Thursday, April 16, 2009
FIXING PASSOVER - One Stoat at a Time
I’ll be out of the loop, wherever you keep yours, for the next few weeks. Maybe I’ll do lots of writing and posting, and maybe it’ll be ALL JESSE ALL THE TIME while I take four weeks of bondo leave to deal with the bodywork needed after that little bruiser beats up on me. In the meantime, it’s the last night of Passover tonight and Easter candy is still rolling around behind most of our furniture at home, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to offer a few thoughts on modern religious practice, and how to make it more moderner. This is because I am HELPFUL. Am too. Shut up.
Before we get into a face-slap stooge-fight, let me divert your attention: have you been celebrating Passover? Really? Have your kids, or all the kids that you now know or ever met? No? I did not think so. Well now you can stop being part of the problem and just dissolve yourself in this solution:
FIXING PASSOVER - ONE STOAT AT A TIME
1. The Problem with Passover
Protocols of our elders having been duly consulted and ignored, a determination has been made by your correspondent regarding the great paschal festival, the observation of which is ordained as a holy obligation at Lev. 23:4, Num 9:3,5, and probably elsewhere but who has the patience, I mean really. Yea, it has not escaped our attention that this very commandment - to observe in its season the pesach each year - do we forsake, and increasingly so through the compounded effect of our ongoing failure to provide an entertaining kinderspiel for the younger crowd. What I’m saying is, we are boring the children with our longwinded Passover seders, and we need to do something to keep their focus on the matters at hand. Maybe I should just have said that first and moved on. Lesson learned.
The traditional recitations of the four questions or the descriptions of the four students that are reiterated at the Passover seder each year ostensibly seek to capture the imagination of the very young, but honestly they never really step up to the task. The exodus story itself, with its twenty combined plagues and commandments, is too busy, confused and attenuated for tender ears. Meantime, the paschal prohibitions against leavened products - cereals, pizzas, beeves wellington - are too many and too onerous to be borne without some friendly sympathetic helpmate to add cheer and boost spirits.
The quest to hold a child’s attention has simply grown more challenging over the last several thousand years. What may have worked once in Yavneh is no longer playing in Poughkipsie. Where once the children could go right through all eight days of Passover and see only Exodus-themed imagery, such as plague-sets or toy flails, now they’re beset with bunnies and literally (figuratively) pelted with chocolate eggs that are not kosher for Pesach and might even possibly contain ham. The competition to keep kids keyed in on Pesach is fierce and demands a creative strategy. The Passover festival is too rich and profound, too redolent of redemption and mystery, for us to allow it to get pushed off the radar screen by some fleabitten bunny. Passover therefore clearly needs a mascot, as has long been the custom for some of the other important festivals (for example, Manny the Menorah or Sukkah Shmuel). Not to engage in this effort to make Passover more attractive to next-generation celebrants, would be to deny our very destiny as a people. Action is demanded. But of what kind?
2. Selection Criteria: Making Passover Cuddly
Our criteria are, thankfully, wide open. Let us consider precedent: what is the marketed face of the festival of Christ’s resurrection, after having been crucified and three days in his crypt, miraculously to assume his place with his father in dominion over all lands and nations? The face children give to this transfiguration of unutterable majesty, is the pinched, bleached-out face of a white rabbit - albeit, sometimes in formal top hat and waistcoat - who runs around of a saturday night pooping out candy all over the lawn.
The Easter Bunny: not only thematically inconsistent, but weirder than a platypus on mescaline. Think about it: He’s a rabbit - but not a regular rabbit, no - he’s a male egg-laying rabbit, what lays the cho-o-lat eggs. And I need not belabor the utter failure to posit any specific resurrective significance to the ubiquitous sugar-encrusted marshmallow animals and cryptic jellybeans that abound in the rabbit’s corn-syrup wake. But despite the ridiculousness of selecting a bunny to symbolize this festival, that bunny has successfully co-opted the whole affair. Easter is now mostly about a bunny bearing candy, standing in for the life-restoring power of the King of Heaven and his Holy Son. The bunny stands triumphant and unquestioned, despite that he embodies breathtaking leaps of logic and credibility. This means we can choose whatever we wish to be our marketable face of Pesach. Clearly, almost anything will do.
3. The Answer that Ends All Argument
I propose: Moishe, the Passover Stoat.
Can you not already sense the inherent familiarity, the obviousness, the pendant cultural embrace of our friendly friend Moishe? If not, let me remind you that the legend of Rudolph, RNR, was actually only written in 1939 - but now we literally cannot conceive of celebrating the virgin birth of the messiah on earth without explicit reference to an ILLUMINATED PRESENT-DELIVERING ARCTIC CERVINE. Seriously, this is the mascot they picked after we gave them almost two thousand years to come up with something. Yet despite this thundering ridiculosity, Rudolph has been fully established as a principal holiday mascot in the course of only a generation or three. This renowned case study proves that the market is now ready to hear the multifarous legends of Moishe the Passover Stoat.
Each time his name is uttered, the more inveitable is the seepage of his legendary exploits into the fabric of our social history, like the greats before him - Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, or that Giant Sno-Tire-Holding Guy by the Highway. Those popular legendary figures, though arguably of more recent vintage than the Easter Bunny (or, by extension, “Jesus"), still have captured our hearts and insinuated themselves thoroughly into our individual and mutual idioms. Our very mental image of “straightening a river with a lasso” or “holding a giant sno-tire by the roadside” is a product of the hard cultural inroads secured by these modern avatars. Moishe will easily become every bit this much a cherished definer of our cultural narrative as any of them, given half a chance.
The choice of “stoat” as the genus mascottus would appear to be so self-evident as to render explication superfluous, but for the record: the stoat is possessed of the four classic Passover qualities: generosity, piety, refulgence, and juggling. Stoats are known among animals for being judicious and good-humored, for keeping tidy gardens and for enjoying Leon Uris novels. They both are kosher and keep kosher. They are the veritable diamond fob on the great terrestrial food chain. Plus, kids love’em.
“Moishe” is a good name for a Passover stoat because it evokes the Passover story, which also concerns a “Moses.” The name itself includes the sound of the inaspirate hard schwa, which similarly appears in “stoat” and “Passover,” lending a happy assonance to the articulation. This phoneme is the Pythagorean “perfect sound” from which all other sounds are generated. It is both qualitatively and quantitatively euphoneous. Plus, kids love it.
It is possible that certain other animals could also suffice as the Passover mascot in place of the stoat. Potential candidates include a squirrel, a penguin, and maybe a wallaby. Compelling arguments could be crafted for the elevation of any of these to mascot status ahead of the noble stoat. However, I already am working on a whole collection of Passover Stoat legends, so let’s not rock the boat. Regardless what the kids are loving.
Up later: Moishe stories. But first, I probably have some other stuff to post, or do, or something. Make sure you wash your hands before returning to your other computer-related activities, now - you don’t know where that stoat has been playing....
