Holy Double Holy Week, Batman!

Practicing Jews all over the city are madly cleaning their houses this weekend in preparation for Passover or Pessach which starts this week. To remember spending forty years chilling out in the desert with Moses en route from Egypt to Jerusalem, this is a holy week full of ancient tradition and ritual- and absolutely no leavened or wheat anything.

The obsessive cleaning is ostensibly to look for any cookie crumbs or stray noodles between the couch cushions that may ruin your wheat freeness. Even all of your kitchen dishes and pots are to be sanitized with boiling water to get rid of any remaining live cultures which may accidentally constitute your food as leavened. Yossi tells me that the the lazy folks, himself included, just keep an extra set of dishes just for this week to avoid all the sanitzing.

Even non kosher Jews will go whole-hog kosher this week. No bread or wheat products will be available for sale in the grocery stores. Instead they will be eating Matzoh which is sold in cinder block sized cardboard boxes. Matzoh looks like four inch square pieces of cardboard and tastes accordingly in my recollection. I don't know how The Chicken is going to live without his new favorite Friday food: Hallah bread (seen above).

We have been invited to a Seder Supper on Wednesday so I will let you know how that goes.

Not only is it passover, but this is the Christian holy week. Any other year and I would be singing my brains out at church for the week's four services. Although I was usually exhausted by holy week in the past, I must admit I feel a little bereft without choir as part of my life anymore.

I expect this means that the old city is going to be a gong show with large packs of singing Christians and dudes carrying giant crosses though the streets. I will not be missing the action and will be heading into the old city to check it out the resurrection mayhem next Sunday.