"Hello. I am trapped in my house." http://mspmag.com/eat-and-drink/foodie/in-praise-of-the-loneliest-seder-ever/

I have a lot of unnerving conversations with my best friends. “Jews lived in attics for years hiding from the Nazis, and they were fine.” Were they? Were they really? “A couple hundred thousand people will die, and we’ll go back to normal.” Will we? I

"I’m not alone in now concluding that normal was not that great—Who cares if it wasn't profitable to have extra ventilators and masks and pandemic researchers on the books, we should have had them."

Meanwhile, as we stand six feet apart in the grocery stores, we must see that the end-caps are full of Passover supplies. Matzoh, ancient Egypt's version of the bag of chips you grab from a truck-stop because you better have something to eat while you're on the road."

I’ve been asked a few times now what we are “supposed” to do this year for Passover. Do we get out the good china, and spend all week cooking for ... Instagram, FaceTime? I mean, if you’ll be happy looking back on that and it gives you comfort, have at it.

My two kids don’t want chicken liver, gefilte fish, or a whole brisket. It occurred to me that gefilte fish & chicken liver are something you are horrified by as a child, and somehow meander back to in your 20s, probably at other peoples’ houses, which are currently off-limits.

Mainly, what we’ll have this year is: Conversation. Maybe about how on the seder plate we remember life’s bitterness, as well as life’s sweetness, but in my whole life till now we always celebrated having come through the plagues a long time ago, back when everything was myth.

When Cinderella and Moses and Blackbeard the Pirate lived with equal weight, in a world that always drove towards a happy ending. But we have a whole holiday about surviving plagues, right here, before us. What does it mean, plague? What does it mean, to want to be passed-over?

How will we think about this holiday in the future, if we get to spend it with other people? Is it right to celebrate buttered matzoh with salt, when that’s not much, but also, it’s quite a lot?

And we’re sick of each other in these four walls, but losing each other or these four walls would be the worst thing that could ever happen.

The American need to fairytale everything into silver linings is part of what got us in this mess. We put fire-doors in building-codes and stockpile masks not because everything always works out in the end, but because disasters are a part of life too.

Which we forget at our peril. (We forgot at our peril!)

But if we do get a silver lining out of this isolated Passover, let it be this: We were lucky to have those heedless years of taking for granted Aunt Sylvie bustling around with cut-glass full of canned olives and celery sticks among a pile of kids on the beige-wall-to-wall,

and we’re lucky today to have a box of matzoh too—and we’re lucky even if we don’t feel lucky. Just because this really, truly sucks, doesn’t mean we’re not the luckiest people who ever were, merely to not be sick, which, God willing, we will never consider “mere” again.

And so let us now praise the most isolated Passover seder maybe ever, and work to recall what about it even in this is lucky, fortunate, and blessed. Pass the matzoh, and let’s find an aunt to FaceTime.