Last night, Jess and I made the best of things, setting up a seder for just the two of us on our living room floor:

Though we had longer haggadot, and even some shorter ones, yesterday morning my mother sent along a Coronavirus-updated version of Shoshana Silberman’s A Family Haggadah, which we had used in my childhood.  And, somehow, that seemed like the right choice.

So, occasionally bolstering with prayers (like birkat hamazon) and songs (whether chad gadya, or ‘Take Us Out of Egypt” [to the tune of “Take Me Out To The Ball Game”]) and readings pulled from other books, we made our way through at a moderate pace, stopping to round up the ceremonial items I’d forgotten to bring out initially, or to pull various items out of the oven, or to go off on weird conversational tangents that had nothing to do with Passover at all until we remembered what we were doing and circled back to the seder.

We opted against opening our hall door for Elijah, singing out the open window instead.  And, though uniformly delicious, our menu was a bit less than traditional, working with the abridged ingredients we’d actually been able to round up.  Still, all in, I’d call it a great success.

We’re repeating tonight, this time with my parents (and possibly other family members?) on Zoom. And, yes, l’shana haba’ah and everything.  But, honestly, even in the midst of Coronavirus and lockdown and whatever else, I’d say this year, right here, is already pretty excellent, too.

While I continue to have all kinds of moral angst about online grocery shopping during this pandemic (I’m not in a high-risk group myself, and am therefore just taking advantage of the fact that I can afford to offload my risk to a less privileged low bidder), I nonetheless bowed to COVID worries this week, and ordered a big load of stuff from Fairway using Shipt, the only service I’ve found that currently has even intermittent delivery availability in NYC at the moment.  (Given their business model, it’s worth returning repeatedly throughout the day if there are no current slots, as new ones regularly open up.)

While it’s slated to arrive in a couple of hours (though the delivery window has already been twice pushed back), given the picked-clean shelves of grocery stores, I can’t imagine more than a small fraction of what we ordered will actually show up.  Still, with some creativity, and our already-stocked pantry, I think we’ll be mostly fine.

The biggest questions are around Passover, which kicks off this Wednesday evening.  A month and a half back, when I stocked up to weather this all, I didn’t really take into account the flour content of shelf-stable options, and I definitely didn’t grab any jars of gefilte fish.  So, though my parents have floated the idea of a Zoom seder, it’s unclear whether we’ll actually have any of the ingredients needed for even just the seder plate, much less traditional dinner dishes like brisket or matzo-ball soup.

At the same time, if the point of the holiday is to remember when our ancestors were slaves in Egypt – which, in Hebrew, translates literally to ‘a narrow place’ – then perhaps a quarantined version of the holiday will be as good of a reminder of that feeling as possible, and a success regardless of the culinary details.

Next year, if not in Jerusalem, then at least outside my apartment.