Question: I’m gluten intolerant, but I know it’s a mitzvah to eat matzoh on Passover. Are there any gluten-free matzot for people who can’t digest gluten?

-Linda

Answer: Gluten is the common name for proteins found in all forms of wheat, rye, barley, and triticale. These days lots of people are discovering that their bodies have trouble digesting gluten, or that they have Celiac Disease, which means that any glutinous food they eat causes damage to their small intestine.

Seder night is a challenge. There’s just so much to do and so many things to put on the table!

In addition to a formal setting — charger, dinner plate, appetizer plate, water glasses and wine glasses, four kinds of forks (salad, fish, meat, and dessert), two knives (one for fish, one for meat), three spoons (appetizer, soup, and tea), and dinner napkins — there are ceremonial foods and objects that need to be available to the seder leader.

Keep things as simple as possible. Use rectangular tables and get the smallest folding chairs you can find.

A few years ago I accepted an invitation to share a Passover seder at the home of my then-boyfriend’s parents.

Since we were becoming more serious as a couple, I was excited to experience this penultimate sign of family acceptance. I bought a cute new dress to wear and some gourmet kosher-for-Passover chocolates for his mom. I prepped by asking for short bios on second cousins I’d be meeting for the first time and, in case I was asked, I practiced the Four Questions.

Rabbi Aryeh Levin was called the Holy Man of Jerusalem. He spent his adult life in Israel, where he visited prisoners, bringing them comfort, food, spiritual sustenance.

Once after Passover some of the Jewish prisoners told Rabbi Aryeh that although the seder had been good, something important was missing: Because they were in prison, they could not perform the traditional rite of opening the door for Elijah, an act that invites redemption, for Elijah is the herald of the messiah. Surely there was no enslavement more absolute than the inability to coax forth redemption.

Who would have thought, in this cookie cutter world, there would be a heimishe hamantashen controversy?

Let me tell you the whole megillah.

Out in Anaheim, Calif., where Mickey and Minnie live, in the community where I grew up, there is a changing group of women and men who are a bunch of Purim pixies. Baking in the Temple Beth Emet kitchen for the past 45 years, they have turned out tens of thousands of hamantashen.

Working in two shifts, with a division of labor and specialized tools, and using a not-so-secret recipe, each year they baked hundreds of dozens of prune, mohn (poppy seed), or apricot hamantshen.