According to the Torah (Exodus 13:6-7), Passover (especially the requirement to eat only unleavened bread) is seven days long, and that has always been the case in Israel. But in the rest of the world, Jews added a day to Passover (and other holidays, with the notable exception of Yom Kippur) to be sure their observance completely encompassed the “proper” days as determined by observing the Moon in the land of Israel – and this custom continued long after the calendar was mathematically fixed so that there could be no doubt about the “proper” days.

In 1846, the Reform movement of Judaism (which includes our congregation, Shir Hadash) decided that there was no need to add the extra day and reverted to the Biblical definition of the holiday – seven days. And so Passover ended for us at sundown this evening, allowing Shir Hadash to kick off this year’s Gala celebrations with a Zoom make-your-own Pizza party.

Of course, we weren’t left on our own; Cucina Bambini provided the instructions and instructor, Ryan. He took us through the process and made suggestions about changes to make if we had more time (such as letting the dough rise longer), but even with the short schedule, the pizza was pretty tasty. We couldn’t quite finish what we made, but I’m sure it’ll be just fine as leftovers.

I felt guilty for not having a photo with yesterday’s blog entry – but I hadn’t taken any photos, nor edited any, and what I wrote didn’t really call for a photo anyway. So I guess it’s no surprise that I woke this morning with an idea: we should go to a botanical garden!

We’re members of the San Francisco Botanical Garden, so we’ve been there many times, though not in the last year. I wasn’t sure how crowded Golden Gate Park would be on Good Friday (we try not to go on weekends because parking is a hassle) – and then I had another idea: visit the UCSC Arboretum and Botanical Garden instead, since we’d never been there and Santa Cruz is a lot closer than San Francisco.

Our first stop was the South African Garden (we still hope to go to South Africa this year, though we have a backup plan for 2022). I bought my new camera for our South Africa trip, so it seemed only appropriate to give it a real workout in the garden!

I had the camera set almost wide-open at F4.0, which meant I didn’t have a lot of depth of field. I liked that when it blurred the background, but not so much when I couldn’t get the whole flower I was shooting into focus, like the next picture.

Our next stop was the New Zealand Garden (we hope to be there in 2022!). Most of the flowers we saw there were California Poppies (it’s that time of year!), but I really liked this Electric Pink Cordyline.

There was a good bit of art in the New Zealand Garden, like “Sun Catchers”.

The California Garden was next, complete with California Poppies just under the welcome sign.

I also liked the Del Norte County Irises.

I enjoyed the Purple Ice Plant in the Succulent Garden.

Our final stop was the Australian Garden.

Although the parking lot was fairly full, we had no problems avoiding other visitors (we masked up anyway, of course). We didn’t run into any human workers, but I did find this busy bee near the exit.

I don’t know what gave me the idea of visiting the gardens, but I’m glad we went!