Passover On A Boat

We took a family cruise with 4,500 of our closest friends for Spring Break. Royal Caribbean has enormous boats that include multiple dining rooms, pools, water slides, a casino, a miniature golf course, a basketball court, theaters, an ice skating rink (because why wouldn’t you put an ice skating rink on a boat?) and much more. While I could write about how I made a cruise activities staff member think I was a professional golfer, lost playing bingo and trivia, share that The Moose (now 12!) won a free throw competition against teenagers and adults, or other highlights from the trip, I'm going to write about the Passover Seder, which is the ritual dinner to start the holiday. Wow, that was a really long sentence!

Passover, one of the most important holidays in the Jewish calendar, commemorates the Israelites becoming free after being slaves in Egypt. Think The Ten Commandments starring Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner. Too old of a reference? Go with the animated The Prince of Egypt. Anyway, some cruises have a rabbi and/or a formal Passover Seder. Our cruise did not. Instead, the cruise provided a portion of a dining hall for a self-led Seder. While we thought the cruise was going to provide prayer books, they did not. Fortunately, another family brought a Seder plate and Haggadahs, which are the Passover prayer books. Unfortunately, the Haggadahs were completely in Hebrew with no English at all.

I guess now would be a good time to mention that there was just my family and another family in attendance. The other extended family consisted of a couple, their three elementary school aged kids, and the father's parents. The family was from Israel and moved to the United States several years ago. The grandparents still live there and only speak Hebrew, so the other family led a fast Seder all in Hebrew. We participated in a few prayers here and there, but any readings were recited quickly by the dad or grandfather.

It ended up being a nice and unique Seder. The cruise provided a good meal of brisket, chicken, matzah ball soup, and more including Manischewitz wine, which one of the other family's kids quickly discovered was not grape juice. We had a nice conversation, and there was a huge area to hide the afikomen (it's a piece of matzah that kids try to find). And again, did I mention that this was on a boat?

The next day, we took a tour of Nassau in The Bahamas and stopped in the Atlantis hotel. I noticed a few men walking around wearing kippahs, a traditional head covering, and realized that people were celebrating Passover at the hotel. My aunt used to go to "Passover resorts," where you spend the entire holiday away and have all of your meals prepared, but I'd imagine that Passover at the Atlantis is at a completely different level. Sure enough, celebrating the entire holiday for a family of 4 is probably going to cost five figures and that doesn't include airfare.

Here are a few pictures from the trip:

Canadians can bring back so much more than Americans!