I know what she’s thinking: chareidi, kids, more kids, mess, problems

As told to Rivka Streicher

The round table is set for six. The girl from Jewessence is here already. We’re just waiting for Michelle.

My kids are up. I didn’t want them to miss the Seder experience, even though at ages two and three they’re going to get cranky soon or hyped from too much grape juice. (And what will Michelle say?)

There’s a knock on the door, and I hold my breath.

My husband, Eli, smiles at her. He dons his kittel, and we start to make Kiddush together. Him in his chassidish Satmar havarah, not looking the part, light years from the Williamsburg he grew up in, though smidgens of it still live inside him.

I say the words aloud alongside him. After five years the pronunciation is growing on me, even as I hear an anglicized version of the Seder Kiddush in my head. My mind flies back to the Sedorim of my childhood; we always had a Seder, even if the cousins would drive home afterward, and we made a mean charoses, a recipe I duplicated this morning in my small Jerusalem kitchen.

I hold my cup aloft and think how much this Seder means to us. We’d been invited out the last couple of years, so this is just the second Seder we’re doing on our own. It’s a night of harking back, of generations and links in a chain.

Eli and I, we’re forming our own link, bridging our differences, in marriage, as parents. It’s been five years and three children, and we’ve built a new life in Jerusalem, one that neither of us could have imagined as we grew up in our divergent corners of New York. And in this new life there are new characters, problems to face — or embrace.

One of them is Michelle, the neighbor who stands beside me, Kiddush cup quivering in her hand.