A satire.
I was excited to head out to the Passover program with my family this year. I had done extensive research on six WhatsApp and Facebook groups devoted to the subject with thousands of nit-picky Jews from around the world just like me over the prior five months. My choice was carefully balanced between nice hotel and physical facilities, good food, and whether I cared more about talented speakers, mixed swimming or a relatively cheap price.
Programs can generally be lumped into three groups: those under 250 people; 250 to 600 people; and a bazillion people. The tinier programs tend to get small families and Europeans, while the enormous programs get the nouveau riche who bring twenty-seven kinsman and a nanny. We opted for the middle one, assuming a Goldilocks outcome.
My cheap (prefers “frugal”) spouse insisted on taking two flights to get to our destination, to save a total of $400 for a family of five, on a program that cost in excess of $80,000. While he said the extra four hours of travel time were about principle, I’m sure he figured it would keep my mother from joining us, who could never manage the transfer in a large airport, thus avoiding both needing to pay for her and having her company for ten days.
Fortunately, only one suitcase went missing on our arrival, with all of one son’s yom tov clothing. He managed to get by with loaners from a friend on the program, who was only two sizes larger than my 20-year-old. He’s “in the freezer” and not dating yet anyway, so looking shlumpy wasn’t a big deal.
We arrived at the hotel to have a young snotty woman wearing a Vasser shirt tell my other son that she was triggered by his “NYPD” T-shirt, and demanded that he change it immediately. He laughed at her and told her to “go to a woke non-Orthodox program next time.”
Not a great start.
Our rooms were pretty nice with ocean views, but our three adult children with nine large pieces of luggage could barely fit into their shared room. We had opted to not splurge for a third room, in a ridiculous approach of pretending we weren’t spoiling our kids rotten.
By the time everyone unpacked and showered, there was very little time to call family members at other programs around the world. I opted to just post a quick family pic on the broader family’s WhatsApp. Everyone else did the same, including my brother who was unhappily at home with his in-laws, who posted a GIF of a young boy crying.
The boys ran off to minyan while the women followed a comfortable 30 minutes later to not appear too frum. The boys used the opposite approach, tucking four sefarim under each arm to “frum signal” to other bochrim on the program. Personally, I thought the white shirt, dark suit and 4-foot long tzisit dragging behind them was sufficient but I’m old school.
The Ashkenazi and Sefardi minyanim both started at the same time, with about the same number of people, however the Ashkenazis got the ballroom while the Mizrahis only got to pray in the hallway. Quite a strike in a program hosted in an Arab country, native to many of the yet-again-abused Jews.
The men looked for someone to talk to about the minyan situation, only to discover that there was no one from the program operator on premise for the first days of yom tov, presumably attempting to avoid yenching Jews. In any event, it sorted itself out, as both groups were ultimately placed in small windowless rooms, and the Sefardi minyan shrank in size as many people abandoned the long atonal davening of their Mizrahi brothers and joined the Ashki crowd. Little did they know that the Ashkenazi minyan had been taken over by a group of Five Towns’ guys who only gave aliyahs to friends and family. Worse still, the American and French families who had made aliyah let their small kids run around like lunatics, seemingly preparing them for a future of hooliganism.
The food on the program was great. If only the people treated the seder and meals with a modicum of respect.
We entered the dining room to see a woman throwing a fit, tossing platters of food to the ground when she found out that the program wasn’t gebrochts. Men stalked the buffet with full plates of lamb and steak in each hand, and then asked the Muslim waiters – who had fasted all day for Ramadan – to bring them burgers and fries without a second thought. Concurrently, two American mothers stormed the kitchen demanding that their kids are the most special, and needed white meat chicken without salt, and dessert that contained no chocolate, nuts or gluten. ASAP.
We made the mistake of taking our food before finding our table. Carrying full plates, we had to walk back to the entrance to look up our table number, an astonishing #86. The high number wasn’t the issue; we were trying to figure out the logic as the prior highest number was 44, a bizarre gap. Worse, the table numbers in the dining room were completely random with absolutely no order or logic. Even more curious, table #86 didn’t exist. We ended up grabbing an empty table next to the kitchen entrance to enjoy the incessant flow of dozens of waiters shuttling back-and-forth with plates and food, overwhelmed by the hungry Jews who remarkably ate every two hours.
Things slowed down to a normal pace after the first day, with relatively few outbursts. The “Vasser woman” switched to a PETA shirt for the remainder of the chag, alternately yelling about the 200-pound tuna flopped near the barbeque which was carved up each meal, and the seventy foot-long buffet of charred animal meat. One girl complained to management that she saw a swastika design in one of the carpets, while a few boys got into a mild fight about whether Shraga is a real yeshiva. Yet no one complained about the small children who kept playing in the lobby fountain, kicking the spotlights to squeals of delight, waiting to get electrocuted.
The Israelis celebrated a single day of yom tov even though they left the holy land at precisely the time they are supposed to be there. One Israeli woman with fake breasts that looked like goiters if her gigantic botoxed lips had not lowered them into correct orbit, brought her kids horseback riding, not pondering the strange small gold hamsa hand dangling between her legs from a chain around her waist. I wasn’t sure if she was proclaiming abstinence or complaining about the effects of the ride.
The prayers were short and unmelodious. While the large programs hire talented chazanim, the smaller ones get men who claim they have yorzeit for their mothers-in-law and torture the prayers in their memory. Shir HaShirim was completed in 300 seconds to a round of high fives. Even at breakneck speed, davening always seemed to end five minutes after breakfast closed down. For the evening services, the self-anointed gabbaim, who showed up to every minyan twenty minutes late, shouted with the authority of geonim about the right time to recite the omer, seemingly based on nothing more than it was a few minutes later than the last screamer.
While the Facebook groups had daily photos of program dinners from around the world, my spouse kvetched about breakfast which no Jews seemed to care about. One complaint was regarding the lack of the ultimate yin yang Pesach food, something which is both the opposite and complementary at the same time: chocolate covered matzah, which reenacts the battle scenes of the movie “300” in Jewish intestines. The hotel must have been familiar with the dietary ramifications of the holiday, as every room attendant had a toilet plunger in a holster.
One group of guys took no chances on the program’s kiddush and shlepped their own to the resort: tequila and foie gras from Europe. As they sliced the gelatinous mound onto Pesadic crackers, I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the expiration date on the goose liver was 18 months earlier. Perhaps I secretly wanted the Vasser girl to claim a small victory.
A friend on the program let me in on an observation both too early and too late: the busboys were only rubbing the dirt off the cutlery and not washing it. I found myself drinking soup straight out of the bowls and eating fruit by hand during the second days.
During chol hamoed, some people went on group tours while others hired their own guides – to do the exact same tours as the rest of the group at five times the price. Still others stayed on premises and attempted to poach workers to bring back to the United States for new help.
In all, we had a great trip that cost roughly five percent of the country’s GDP. My family around the world also enjoyed their programs seemingly more than people’s posts on WhatsApp and Facebook groups would suggest. My sibling who stayed home with in laws was glad it was over and that no one fell down (or needed medical attention!)
While the tradition of saying “Next year in Jerusalem” concludes each seder, I wonder whether people ended the holidays saying “next year I’ll find a program where I can do something to get a Passover trip for free.”
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