Happy Eastover!

Or Passeaster, as with which your preference may lie.

Last evening my family celebrated both, as the lapsed Jews gathered with the lapsed gentiles and the never-were, and faked a quick seder under my direction to tell the story of passover and then eat a meal before digressing into drunken therapy complaining about how awful the people we didn't invite are and always have been.

This is that story:

"Okay, so Moses is a Jew, but he's adopted by the queen. He's basically the pharaoh's little brother. Until one day God's like, "You're Jewish," and he's like, "Damn." So he goes out and sees what it's like to be Jewish, except he's still rich and powerful and not a slave. So God says, "No, you gotta free them now," which he's cool about, figuring his brother will be down ince their dad was about to do that anyway. But it turns out since Moses left to learn about being Jewish his brother became kind of a dick and didn't free the slaves at his dad's death like he was supposed to. It's a free laboring class. Come on.

"So Moses is all "Dude," and his brother is like, "Yeah, I know," but God 'turns his heart' so he'll refuse to let the Jewish slaves go, so effectively nothing from this point out is really his fault and God's a huge dick.

"So Moses performs some miracles, which also happen to be horrible, horrible plagues upon the Egyptian people for something their king did because he was being Jedi Mind Tricked.

"Don't try to frighten us with your sorcerer's ways, Lord Vader.
"Your sad devotion to this contemporary religion hasn't given you
clairvoyance enough to- wait, yeah, actually no. Go ahead."

"First Moses made his staff into a cobra, which killed and ate the cobra-staff of an Egyptian magician, just to prove out God was stronger than his god. The the real plagues started: the Nile turned to blood, frogs rained from the sky–which is pretty cool, actually–lice, "wild beasts"–so, like Egyptian antelope or whatever were running through the streets, so that was cool–pestilence–which destroyed the entirety of the nation's crops and food stores–boils on the face and all over, giants, painful hail hitting people in their heads, locusts–eating what little of the crops remained–darkness just blotting out the sky–which should have been the end of it, but the Lord still kept Pharaoh from letting the Jews go–and finally the killing of all first-born Egyptian children, essentially committing genocide against an entire people for the fun of it.

"Dude, I am way too high for this right now."
"Shut up, Ezakiah! My mom'll totally hear you!"

"Finally, God let Pharaoh let the Jews go, but they had to get out quickly, so they baked their bread before it had risen, so it was all chewy and gross–basically a Cliff Bar. Then for some reason Pharaoh changed his mind again and some generals chased after them, but the Jews walked through the Red Sea in that really cool animated scene that's all anyone remembers from Disney's The Prince of Egypt. Then all the Egyptians chasing them died, and the Jews wandered in circles for 40 years until Moses died to punish him for breaking some tablets when we got bored and started worshiping a golden cow statue while waiting for God to finish dictating some laws.

"And somewhere in there, God also "passed judgement" on the Egyptian gods, apparently, so they were real but pussies."


Luckily, I'll be spending all day today working, despite it being Sunday and Easter, so I won't have to deal with the Jews telling me I'm a bad Jew (Passover is officially over), or the Christians telling m I'm going to hell (they're all fighting with their own families over plastic eggs).

But God willing we'll all meet again in Exodus II: The Search For More Money.