I could not be more tickled pink–actually purple–about the story of my purple matzo ball soup. It happened when I found myself making a seder at our friend Sergio’s house in Cumari, Brazil (Pop. 3000) last week.
The problem in telling the story, however, is that the purple soup is NOT the story. And I’m only realizing this a week later, back in Chicago. That by looking only through the lens of me and my soup, I missed the actual story. The only way to tell the story now is by parsing through the lessons.
Don’t Get Caught in the Weeds
When Isabel said, “I want to know the story of the soup” (Eu quero saber a história da sopa) I thought “it’s not that big of a story. We didn’t have broth. I used whatever vegetables were available to make some. That included purple cabbage. So my soup was purple.”
Only now do I realize she didn’t mean tell me the story of YOUR soup, but the story of THE soup…the story of the Jews’ Exodus out of slavery in Egypt and the wish for freedom for all today; the unleavened bread that became the matzo and the reason Jews don’t eat any leavening for eight days; how Passover has been celebrated for over 7,000 years by Jews around the globe. And then I could add how crumpled matzo crumbs grew into ball-shaped dumplings that became, while not a traditional icon of the seder, certainly a beloved part of the meal.
Tell the Story from the Other’s Perspective
No eggs? We borrowed six from neighbor Unildes. No matzo? I can make it from scratch with flour. No flour? Another neighbor lent us that. Of course walnuts (a primary ingredient in the Charosets, the chunky mixture of walnuts, apples, sweet wine and cinnamon to symbolize the mortar the Jewish slaves used to build the pyramids) are only available in December. (It’s a Brazilian tradition to serve walnuts or give them as gifts for Christmas)
I thought the story was about my ingenuity and flexibility in soldiering on to make seder as the only Jew in a small town and without the conveniences of a big US City. What I missed was my husband finding a little Orthodox store in Sao Paulo the week before to get Matzo ball mix and sweet Jewish wine. Or how Sergio tried to accommodate everything I needed. How neighbors chipped in with what was missing.
This was not about me as the hero saving Passover—in fact I was the only one celebrating. It was about all the others in the story who respected and supported that this was important to me—even when it was foreign to them. Thank you.
My soup was hilarious…to me.
I loved my purple soup. It reminded me of Renee Zellweger’s similar fiasco in Bridget Jones’s Diary. But mostly it reminded me of why I love being part of an interfaith, multicultural family: the cabbage that dyed the soup purple only became available because Sergio was willing to share half of what he was using to make his Good Friday Fish dish—the main dish for the meal we were eating after the seder.
This is not your parents’ small town.
We wondered how our friend Sergio would fare moving back to a small town after years of living in the US. But while he was away growing and finding himself, so was the town. Yes, practically everyone in town is a cousin (as the town historian Edimilson was proud to diagram), and yes, most of the now aged 60-something guests (at the post-seder Easter Party) had gone to kindergarten together.
And they are teachers and politicians and artists and entrepreneurs. How wonderful it was to have that small-town sense of groundedness and connection as a foundation and anchor to one’s meanderings in the world.