Pesach!

To those readers of a slight or pronounced Jewish persuasion, my best wishes for a wonderful Passover. Pesach started yesterday (the 20th), and continues until next Saturday.

My first Jewish story:

My brother Sean has a Jewish friend who, a few years back, came over to our family's house once and had dinner with us. Blunt-spoken person that I am, I started talking a bit about religion and then asked a question about the Jewish perspective, but instead of asking "What's the Jewish perspective?" I asked something like, "What do you people think?" The room temperature dropped a few degrees.

See, this is why I could never be a politician. While not a gaffe on the scale of Michael Richards's infamous N-word meltdown, my utterance doubtless seemed pretty damn rude to our guest. Sean's friend remained polite and I did my best to recover, but I'm sure the damage was done and I was mentally tagged "Asshole" by both Sean and his friend.

So this is a heads-up to all the non-Christians I plan to meet as I trudge across the mainland: if I mistakenly say "you people" in reference to your entire tradition, please understand that I don't mean it derisively.

My second Jewish story also involves house guests, but this time it was our entire family that made an inadvertent mistake. I was teaching French at a Catholic high school in Arlington, Virginia at the time, and because our language department planned to host a group of French teens who would stay with us for two weeks, I was asked to house the chaperones. My mother busied herself preparing a meal for our guests: spaghetti with ground beef and pork, plus, of course, parmesan cheese.

At that point, we didn't realize our guests were Jewish, and that they did indeed eat kosher.

When Monsieur and Madame arrived, we all laughed about the mistake and a new dinner was quickly made.


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