For giving us the fruit of the hobgoblin

There are Jews' Jews and there are gentiles' Jews. Jews' jews grew up with a lot of other jews around, their parents may have owned a button factory (based on my summer camp experience), they attended bar mitzvahs with the requisite themes of ice skating, monopoly, and roses, stores in their hometown are called Schwartz's Kosher Meat on a Stick and Lipschitz Furnitue Galleria.
The other Jews, like me, were probably one of the first Jews to ever go to their schools. Because of their mother's yearly Hanukah presentation, their classmates thought their religion was one or pyromania and doughnut worship. Their 5th grade chorus teacher may have told them, "sure, you can not sing about Jesus, but you are going to look like an idiot up there on the risers with your mouth closed while everyone else is singing."
My temple growing up served an hour's drive radius. Shabbat services (which were only held once a month) drew about 10-40 people. Our rabbi was part-time. My family had three other families in the area who we would rotate hosting the big eating holidays (Rosh hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover) with. For the 7 collective kids of these families, the goal of these dinners was to see how much sweet (and also 22 proof) Manuchevitz wine we could surrepticiously pour into the punch bowl of Juicy Juice set out for our ladling pleasure on the table. The answer was usually quite a bit.
Since I only saw my Jewish friends at most once a week (for Hebrew school and not at all in the summer), the mainstay of my jewish identity was how I defined myself to the good Christian children at the James H Bean School. In third grade I told them that swearing wasn't wrong for Jews and cloistered a group in a bathroom stall for a whispered rendition of my mother's daily I'm-home-from-work expletives. In the fourth grade holiday musical, I didn't even have to try out to be on of the glow-in-the-dark dancing stars in the one This Song Isn't About Christmas number, I was handed the part. I even brought a second grade Megan Condon to a Hebrew School passover, which went well until she broke into tears and eventually inquired when we were going to drink the blood of little Christian babies.
When I went to college, it was suddenly Jewapalooza. But instead of feeling part of the incrowd, I felt like one in a herd. I went to high holiday services on campus my freshman year with at least 500 other students. We sat, we stood, we prayed, we sang, and it felt like nothing, like routine. The rest my holidays on campus were spent in a park near my dorm, thinking and reflecting and trying to throw in Hebrew words where I could.
There are probably more Jews in Seattle than Maine, but not as many as in Providence. I know a few who I play frisbee with and we do Hanukah together and it is wonderful. There is one friend in particular who I always to passover with because we care for the same balance between praying, eating, drinking, and stroytelling. For the last two years, we have shared a table with our gentile boyfriends and sang the same songs to different tunes and had a very good and tasty time. This year that friend was in Sweden. This meant that the only Seattle resident I have ever done Passover with before was my ex-boyfriend. I was pretty sure he could be relied upon to entertain my need to get my jew on, but I needed back-up to really have a party.
So I set about recruiting. Luckily, if you play it right, Passover is a pretty easy holiday to get people around a table for. You just have to watch how you pitch it. You can't say "I'm having this dinner, where we are going to wait 2 hours before we eat anything. While waiting, I will tell stories about g*d killing Egyptians, and then we will sing a song saying it was all too much, really and we still feel kind of bad about it. When we finally eat, the first thing will small loaf made by putting many different kinds of fish together in a blender and fusing them into one fish with jelly and salt. One very lucky person will find a large piece of a cracker that I have hid in my apartment. And another highlight of the evening will be leaving the door open so an invisible man can join us."
What you do say is, "It is mandatory that we dirnk 4 glasses of wine." That brings in the gentiles.
So I had a crowd for Passover last night. I got home early to cook and clean. Wht your really supposed to do is take a fine brush and go over the entire place looking for Hametz (leavened bread). The only place I took a brush too was the toilet, so it is hametz free if nothing else. We did do really well with the reclining part, however, since I only have two table chairs so everyone else was in an arm chair.
In the course of introducing new friends to Passover, some themes of the evening were hammered home. The sentiments of the dinner conevyed to my guests were: Everyone dies. As jews, we feel guilty about everyone dying. But then, haven't we suffered enough, why should we feel guilty for the suffering of our persecutors? Oh god, we feel guilty again.
Still, they managed to get into it. Even when we sang about circumcision, even when we ate salted parsley as an hoursd'ourve. I think the wine may have helped.
By the third glass everyone had some recognition of the wine prayer -- borai bri hagoffin (thanks for the fruit of the vine). And at the fourth glass one guest asked, "Isn't it time to borai pri hobgoblin again?" And as a gentiles' Jew, that's when I knew my job was complete.