Purim To Pesach Blues

I’ve always hated the last week before Pesach more than any other time in the Jewish calendar, even more than any number of Yameh Kippur that you might theoretically accrue and fast through at a single shot. The problem is that as the festival of liberation approaches, there’s less and less worth eating in the fridge or in the larder. By the last week what’s still left lingering there, is something that if it had whetted anyone’s appetite in the first place, it wouldn’t be lying there still, rotting in atrophy, collecting dust and a variety of insect faeces.
I think that the Pesach spring-cleaning tradition, starting each year just after Purim, is a custom initiated by women and perpetuated out of vengeance. Over the post Purim weeks room after room is declared off chametz limits, with all the premeditated and creepy cruelty of a Chinese water torture. By the second week of Nisan the only place you can still down a beer or a whiskey in the comfort of your own sub prime domicile stronghold is on the inside of your oven or else in the unfilled yodelling chasm of your fridge or standing in your mutt’s drinking bowl.
What have we men done to deserve such retribution? If we were to ask a woman, probably there wouldn’t be enough trees left in the Amazon jungle to provide the paper needed to bear the curses we have brought upon ourselves. What could be men’s original sin? Not refusing the forbidden fruit, committing the first recorded murder, Onan’s cheating Tamar out of a son and thereby a claim to tribal property? (The bible didn’t give that perpetrator of primordial sexual exploitation any chance of reneging on his plea bargain.)
And what’s worse, any number of hours done in community service like shifting cupboards, painting walls, cleaning out the storeroom will not reduce the term of the sentence or ease the burden of our thirst or hunger. In comparison to this, the Fast of the Firstborn, just before Seder night is more like a blessing than an encumbrance. There the self-denial is absolute. Your mind and stomach are set and tuned for abstinence and there are no false expectations.
All this talk of girl power reminds me of nida, another so called affirmative action regulation for women, but with the dash of the mikveh and the romance of sleeping in separate beds and the decadence of surfing the internet into the wee hours of the morning. And yet again, any attempt to embed these traditions in some sort of rational explanation is fated to doom. All sorts of fat aunts and rolly polly balding uncles with their kipot pinned to their kelp brushovers are wont to speculate as to the healthy benefits of kashrut and nida, and whose theories are of course not any more viable than Madame Venoza’s horoscope.
But if you think that these weeks of victual denial, this Jewish Lent, are going to help you deflate that spare tyre round your abdomen, further bloated with hamentashen, alas the news is bad, it’s a delusion. All this deprivation is not even good for your diet. You may not only be eating junk food but you are also eating junk. Its stuff you didn’t even dare throw into the dog’s bowl throughout the last 11 months. Instead you are throwing your diet routine right out of balance consuming leftovers that have lain untouched in the cupboard since time immemorial, like Tutankhamen’s energy bar. (In the unlikely case that he should resurrect and start bumping into the walls in the antechambers of his pyramid) With your dining routine discipline thrown out the window to all 4 winds, not only can’t you keep track of the calories you’re consuming but you’re going to over compensate yourself for the deprivation your system is encountering with unmeasured quantities of cholesterol and stale tim tams and mouldy half empty jars of vegemite on piles of fibre disadvantaged toast.
So it’s no wonder that on Seder night we have to purge our stomaches with horseradish and gefilte fish and salted parsley and then buttress our intestines with liberal helpings of wine and matza plaster.
And then if the children are well behaved and if Eliyahu HaNavi arrives with his sleigh and reindeer, I’m going to steer him clear of the Coonawarra and hope that he finds the afikoman and then rewards me copiously with a subscription to a spa with a Jacuzzi, a sauna, a hamam and a well equipped health club.