and on the bright side, the kibbutz pool is now open

After seven long days of observing the Heebs in action, I think it’s safe to say that I’m pretty much an expert on the holiday of Pesach, also known as the Pestival of Matzo. In order to enlighten my non-Jewish and other unworldly readers, I will provide you with some of my most significant discoveries of the last week.
1. Bread vs. Matzo.
During Passover, it is customary to give up bread in favor of everything unleavened – egg noodles, matzo pizza, yeast-less cereal, cardboard cakes/cookies/brownies/muffins, basically every carbohydrate you can think of but made with enough artificial ingredients and a shorter preparation time than it takes for the bad guys to drive us out of Egypt. And why do we eat these crap-ass food items? My thesis is that it is purely so that we can pull a piece of crumbly matzo dipped in peanut butter out of our lunch boxes and shriek, “Hey, look at me, I’m Jewish!” Come on, did you really think anyone actually likes the taste of matzo? I mean…
But in Eretz Yisrael there is no need to prove your Jewishness to anyone for obvious reasons, so you can trust me when I say that not one piece of matzo will ever make its way into my stomach! Instead, I’ve taken the anti-establishment approach and eaten as much yeast-filled cuisine as possible: pretzels, rice cakes, granola bars, pita (of both the traditional and Druzi varieties), even good old-fashioned bread. Mmm mmmm, carbs.
2. Seven vs. Eight Days.
Pesach is a day shorter in Israel, probably because a whole week of not eating the Israeli diet of Hummus and Pita is already too much to ask. Plus, we’re already doing the rest of the world a favor by awaiting the arrival of the Messiah in the Holy Land, so it’s kind of like getting a tax break for all the mitzvot we’re carrying out.
3. Spring Cleaning.
There’s an old wives’ tale that says that matzo is made of the ground up bones of Christian babies; however, I’m fairly certain that matzot are in fact made of the mashed up insides of kibbutz volunteers. On my last day of work before Pesach vacation, I and seven or so other slaves had to kosherize the entire dining hall on Kibbutz Ketura. Apparently this process involves dipping everything in boiling water as some kind of Judaic baptism to cleanse all the dishes and silverware of all the breadcrumbs they’ve ever touched. Also, because I’m one of the most diligent workers in the cheder ochel, I was blessed with the honorable duty of cleaning the serving tray heaters with, oh yes, a toothbrush. You’d better believe that every crevice is officially breadless, greaseless, and scrubbed so raw that the metal shines brighter than the day it left the sweatshop assembly line.
I’ve also become quite skillful with the Israeli mop, also known as the squeegee, because we “mopped” the entire dining hall like 17 times over. Jesus! Do you really think breadcrumbs are just going to appear after the fifth run through? Bah!
4. Family Bonding.
With all the extra vacation time on our hands, why not spend it on various tiyulim with your relatives! (Oh, and if anyone can provide a good translation for the Hebrew word tiyul, that would help me out quite a bit. Outing? Hike? Stroll? Who the hell knows.)
In America, or at least in the Dorfman family, Passover is only a holiday for the first day or so, then you go back to school and/or work just like any other day. But in Israel, everyone gets the entire week off! It’s like an elongated Thanksgiving weekend, except without good food.
To celebrate, one of the national Israeli banks paid a shit ton of money to all the parks, museums, and archeological sites so that they’d all be free of admission for the entire holiday. Touching? Generous? A good idea? Really? Forget the occupation, this was like the worst course of action Israel has ever committed. Everyone and their mother was out and about, taking in Israel’s rich history and national beauty all at the same moment. It’s nauseating, really. There are supposedly seven million people in Israel, and the tourist destinations simply cannot support them all at the same time. Moreover, the freeways cannot handle seven million cars trying to pass each other all at once!
But I digress. After a two-minute tour of K Shmo so my mom and brother could see all the hot sites (my bachelor pad, Etzba Hagalil Middle School, the Shuk, the bus station, the pub on Kibbutz Dan), we headed to Nimrod’s Fort… pardon me, Fortress. After five (ok, two) grueling hours of scouring the ancient structure, I could pretty much write a brochure on it, but I assure you I won’t because my blood pressure rises a few points just thinking about how much I hated that place. I hate crowds, I hate the dark, and most of all I hate feeling like a rodent in a maze. We had to walk down all these horrible, spiral staircases into complete darkness, only to stumble upon a crack in the wall which served as a lookout post for whoever it was that used the fortress to defend the Golan Heights way back in the day. I would include some pictures of the view, but they would probably all have the same caption: “Great! It’s the same view from every angle! Ooh, there’s the same Druze village, and there’s some bushes and rocks. Yeah, awesome. This room looks exactly like the last one. Can we go eat now?”
5. Chagim.
Chag means holiday in Ivrit in the religious sense of lockdown and other nonsense. During the Chag of Pesach, all these mini Chags keep popping up all over the place, as if the Sabbath Bride is PMSing and can’t make up her mind on when she wants to make her big debut, or maybe she just wants the entire Jewish world to suffer along with her. First it’s a Monday night/Tuesday, then it’s back to the usual Friday night/Saturday, then again on Sunday night/Monday. I just can’t keep it straight. Must Passover be made more complicated by the whole country shutting down for 24 hours at a time? Haven’t I been subjected to enough hardships in the last week?
6. Once Again, the Food.
You don’t know how good the food is on your kibbutz until you eat lunch at another hippie commune. My god. They say the dates are sweeter on the other side, but now I know that our fancy, educated-Anglo-breeded varieties are SO much tastier. Ah, socialism.