I have always loved Passover. Okay, not always; My three-quarters Jewish, mostly atheist family and I didn’t throw seders growing up. But since college, I’ve been gathering with friends to read the Haggadah (albeit one with a strange, feminist, decidedly modern slant), tear apart the matzah, dip the parsley in salt water, ask the Four Questions and to applaud. the youngest at the table when they found the afikomen. When Bernie Sanders withdrew from the 2020 presidential race on the first night of Passover, I mourned quietly, imagining what it would have been like to see someone in the White House sharing in these age-old traditions, and not just for PR -points.
An important part of Passover, as I learned as I grew up and graduated and made more Jewish friends—some of whom were raised much more observantly than I was—is the ritual of keeping kosher for the eight nights of the festival. Leavened bread is verboten, which basically means pasta, cereal, pancakes, cookies – or “carbs,” as I learned to think of these foods in high school, when the ghost diet culture first taught me to avoid them – are off limits . I’m reminded of the frustration that chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton recounts in her 2011 memoir: Blood, bones and butterWhen I went to cook at a summer camp and found that many of the girls were “eight years old and already weirded out for wanting a piece of bread,” I felt that frustration myself, because I knew it was the height of nonsense to deny myself the food I loved, but feel too seduced by the mirage of thinness to live any other way.
As a concerned partial Jew, I’m always looking for ways to “confirm” that I’m doing things correctly on Jewish holidays. (Seriously, just ask me about my challah game.) But as someone who has struggled with disordered eating—and binge eating disorder in particular—for more than a decade, I’ve always known that cutting out food, even just for a week, and for spiritual reasons, would probably take me right back into the world of binge eating, compensatory calorie counting, and obsessive exercise that I had worked so hard to leave behind.
That all changed this year, probably because my relationship with my faith has changed. Even as I mourn the violence in Gaza, the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas has made me feel more connected to my Jewish faith than ever. I want to tie myself more closely to its traditions, if only to remind myself (and the loved ones I celebrate Passover with) that Judaism encompasses far more than any country, ideology, or army ever could. I no longer feel comfortable with my connection to the Jewish faith being purely “cultural”; I want to observe some of the practices that my ancestors did, such as fasting or keeping kosher on specific holidays, to commit myself to what it means to be an active, open-eyed Jew in this world, one who learns from the pain of the past while also fighting for a liberated future.
