But here’s the thing: Even if we wouldn’t teach this stuff in school, wouldn’t they remember it from last year anyway? Are we supposed to knock them on the heads once a year and give them amnesia? Reset their brains? I thought we only did that to the rasha.
So now I’m thinking we’re actually supposed to get the kids drunk. Give them that strong wine for the first cup so that all of a sudden they forget everything. This is why the seforim keep insisting that we rush things so they won’t fall asleep. We’re on the clock here.
But the truth is that, in true Pesach tradition, I can probably answer your question with a question: Every year, your children’s rebbeim teach them a million divrei Torah on Ha Lachma Anya and the five rabbis and the one with the weird facial hair and the 4 sons, but there’s a massive gap of divrei Torah in Maggid between Tzey Ul’mad and the Makkos because the rebbeim don’t give the kids anything to say. And then they give divrei Torah on bentching. Why don’t they teach Tzey Ul’mad? Isn’t that the main story section of the Haggadah?
And the answer is your question.
Dear Mordechai,
What should I do for Chol HaMoed?
A.M.S.
Dear A.,
Go somewhere indoors, especially if you don’t eat gebrokts. Because it might rain. In fact, some people might be rooting for it to rain. I know I was last year.
I know this is the most selfish thing to root for, but hear me out:
Last year, on the first day of Chol HaMoed, I looked out my window and noticed two thick white lines running around the side of my not-yet-Jewish neighbor’s house, down their front walk, up their sidewalk to our driveway and out to the middle of the street, where it stopped. And I said to myself, “It looks like they got some kind of delivery. What on earth did they drag out of a car and into their house? Two oversized pieces of chalk?”
And then my wife said, “Oh. It was the flour.”
It turns out that the night before Pesach we still had a big plastic container of flour and nothing to do with it, because our oven was Pesachdik. And we don’t sell real chometz. I went to shul, and my wife, who was supposed to be hiding chometz, went out to the backyard and dumped all the flour into the outside garbage can. With no bag. And she didn’t know that all our outdoor garbage cans have holes on the bottom, though this usually doesn’t bother me because it means that my cans don’t fill up with water when it rains. Anyway, the next morning, I brought the cans to the curb, and the garbage collectors brought it to the middle of the street and dumped it into their trucks, and I never looked back. Until Chol HaMoed.
So I spent the next couple of days seeing these two big lines of flour running up and down my neighbor’s property that we could not do anything about, and wondering if our neighbors were wondering what it was, but we didn’t want to do anything to draw attention to the fact that we’d made the mess because then they would ask us to clean it up with our Pesach broom or our constantly-malfunctioning vacuum cleaner, and we’d have to say something like, “Sure. Next week.” This would not be great for anti-Semitism. Especially if we don’t explain that it’s flour.
So we spent all of Chol HaMoed davening that it would rain so our flour would wash off our neighbor’s property, even though everyone else was saying Morid Hatal. Finally we won, and it did rain on Chol HaMoed, as it always does, but it didn’t rain hard enough, so the flour was still there. But now it was more of a dough.