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I make a silent toast to the things that I do and don't miss
Even before my grandfather died in 2011, I had become the person who led our family seders, because I was the most fluent with the Hebrew and with the stories. I use a mix of books and my own memory. I have none of my books here because we are always at my parents' house for Pesach. (When my grandmother was alive, we were always at my grandparents' house in Maine.) I was already upset because of the disruption of traditions and especially upset tonight at the thought of having to cobble something together off the internet, which felt makeshift and impersonal. Then I remembered that three years ago, my parents had given me and my brother copies of a number of files from my grandfather's computer, printed out as keepsakes on nice paper—family history in letters, stories, the family version of the Haggadah he put together in our childhood and revised into its final form in my adolescence. I had just seen the folder when I was cleaning up my office. I found the printout inside of my grandfather's Haggadah, entitled "Pesach 1995." And then I started crying because it was not like being with either my parents or my grandparents but it was from them both. "In celebrating Pesach," my grandfather wrote, "we are following a tradition that started about 5,000 years ago. A tradition is a way of doing something or celebrating something in more-or-less the same way, time after time." This is an especially more-or-less year, but it's still the tradition. May we all come through to the next time.
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In the past few years, we've used a different haggadah than the one I grew up with, which I don't enjoy as much because I like the bit with the rabbis arguing over how many plagues there were, dammit. This year, everyone had access to the old ones but the new ones would have required someone to scan and mail, and then us all to print, so *drumroll* triumphant return of the Edwards Supermarket Haggadah!
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Thank you. It is not the story as I tell it myself, but it was really good to have this year.
This year, everyone had access to the old ones but the new ones would have required someone to scan and mail, and then us all to print, so *drumroll* triumphant return of the Edwards Supermarket Haggadah!
Mazel tov!