Making seder for Pessah

In Jerusalem, the old neighbours who had been in the city at least 20 years would say every year that the time to take out the summer clothes and put away the winter clothes never comes until Independence Day.

In Tel Aviv things are easier because you put away your winter clothes and take out your summer clothes at the exact same time you deal with the whole business called making seder, which is not the same thing as the family experience tomorrow night which is making a seder. Two different things.

Making seder means cleaning up. Thoroughly. It could be called an expression of personal responsibility. All the junk collected over all the years in the backs of drawers, on the tops of shelves, behind the books in the bookshelves and beneath the piles of magazines saved because for reasons completely forgotten it was decided that it might be a good idea to save those magazines.

It's sort of like what the Eban Committee investigating the Pollard Affair is supposed to be, (or more up to date, the Shamgar Commission trying to understand what went wrong in the Tomb of the Patriarchs or at City Hall Plaza in Tel Aviv) but it's not at all secret and of course, things, unlike people, are much easier to cart away when they've been around too long.

Already a week now, on sidewalks in the city, bags of clothing have appeared, old pieces of furniture ranging from simple chairs to ungainly sofas, have suddenly taken up residence. These bags of clothes and pieces of furniture don't last on the streets very long.

First the singles come by, finding the overstuffed chair they've been looking for and will keep in their living room for a year planning to have it reupholstered but never getting around to it because once was enough to walk the streets of Tel Aviv carrying an overstuffed living room chair with the seat on the head, the arms in the arms, and the top of the back of the chair banging against the bottom of the person carrying it.

In the mornings, between dawn and a reasonable hour, it used to be the invisible men from Gaza with many more children apiece than can be possibly imagined by almost anybody living in Tel Aviv, always needing another sweater, another pair of pants, another shirt, no matter how frayed at the collar.

These invisible men, working unseen all around you in the city with brooms and barrels on wheels, make the big bags of old clothing become invisible, too. And once invisible, the bags of clothing, like the invisible men who are gone by the afternoon, are forgotten, unless, by accident, or when you weren't looking your wife threw away your favourite collar-frayed shirt. Nowadays, of course, it's the immigrants -- Russians mostly -- on the search for the throwaways.

In Jerusalem, most of the restaurants will close for the holiday, because it's so complicated to clean up enough to satisfy the rabbinate. But in Tel Aviv a lot of the restaurants will stay open because the owners never intended to satisfy the rabbinate. That attitude is appropriate for a city where the chief rabbi said almost matter of factly that maybe it isn't such a good idea to force people to get married according to those rules and regulation of orthodoxy if they don't really care about those rules and regulations.

That kind of common sense is what Tel Aviv sometimes can be all about, and is very different than life up there on the hill, where because there are so many different kinds of Jewish people, Arab people and just plain people that it's sometimes impossible to find a sense that is common to them all.

Making sense of things is what making seder is all about.

It's trying out the telephone numbers written on the backs of checkbooks, without a name to go with the number, and asking "Who's this?" when somebody answers. Usually they answer "Who's this?" and then depending on the common sense of the caller, who could easily turn the whole thing into a fight with "I asked first," the solution to the mystery of the telephone number on the back of the checkbook is solved.

Of course, often those numbers are scrawled in the darkness of a pub late at night with a hand made unsteady by the weight of the glass and the number isn't written correctly, or worse, was deliberately given wrong.

So making seder in Tel Aviv is opening the windows to summer, which is only a few blocks away, Max-I-Mum from anywhere in the city, on the beach, where for the first time this season, this week it will be difficult to find a chair out of range of the tableless ping pong players. It's a way of making sense out of all the apparent chaos.

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