Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Friday night's small, somewhat improvised* seder at adrian_turtle's apartment worked quite well. I hadn't realized the extent to which using a different haggadah than I was used to from my family seders would have me thinking more about the whole Passover story and liberation more broadly. Some of that, I think, was the specific texts -- my family always used the Maxwell House haggadah, as did many other American Ashkenazi Jewish families, and Friday night we used (part of) "Gates of Freedom," a more recent Haggadah published by the Reform Jewish movement, with a few pages of other material Adrian found online.

Beyond that, and beyond the more contemporary language -- the Maxwell House haggadah is full of quasi-King James Bible phrasing and grammar -- both different phrasing for the translations from the Hebrew, and the added short pieces by other writers meant that I was thinking more about the meaning of the words, rather than things like "this is where my aunt makes a joke about Rabbi Jose."**

The menu was also slightly experimental: Adrian made a Moroccan Passover chicken recipe, and put some caramelized onions in the matzo ball soup because she had them available. The sauce for the chicken was sweeter than I really liked, but that was OK, there was this dish of horseradish right there, which cut the sweetness nicely.***

* Until Tuesday morning, Adrian was planning to go to Virginia and spend the holiday with her other partner and his family, but various pandemic-related reasons led to her postponing that trip.

** There's a story about several rabbis discussing Passover and the Exodus, including "Rabbi Jose the Galilean," almost certain pronouncing "Jose" like "Joe's," but my aunt liked to pronounce it as if it was Spanish. A small thing, not exactly a joke, just a thing that was always there when we were having a seder at her place.

*** I was in my forties when I started liking horseradish (other than in shrimp cocktail sauce), rather than putting the tiniest amount possible on the matzo with the charoses.