maybe the whole point of once we were slaves but now we are free is to be free. I’ve been reading the Torah every week and frankly, I don’t see any laws saying You must eat this or you must not eat that. These are traditions that started somewhere and I appreciate that. You do things as a culture specifically to pull a culture together and that’s how you get a culture. You do things as a group and you agree to mutual experience.

This of course is the argument against me amongst my neighbors. They want me to drink and eat meat with them. Did you want me to drink and eat meat with them and the Russian Orthodox want me to drink and eat meat with them. Even my ex-girlfriends out on Instagram telling everybody how much she likes to drink and eat meat. Everybody thinks drinking and eating meat is part of their cultural heritage. I say that this is sinister.

There was a real reason that I quit drinking. I was tired of feeding my depression. I was tired of engaging in activities that led me towards unhappiness. I was tired of the conversations that one has while drunk and I was extremely tired of the people you meet when you drink. I quit drinking because I didn’t like it and I didn’t want it.

What was my argument for meat? I’ve said this any number of times but I started with a question about heart health, realized that this is what was most important to me and jumped in and found everything else in the world that comes along with letting cruelty to animals go.

To make it simple, I got smart. And if you’d like to put that together with the general thought, if you’re not smart, you’re not going to stay a free man for very long.

So all of this groupthink is groovy and all but a free man wants to retain his freedom. Who says I have to do something? Who says I have to eat something I don’t want to eat or drink something I don’t want to drink? Who says I have to play with my body chemistry with people just so they feel we have some kind of a bond. You want to feel like we have a bond? Never, ever, ever lie or cheat me in any way, be open and honest with me in all things and never, ever, ever, attempt to play with my emotions or my head for personal gain or enjoyment. You give me that promise, you get a bond. Step off that path and keep walking because I don’t need you.

If you think you want less than a person of this character to join your club, I don’t want to be in your club. And if we’re talking about the brotherhood of Slavic Nations these days, don’t save a chair for me at the party. I’ve already got the gist of this argument well in hand.

But this isn’t to say that I don’t respect the tradition. I’m very grateful for 3,000 years of reading and writing and praying and thinking and arguing. I’m just saying that I’m an independent. I’ve been an independent my whole life and I can’t think of a single reason to stop now. Give me a couple of nice friends that I can truly believe in and count on, I’m good. And if it’s about spending time alone, I’m not afraid of that. I like the sound of my own thoughts and I like the sound of a lack of talking very much. I like peace and quiet and I love the sound of nature in all its beauty. Take out human chatter, I don’t feel bad and I don’t get bored and I don’t feel I’m becoming anything bad. I just get to be myself in my natural state and that is good enough for me.

So what’s the story with Passover? It’s shabbos. I get this holiday every week and at the end of the day today, I’m going to say some prayers, I might say a few extra prayers as thanks for the spring season and for my heritage and for my ancestors and for all of the chosen people in the world and the trials and tribulations we have and the weight we carry and then I’m going to check out, just like every week. And as far as dietary restrictions or thinking about what it means to be free, don’t worry, I got it. I got that. I know exactly what it means to be free.

***

It’s 10:00 and I’m working on filling the boxes. I’m taking a short break because I need to take a short break and because there are no task Masters standing over me telling me to keep working. If I want to take a break, I will take a break and that’s all there is to it.

So it’s Passover and it is a Time to give thanks for our freedom. It’s also a spring holiday. It’s a holiday that reminds us it’s time to go to work. Work in this case should be definitely considered agriculture. Why agriculture? Because it is the thing that separates us from the animals. No, let me rephrase that. It is the thing that separates us from the other animals.

As I was working, I was dreaming as I often do. I was thinking about this entire party and the idea of gathering and giving thanks for allowing us to escape Egypt and become Free people. I was thinking of this as a great metaphor for something that might actually be more true.

The history of civilization, by civilization I mean City centers of trade and places of agriculture instead of hunter-gatherer or migrating animal husbandry. Listening to the story of the children of Egypt walking in the desert, they are relying on their animals for food because they have no home to plant gardens in. We can look at this moment, this 40-year search for home, as yet another metaphor for the history of mankind. At some point we figured out that raising our own food was better than hunting it and that living in stable homes was better than constantly fighting the elements.

If you can see my point, one step further away from the other animals.

If all of this makes sense, I also thought to try and make sense of this phrase “the chosen people”. Traditionally, this rather annoying moniker has been applied strictly to Jewish people but if you’d like to look at this as the human animals further divorce from the rest of the animals, indeed, human beings are the chosen people. And certainly we can easily see that we were chosen by God, by Nature, to be above the other animals.

If this makes sense, remember that we are children of Nature and that nature comes first is the first commandment. Don’t give praise or pray to any other God, no leader, not to money, not to drugs and not to anyone or anything who wishes to take away our freedom.

We are agrarian apes. We are apes who grow their own bananas and grapes and berries and nuts. We are apes who have learned reason and mathematics and logic and science. We are apes who have learned to speak an understandable and repeatable language and we are apes who have learned to write this down.

It is appropriate then to give thanks for the Torah, for the written word, for the words written during the time when we left bondage and moved towards personal freedom. Apparently, we haven’t made it yet. Apparently, servitude still exists everywhere you look. Apparently too many people have not yet learned to read and reason and add two and two together and get a straight number.

I said before that I would say a special prayer for Passover. I could borrow this prayer from the pre-existing Canon and acceptable practice. I have these materials available to me. But I thought I would take a crack at riding a pair of my own. I’m going to borrow some of the form but please allow that my heart is in the right place.

Praise be the name of God who has allowed us our planet to live on and the will and ability to understand that it is ours to take care of. Thank you for giving us the air that we breathe on the water that we drink and the land that we use to grow our food. Thank you for the trees and thank you for the sky and the clouds and the rain. Thank you for all of the things of beauty that you give us so that we may live and we are grateful for the opportunity to do so.

And we thank you for giving us the knowledge of right and wrong. And we thank you for this logic that has set us apart from the other animals. We pray forgiveness for our trespasses and when we forget that we are not supposed to be like the other animals. We are supposed to be higher. We are supposed to know better and we are supposed to make wise decisions that do not disturb the world that you have given us while allowing ourselves to live comfortably.

And we thank you on behalf of our animal brothers and sisters who only can praise you with their lives. And we thank you for the ability to speak and reason and understand each other and for the ability to give praise also with our words.

Thank you for giving us our freedom. Thank you for giving us the intelligence to create our own habitats. Thank you for the opportunity to live these lives you have given us and we hope that we are pleasing to your eyes.

We also humbly apologize for our foolishness and our indiscretions. We apologize for our lies, both to you and to ourselves. We apologize for the lives we have taken, both our own and our animal brothers and sisters and we pray that this year we find reason to overcome this mistake once and for all.

Praise be the name of the one who gives us our sun and our seasons and allows our planet to follow its path generation upon generation upon generation. Praise be the name of the one who has allowed us to live and grant us the peace, serenity, wisdom and heart to become the best that we could hope to become in your eyes.

Praise be the name of the one who rules the universe for all eternity for granting us our lives as the chosen people.

You can say amen here. You can translate this to any language you want and we can just leave this in the public domain. Cheers.

***

Well, that’s something. You get finished writing a prayer for reason and World Peace and then you go back to work and a military helicopter flies right over your head. Right smack over your head, gun turrets and all. I’m not that much of a specialist in knowing what kind of machinery they use. I’m just saying I got a good look at him. He’s now flying around the Forest right now doing whatever reconnaissance needs to be done.

Have you ever had a gun pointed at you? I have. I really have. More than once. Do you think it’s fun? It’s not fun. Have I ever pointed a gun at anybody? No I have not. But I would be interested in hearing the reason why I should do something like this or to use a pistol or any type of weapon against my fellow man or animals.

I did kill a bird once. I shot it with a pellet gun. And then I went and I found the body, had a good look at what I had done and never did it again. I was a teenager at the time.

I will also admit that I’ve beaten the living shit out of a few people. But never to death. Never to death. To reason. I have beaten people to reason but not to death.

These War helicopters suck because they make a lot of noise, they ruin the peace and they point guns at you. And none of that makes your day any better. This I promise you is the truth. None of that makes your life any better at all.

***

It’s coming up on 2:00 and I’m taking a bit of a break. I guess I kind of hit a wall and needed to stop. That’s the thing about physical labor, you know when you’re done. Maybe when you’re working with your brain, you can just nod off and go to sleep when you get tired. One of the greatest things about working at home is being able to crash on the couch when needed. You work a while, you do what you can and when the sleep comes for you, you take it.

Working out on the field is a different thing. You can tell when there’s pain or fatigue because you start getting really insane. Your muscles stop working correctly and you start making mistakes. You start rethinking all of your tasks looking for ways to make it easier. And then you get into the territory where you can get hurt. It’s better to take a break.

Right now I’m thinking very hard about what I have to do to be prepared for this evening. I’m not going very far out of the norm for Passover but I’m going to do what I can to stay reasonably kosher. I’m actually never unkosher. I’ve already said this but this is the easiest part about being vegan. There are almost no dietary laws that you can break. Vegetables are cool. Beans are cool. Fruit is no problem whatsoever.

There is some business though with grains. I already mentioned this as well and I’m leaning towards potatoes and some noodles made of potato starch. No leavening and I’m going to make a hummus so I have something to put on the matzo. Very possibly, I will make something like a vegan matzo brei. Lots of bread is usually matzah and eggs but I don’t eat eggs so I might use ground up split peas instead. Peas are actually a wonderful egg substitute because they harden a little bit when you cook them. They’re also pretty good for making faux tofu. I might also make this peanut sauce, it’s very spicy and it tastes remarkably like deviled eggs. Just some peanuts and vinegar, salt and pepper and blend it up with some hot pepper in there. Very tasty and very much like what you would get on a normal Passover table.

I mean, I get the point and the ceremony and the ritual, I just don’t need to harm animals. I don’t need to harm them for food or for anything. At the moment, I am completely vegan with even canvas shoes and belt. No suffering, no pain and no paranoia.

I also need to fill up the water barrels and even though I don’t think it’s going to be very cold, I think I need some wood. I know, I know, I know that we’re not supposed to be lighting fires but we’re not supposed to be suffering and probably, we were supposed to stay in Jerusalem. Y’all can talk about that with the Romans sometime and see if they have anything interesting to say.

Let’s get going. I’m just sitting here doing nothing. I don’t really have anything to say. Let’s go.

***

Actually, maybe there is one thing to talk about. Directly across the road from me, some people are walking around the property as if they’re actually going to do something this year. I have no doubt in my mind that this is a bullshit trip. If anything, I am sure they just want to sell the property. These are the two old deaf people I’ve mentioned. They only yell and scream at each other and both of them are deaf as doorknobs. You wonder what came first, the deafness or the screaming. I’m betting on the latter.

I have two such generally empty houses here. Both of them are completely annoying when the owners actually show up. They don’t want to live here anymore. They work and they’d rather be in town but they feel some kind of nostalgic draw to these places. Many years ago, it was part of life and maybe even they were born in these houses. Now they are just derelict shacks, nobody wants to invest very much in them and truthfully, people are way too lazy to do agriculture anymore. There’s no money in it and everybody would rather buy their groceries from the supermarket and bring it home in plastic bags.

Truthfully, except that they believe that taking care of the place is directly connected to using weed wackers and nothing more, you have to keep up appearances like you actually care about the place, I don’t care anything about this. They are just worried about money and probably don’t even believe that anybody wants this place. They are stuck with it and there’s probably a 75 or 80% chance that they will one day just say the hell with it and abandon the place. There are quite a few abandoned places here and village life is not going to come back in style.

Ria took good advantage of one of these abandoned houses. She bought the thing for 400 rubles, about $135 at the time and she tore It to the ground and used the wood for her fireplace. She has enough wood for maybe 3 years and her house is unbelievably warm during the winter time. And as for the property, it doesn’t matter. There’s just some grass and trees where there used to be a house. Nobody cares.

And that was it. 10 minutes to walk around and have a look at what’s going on. Some yada yada between neighbors and they are already slamming car doors and getting ready to leave. Dasvidaniya. It’s been nice to look at you. You don’t have to come back if you don’t need to. I won’t mind one bit if you’re not here.

***

Well, it’s a little after 5:00 and I have finished up the working part of my day. Let’s just say it’s ironic that I finished by 5:00. Specifically, I finished the latest layer in my raised beds making 20 some odd trips with the wheelbarrow and raking everything smooth. I cut up some firewood in case I need it and I filled the water tanks. I did that by hand although I considered using the pump or at least having a look at how the pump performs. I ended up doing it by hand because it’s not that big of a deal. The house is cleaned up a bit. I haven’t started cooking yet but I know what I will be preparing.

I’m not having a Seder here nor am I attending one in town. My apologies if this news is heartbreaking to anyone. I don’t have anything meaningful to say about this that I haven’t already said. 

I did not grow up in a very religious house. In fact, my parents, other than identifying themselves as Jewish so as to be more understandable to their gentile friends, their rich gentile friends, never really paid any attention whatsoever. When we had holidays like passover, this was simply an opportunity for my mom to cook some old recipes. They would invite guests who were never under any circumstances Jewish and they would sort of laughingly stroll through the service. Looking back, I suppose some of their friends tried to learn something but mostly it was a lot of alcoholic talk.

I don’t want to paint a bad picture of my parents and my mother was only filthy disgusting drunk a few times. She had less self-control in my father and my father would never allow alcohol to get the better of him. But almost all of their friends were drinkers of some sort. Rarely were they heavy drinkers. Only one or two friends actually come to mind who were broken by alcohol. But all of their rich friends were drinkers for sure and there was never very much jewishness at the table

I remember one year that I genuinely took offense at how they bullshitted their way through Passover. I pointed out to them that the book was fairly specific and we could just read the book and it would probably give our guests a reasonable and Rich explanation of our culture. I was shouted down of course. My family always shouted me down because… I truly don’t know why they were so shitty but they were. Anyway, I was told that there was no place for seriousness or to actually pay attention to what we were doing. It was a dinner party, we were technically Jewish and they were giving some gentile friends some entertainment.

There was a time that I did pay somewhat attention to Orthodox Judaism. I did spend some time, about 2 years, trying to be somewhat diligent about showing up at prayers and learning to read Hebrew and following along with the calendar. I never really developed a feel for it and kept with pretty much the same arguments I have today. I understand the physical machinations of the religion, I can see where 3,000 years of reading and writing and arguing would build some level of mental acuity and this would also be true for the repetitive nature of being observant. But I simply had a hard time with the basic premise and I also had a hard time with the meat and the alcohol. Even then, and this would be about 10 years ago or more, I was already into vegetarianism and I really found too much alcohol drinking reprehensible.

I guess you could say I was the local Martin Luther. I’ve been called worse.

Eventually, I faded away and did not work very hard at keeping the connection. I have never renounced the people there as not being friends and I have tried my best to honor whatever they have needed of me. They don’t need very much. I am a friend and this is exactly what I will always be. But I’m not going to be a member no matter what.

I don’t know what else I can say about this on the eve of Passover. I get it. I understand the program and I even know the dance moves. I just move to my own drummer and go My own Way and prefer my own pragmatism over being told what everything is supposed to mean. They may say there is a right way to do things, I say you can just do them and I am pretty happy following my own results.

Maybe this would have been different if I had had a Jewish family. My wife was not Jewish, my daughter’s mother is not Jewish and none of my ex-girlfriends including my ex partner or even close. I do not know why but it’s just the way things work out. I have a propensity for shiksas and when I am interested in finding someone to partner with, there just has never been a member of the tribe at the gate. I don’t know what to say about that except that I never have specifically said that my female partner must be Jewish. I usually just improvise. And of course, you understand the results.

So if I have my vote, I wish everyone a Happy Passover. If you are a devotee of the Christian religions and believe that Easter or pascha is some kind of original thing and not a direct lifting of the Jewish celebration, Carry on My wayward son. There will be peace when you are done. Just leave the anti-Semitism at home. We don’t need any blood labels this year. We have enough problems with Putin picking on our tribesmen in Ukraine. And please, no swastikas on the synagogues. It’s a cliche, it costs money to repaint and you’re not telling us anything about yourselves that we don’t already know.

***

Okay, let’s call this a wrap. I don’t know about you, but I’m good. I feel like I’ve done my job and I think I’ve done a good job. I think there are probably one of two things that I let slide until next week but basically, I think I got the job done. I certainly feel like I’ve done a job because I’m very very tired right now. Very tired and I just want to go to sleep.

I’m going to leave you with a prayer this week. This happens to be my favorite prayer and in a way, the only prayer that needs to be said. And like I said earlier, it’s not completely necessary to see this only as a prayer for Jewish people or for Israel, it can be for all people. It can certainly be for Belarus and for sure, it can and should be for Ukraine. It’s for everybody really because peace is the only thing we really want if you think about it.

Grant peace, goodness, blessing, grace, loving kindness, and mercy to us and to all of Israel Your people bless us, our Father, all of us as one with the light of Your face for by the light of Your face You have given us, Hashem our God, the Torah of life, and love of kindness, and righteousness and blessing and mercy and life and peace and may it be good in Your eyes to bless Your people Israel at all times and in every hour with Your peace.

Blessed are You, Hashem, who blesses His people Israel with peace.