Zoom parties have very quickly spilled over the boundaries of the PareaGrooves. It is incredible to see the push for community and connection and continuation of some kind of normalcy that has taken so many of us online, for parties, happy hours, talks, and religious ceremonies. Many churches and synagogues have been running online services for weeks, but this is relatively passive with few being interactive. This week, for Passover, thousands of people took online religion into their own hands.
Passover is the Jewish holiday that commemorates the escape of the Jews from Egypt, where they were being held as slaves, as relayed in Exodus, the second book of the Bible. It is celebrated with a dinner, called a “Seder.” Seder means “order,” and over the course of the dinner there is an order of many rituals, most involving food, and songs, and telling the story of the Exodus, as well as a nice meal. The commandment underlying and compelling the Seder tradition is to tell the Exodus story, arguably the origin of the modern Jewish people, “dor v’dor” or “generation to generation.” It is a fun time and a good reason to get together with family and friends. This year, with the quarantine, we cannot travel to our families’ and friends’ homes, we cannot sit with each other at dinner tables, and we are afraid to expose our elderly relatives, who are often leading the Seders, to the virus. You would think this would put a kibosh on Seders, especially since most modern Jews aren’t all that religious. Even rabbis were saying don’t worry so much about getting everything right this year. And yet the Seders went on. Within a handful of weeks families and friends across the country, across the world I’m told, organized online Seders using Zoom and other platforms. This involved sending out emails, figuring out the tech, putting together tables set with the Seder accoutrements like a plate with symbolic food, wine cups and candles, and figuring out how to explain how to do it all to our tech-insecure elders. And yet, as with the original Exodus, in just a few short days, so many pulled it off. Thankfully healthy, I challenged quarantine a bit and visited my parents to set them up with Zoom. My father ran a traditional Seder from his dining room as always, and my brother and his family participated from their table in their Zoom box, and my cousins participated from theirs, at least two in each box, totaling fourteen. We were Zooming in from Florida, Georgia, New Jersey and Connecticut. I stopped by a friends’ Seder after we were done, hit them perfectly at the “meal” break, and we were ten, mostly from New York and New Jersey. We shared our family Zoom Seder stories, our family stories, and our fears and gleaned information about the virus, and we met new friends. The next day Facebook and Instagram were populated by tales of Zoom Seders, many of which crossed oceans and continents, let alone the country. The wonderful, and often repeated, upside was that relatives and friends who might not otherwise have been able to celebrate Passover with each other because of the time and expense to travel, many of whom had not seen each other for years, were able to join each other at “the table” and celebrate a centuries-old tradition that is integral to the Jewish calendar. I really don’t think it was the religious aspect of the Passover Seder that drove people on such limited notice to make this collective effort and to spend this time together, to sing the songs we heard our grandparents singing, and which our grandparents heard their grandparents sing together at their tables. It was how much humans value tradition, and the embedded part of tradition which is the connection of friends and family and community. Our isolation had encouraged a collective focus on this value, and so quickly.
In transit from the parents back to my shelter locale I received a text from a friend inviting me to join the birthday “party” for her six-year-old. Again, with limited notice, friends and family came together, showing up at the designated time, to celebrate the little girl. She showed up in her Zoom box, cuddled between her mother and grandmother, wearing her fancy party dress, flashing unicorn headband and some just-like-mommy eye shadow. Her uncle and we honorary aunties came. Several more little girls popped up in their Zoom boxes with their unicorn and flowered headbands. A mom friend and her son showed up in a box and she quickly sculpted a unicorn-like figure with clay so her son could be part of the fun. The kids ran into their rooms to get their favorite stuffed unicorn dolls to show us all, pushing them in front of their laptop cameras to be admired. Then the birthday girl’s mom lit the flashing number “6” candle on their carefully iced and decorated homemade cake and we all sang “Happy Birthday” in unison, and clapped as she blew out her candles. Again, ‘dor v’dor,” “generation to generation,” we pass on our values of connection, community, celebration and support.
