You can find neither Peeps nor macaroons on your market shelves, and you are running out of eggs as it is. You are anxious and exhausted, maybe money-troubled, and the holidays are upon us.
Can you stand it if I use the word “luckily” right now? Because, luckily, Easter and Passover celebrate not only renewal and rebirth, but also a certain scrappiness and resilience, a certain indomitability of spirit. Hope and life triumphed over death and fear! We can rejoice in the fact that we are, at the very least, still alive. We can gather however we are able. And we can insist that the perfect not be the enemy of the festive.
I asked my people on Facebook for virtual celebration strategies, and my friend Naomi Shulman wrote, “I have to say, the fact that my dad is on board with doing a Zoom Seder says everything about why this will be a night that is different from all other nights.”
This is an opportunity to lean in to that difference. Following are suggestions for new ways to make Passover, which begins Wednesday, or Easter, on Sunday, feel warm and special and connected, without the extra shopping and prepping that would surely push you over the edge. What the world will be like by April 23, when Ramadan begins, feels like a mystery that’s still unfolding. Maybe some of these ideas for connecting will still make sense, and you can adapt them in whatever way works for whatever you celebrate.
“This year, we’re encouraging people to get down and dirty with the rituals in their own homes,” said the Rev. Molly Bosscher of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Grand Rapids, Mich. In her newsletter, she recommends getting up early to watch the Easter sunrise.
“Share a thanksgiving. Easter morning, at first light, is when Christians believe Christ was resurrected.” This could be a lovely FaceTime experience to share with relatives in the same time zone. (But good luck getting the teens up!)
Some grandparents may be familiar already with streaming technologies from attending church or synagogue remotely. But if they aren’t, you might want to have a patient grandchild help them practice ahead of time.
Forty minutes is the max for a free Zoom session, and my son, Ben — whose college life has turned into a series of epic virtual lectures — says, “Let that limit cue you about what’s too long for a Zoom experience.” Cut your usual Seder in half. Rabbi Rachel Timoner of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, says, “There’s a ton of permission this year not to say every word.”
Consider shorter check-ins throughout the day so that grandparents can experience the kids making weird Easter s’mores, groaning from the couch in a ham or lamb stupor and complaining about the dinner dishes they’re supposed to wash.
Think: more showing, sharing, singing, games.
Rabbi Timoner recommends encouraging elders to share stories. My 82-year-old British mother recently regaled us with her (oddly relevant) experience of tearing newspaper into wartime “loo paper,” reminding us for the millionth time how much she has survived.
You can put a child in charge of gathering three biographical facts from each family member. These can be read over Zoom, and everyone can guess who they belong to. (“Aunt Shirley was a Rockette? What even is that?”)
Do you have an older relative who might like to remotely coach your child in the cooking of a holiday favorite? Encourage them. Or they can pick a new recipe to prepare “together.” Charoset or deviled eggs or whatever everyone actually loves. Because this is a year to celebrate the seasonal theme of liberation by unshackling yourself from all the traditional recipes you usually have to make! And if you end up making vast amounts for a tiny in-person gathering? Give it away. Surely a lonely neighbor would love a plate. Speaking of giving it away: If you can help others right now, donating even a small amount may bring you solace.
Meanwhile: does your mom know a frugal way to dye eggs with onion skins? This might be the year to share that skill — and FaceTime your kids trying their hand at Depression-Era crafts. Hide eggs or jelly beans (or dried pinto beans); hide the Afikomen or even a piece of cardboard painted to look like matzo. (“You might as well pick really hard hiding spots,” my 17-year-old daughter, Birdy, said. “I mean, nobody has anything better to do.”) Then narrow the metaphorical distance from your old people: Text photos. Record your kids hunting for goodies. Or, if you’ve got grandparents nearby, do what my sister-in-law Alyson Millner is doing: Set up an egg hunt in their backyard so they can safely watch from the window.
What else can you get the young people to do? Get them to do it. To plan and perform a song or musical; to curate and share a Spotify playlist; to read aloud to their younger cousins. (On Facebook, my friend Allyson Tanis reminded me, for example, that there’s a chapter in “All of a Kind Family” about having to celebrate Passover while in quarantine with scarlet fever. “Yes!” my friend Naomi chimed in, “Gertie sings the Four Questions from the bedroom!”)
But this probably isn’t the year for holiday magic. My Facebook friend Tina Engberg said, “I’m at a loss. It will be three agnostics and an Episcopalian around the table. I might hide eggs for myself, maybe the dog. Who knows how I’ll feel in ten days.” And my friend Hillary Goidell wrote, “I don’t find myself enthralled by the idea of Zoom Seder. I would love to sing a few songs and admire the plate and raise a kiddish cup.”
Rabbi Susan P. Fendrick of Boston, who wrote a widely shared Facebook post called “You are allowed to have a sh’vach Seder,” explained the concept of sh’vach to me. “It’s a Yiddish word that means weak, ineffective, mediocre. The opposite of exciting, vibrant.”
“You do not need to set up a multimedia, multilayered presentation on Zoom,” she wrote in her post. “You do not need to cook 17 dishes that remind you of all the family members you are not gathering with.”
“People are exhausted, traumatized, stressed,” she told me. “Maybe we need permission to say it’s OK to do the bare minimum.”
As the refrain in the Passover Seder goes: dayenu, it’s enough.
You are allowed to have sh’vach Easter too, by the way. You can treasure the imperfection — or not. You can marvel at improbable resurrection, improbable freedom — “these most unlikely of unlikely stories,” as Ms. Bosscher put it in an email. Or not.
“The Seder is my THING,” the writer Marjorie Ingall wrote me. “But this year all four of us are getting over Covid-19 and I can barely fathom sitting up for the duration of a Seder. And intellectually I know it’s OK, but emotionally I am so so bereft.” You can be bereft.
We are hiding in our homes; we are waiting for this to pass over. Easter and Passover are hard stories with beautiful endings. And this story, the Covid-19 story, will end too. It won’t end happily for all of us — it already can’t. But on the other side, maybe our lives will be burnished with gratitude.
Catherine Newman is the author of the forthcoming book “How to Be a Person.”