Elijah The Prophet Dials In For Virtual Seder

We were at the point in our virtual seder when we were supposed to invite Elijah the Prophet into the room. At our table, a place had been set. Elijah’s glass of wine was full. My wife Steph was explaining to the 21 adults and 3 children assembled online that we all just needed to open our doors to let the prophet in. On each screen, we watched as people got up to open their front doors. Then a new icon appeared in the lower right-hand corner of the gallery of windows.

“Oh, look,” Steph’s mother Laurie said, ​“Elijah the Prophet is connecting to audio.”

The joke, rigged by one of the attendants, elicited laughter in six states and one district as friends and family gathered for our virtual seder Wednesday evening — one of countless online gatherings taking advantage of technology to overcome the barriers thrown up by the Covid-19 outbreak and celebrate a Jewish tradition thousands of years old.

In the Jewish tradition, the seder — the feast marking the beginning of Passover and which tells the story of the Jews escaping slavery in Egypt — involves gathering family and friends at home for a ceremony and dinner. The idea of conducting a virtual seder began circulating online as soon as social distancing and travel restrictions became a reality a couple weeks ago.

Unorthodox, a podcast centering on Jewish culture, ran an episode on conducting a virtual seder over a week ago. By the beginning of this week, online resources abounded on how to run a virtual seder, from ReformJudaism.org to Fox News, and musical theater celebrities had planned on streaming their own Saturday night seder.

Locally, Beth El-Keser Israel began streaming all services and gathered links to markets that provided kosher food for Passover meals. Temple Beth Sholom put together a ​“package seder” for its congregants to celebrate at home. Congregation Mishkan Israel and Temple Emanuel both planned virtual seders for the second night of Passover.

Like many, we celebrate Passover with family and friends (I’m the totally supportive lapsed Catholic in an otherwise Jewish household comprised of my wife, Steph, and my son, Leo). In the past few years, we’ve managed to gather grandparents, siblings, neighborhood friends, and friends from out to town to celebrate with us. Steph uses Zoom for work, and immediately thought of its application to this year’s seder.

“As soon as we knew we couldn’t actually invite people to the house, it occurred to me that family and friends who can’t normally come to the seder, could come” virtually, Steph said; her extended family lives almost entirely on the West Coast. ​“To me, that part is all positive.”

Matzah By Hand

Steph is a pediatrician and I’m a journalist, so we’re both still working, which is a blessing. But we’re both also avoiding leaving the house except for work or to go to the store. Our 13-year-old son Leo is also home all day. The sedentariness has meant that we all have more time in the day. So Steph decided to make matzah.

“I didn’t feel like going to the supermarket just to get it, and we didn’t need other things at the store,” she said. ​“And I have that kind of time to make it, so why wouldn’t I?”

She found a recipe online from a friend.“It’s different from some of the other recipes because it has olive oil in it in addition to just flour and water,” she said. ​“Most recipes are flour, water and a little salt.”

Was the addition of the olive oil OK? ​“I assume so,” she said. ​“The only stipulations I know of are the amount of time to prepare it.”

That amount of time — as Steph learned from the website My Jewish Learning, recommended in an email from Congregation Mishkan Israel — is 18 minutes, pretty much from the time the baker starts making the dough to the time the matzot are taken out of the oven.

“Due to rabbinical discourse I don’t know the details of — so don’t ask me — it was decided by the rabbis that as soon as the flour touches the water, it starts to ferment. When you’re making bread you capitalize on that. But when you’re making matzah you can’t do that,” Steph said. ​“The whole idea is that when the Jews were packing in a hurry to leave Egypt, they didn’t have time to let the bread rise, so they had to cook it quickly to bring with them. So you’re trying to re-create that.”

Adhering to the 18-minute rule, Steph reasoned, was ​“what makes matzah matzah instead of a cracker.”

But she also had to make concessions to the pandemic. ​“To be technically kosher for Passover, the flour has to be kosher. It has to be guaranteed that no moisture touched the flour during the milling process,” Steph said. ​“These days it’s impossible to find regular flour in the store, let alone kosher flour.”

Was it really OK for us to be using non-kosher flour? ​“Well, look, we’re Reform Jews,” Steph said. ​“To me it’s not about following the rules literally. It’s about following the spirit of them… Doing it quickly, and therefore sacrificing all my normal precision when baking, is in the spirit of it.”

Leo started a timer on his phone. Steph first kneaded the dough in a KitchenAid (“Is that OK?” I asked, which earned me a sharp look), then quickly cut the dough into pieces.

She rolled out the dough as thin as she could. Leo salted and poked holes in the rolled-out dough to prevent it from puffing up during baking.

We then cranked the oven’s temperature as high as it could go — 550 degrees — and put the matzah in.

We watched as the dough slowly started to brown and the timer approached 18 minutes. They were in the oven for about 10 minutes. With 10 seconds to spare, Steph took them out of the oven and put the matzot on a cooling rack. ​“They probably could have done with more time in the oven,” Steph said. ​“But time was up, so out they came.”

Connecting To Audio

We set the time for our virtual seder at 6 p.m. EST (3 p.m. PST for many of Steph’s family members). In attendance were Steph, Leo, and myself; Steph’s parents, Robert and Laurie Silton, in Arcadia, Ca.; Steph’s brother Doug Silton, in Portland, Ore.; my parents, Frank and Linda, in Miami Beach, Fla.; my sister, Jill, in New York, N.Y.; Steph’s aunt and uncle, Myrna Silton-Goldstein and Jerry Feifer, in Los Angeles, Ca,; friends Maggie Shar and Jessica Harwood, in Easthampton, Mass.; friends Tara Duffy, Chuck Wall, and son James, in Beverly, Mass.; friends Dawn Biehler, Nathan Day, and daughters Alice and Brigid, in Washington, D.C.; and Julie, Rob, Ben, and Shayna Bailis, in their house three blocks away from ours in Hamden. We set our places at the table at one end and put a laptop on the other end so we could see everybody, and so everyone could see us.

“Thanks for doing this!” Doug said as soon as he logged into the Zoom meeting Steph had set up.

“In some ways this is better,” Steph said. ​“We don’t have to cook dinner for 10 people and everyone gets to come.”

There was a bigger truth to that. Half the people in attendance had never been to a seder with us because the distance was just a little too far. Now, all of a sudden, that didn’t matter.

As the Duffy and Wall family logged on, two-year-old James was enjoying a snack.

“He’s going to eat the whole time,” Duffy said.

“Judaism encourages children to eat,” Steph said.

“I’m so excited to be a part of this,” Silton-Goldstein said as she logged in. As the Zoom window filled with faces, everyone began talking to one another. It sounded a lot like they were all in the same room with us, just chatting before the ceremony began.

“Welcome to our seder, which is the first in so many ways,” Steph said. She meant not only in its use of technology, or in the circumstances surrounding it. ​“I know this is a first seder for a couple people, but all will be explained.” First, however, Steph said, with sarcasm ​“we’re going to do something probably none of us have done yet today — we’re going to wash our hands,” as the tradition dictates.

We proceeded through the seder. As the youngest member of the assemblage who could read, Brigid, in Washington D.C., got to ask the four questions. To the approval of many watching, Steph skipped the part of the seder about the four sons, which models how to talk to different children about the meaning of the Passover story.

“I hate it,” she said. She explained that in her childhood haggadah — the text for the order of the seder — one of the children, the wicked child, was considered not worthy of saving from the plagues in Egypt. ​“Every child deserves to be saved,” Steph said. (Our current haggadah is more forgiving.)

We sang ​“Go Down, Moses” at the top of our lungs. We drank the traditional four glasses of wine. We talked about and ate the foods on the seder plate. Elijah made his virtual appearance, to the delight of all.

As the seder drew to a close, Steph spoke a final time. ​“It’s traditional to end by saying ​‘next year in Jerusalem.’ Our family has always taken this metaphorically, not literally. I think this resonates with us even more this year, when we’re all inside, looking at each other on screens, when in normal circumstances at least half of you would be in the room with us. We’ve made the best out of this situation and I’m so delighted you could all be with us, and I know that we all hope a year from now, the world is in a better place. Hopefully we’ll all be in the same room before too long.”

We raised a glass to life.