I’d like to wish all this blog’s many Jewish readers a very Happy Passover. Chag Sameach to you all and may you have a happy and Kosher pesach.
We had quite the multi-religious second night passover seder last night. There were three Jews, one person in the process of conversion to Judaism (a quite difficult process I need to say) and a practising Roman Catholic from a family with some Jewish heritage. Great discussions were had about the Last Supper and the fact that it was a Passover Seder, how Christianity carried basic Jewish law such as the Ten Commandments out into the wider world and how it is strange that whilst the Yiddish language has had somewhat of a revival in recent decades, other specifically Jewish languages such as Ladino have not been so revived.
Inspired by a Rabbi at a synagogue I used to attend a person who was descended from Afghan Jews we have revived and transplanted a fun custom to our Seder table. During the singing of Dayenu where we sing about the Eternal One giving us, amongst other things, the Sabbath, Torah and rescuing us from Egyptian slavery, we playfully beat our table neighbour with the green ends of spring onions to signify the whips of Egyptian slavemasters. Laughing Boy loves this bit of the Seder but he got a bit too enthusiastic with the spring onion whipping which is why today I’m trying to clean up all the bits of shredded spring onion that seem to be everywhere.
Two days of Passover have now, at the time of writing, passed with six more to go. Six more days of being extremely creative with the limited range of food we are allowed to eat which means six more days of me virtually living in the kitchen and learning to create meals that contain an awful lot of potatoes, tapioca and similar stuff that doesn’t derive from the grains that we are told to avoid at this period.
It’s probably a good time to dish out a recipe for what Laughing Boy calls ‘Matzah Cake’ and which everyone else calls Matzah Brei. This recipe serves four to eight depending how hungry everyone is.
Ingredients.
One box of Rakusen’s Matzah biscuits (the large size)
three eggs
boiling water.
Butter
Method
Break up the matzah sheets into small flakes and crumbs in a bowl.
Add enough boiling water to make the mixture of water and Matzah into a thick paste.
Leave to cool down so that it is not so hot that the eggs will cook when added.
When cool add the three eggs and mix thoroughly.
Add a very large knob of butter, roughly one to two ounces if you can, into a large non stick frying pan on a high heat.
When the butter is melted and spread across the pan add the Matzah, egg and water mixture.
Spread the mixture in the pan so that it makes like a thick pancake.
Turn heat down a little bit and cook for about three to five minutes.
Slice up the pancake into quarters with a fish slice and flip each quarter over to cook that side for a similar amount of time as the first side or until the outside of the pancake gets to your desired level of crispiness.
Serve hot with lemon juice and sugar. Also nice cold but make sure you add the sugar and the lemon to the cake before it gets cold or it won’t sink into the cake properly.
Unfortunately, being a diabetic and having to watch by carb intake that recipe won’t really work for me. The matzah biscuits are 84% carbohydrates which is much too high for my glucose levels to stay under control.
I’m not diabetic but I find Matzah tends to block up my digestive system. I tend to get awful constipation two or three days into Passover but that normally sorts itself out by the end on the eighth day.
Perhaps Yiddish is reviving because Hitler wanted to destroy it – so it is a reaction to the holocaust.
He didn’t care about Ladino so there is not the same stimulus.
Actually, what really pissed off Hitler was that the Jews had come up with the concept of (Jewish) racial purity and superiority thousands of years before he was born.
But once he got the idea, he was up and running, believing that if the Jews had got away with it for so long, why shouldn’t he and the German Christians give it a try. After all, Christianity is a Jewish sect, informed at its deepest level by Judaism.
It could also be the case that Ladino speakers resided outside of the areas afflicted by the Germans and from what I can gather there were less Ladino speakers in the first place than Yiddish speakers
** […] the process of conversion to Judaism (a quite difficult process I need to say)**
The process of conversion is to Judaism is not a difficult process at all.
You just need to be simple and/or gullible enough to believe in the Torah, the greatest lie ever told.
You also must lack even the most basic morality to worship Yahweh, the greatest confidence trickster in fiction, who is guilty of the most heinous of crimes against humanity, far more than any human could ever achieve..
Then, you have to believe in the sham of the ten commandments* which can, and have, been ignored by Yahweh and “the believers” in the doctrines which form JudeChrislam throughout history whenever it suited them.
A third rate moral philosopher nonsensically opined hat anyone not preventing evil was just as immoral as those perpetrating the evil in the first place. But humans are limited in power, so how much more immoral is it for Yahweh, who is omnipotent, to stand by throughout history, while humans suffered, including those six million chosen people – or as you would have it – who chose “him”.
*Commandments – these are the supposedly moral prescriptions which Yahweh entrusted a Jewish murderer with to deliver to the Jews. A strange choice of communication for an allegedly omnipotent god, don’t you think?
But then he waited several hundred years more before he chose the bizarre method of sending Christ, his henchman and fellow confidence trickster, with the message that it didn’t matter what you did, if you “believed in Christ” you would have eternal life. Even though those who save the entire human population from disease and poverty, would not get a look in if they did not believe.
It is not at all clear what everlasting life would be like. Though I would not want to spend the rest of eternity in the company of a sadistic, vindictive, ignorant, stupid tyrant like Yahweh.