Hello all! This story goes hand-in-hand with 'The Rebel Snakes' and may involve bits and pieces from various points in the timeline, so before every segment I'll be posting a quick descriptor. It will mostly focus on the original character I introduced in Rebel Snakes, the fat, smug, hotheaded, morally passionate Slytherin and practitioner of Hebraic magic, David Gold.

Summary: A series of oneshots in the universe of 'The Rebel Snakes', exploring magic in other cultures, the intersection of magic and Muggle worlds, and the dichotomy of magic and faith. Mostly Gold-centric, with frequent appearances by the trio, the Slytherins and various others. Features linguistically brilliant Harry, morally confused Malfoy, flirty Myrtle, social justice Hermione, chessmaster Ron and BAMF Neville.

Part 1: Gold once told Harry he'd fit in at a Gold Shabbat. He wasn't wrong. In their sixth year, Harry spends Passover with the Gold family, drinks a bit too much, and learns many things. If you're bothered by the idea of tinkering with the Jewish faith to adapt it to a magical universe, maybe give this one a miss.

Dumbledore was all too happy to let them leave the grounds for a night. He spoke highly of Gold's family, and had nothing but praise for Harry's appetite for languages. He didn't seem to like Gold much, but that was beside the point.

Gold didn't like brooms even a tiny bit ("Gravity and I are not close friends. I'd go so far as to say we're not currently on speakers."), so once they were outside the gates, they apparated to a wealthy-looking suburb of London. Gold told Harry to unlock the wards, to practice his Hebrew.

"Dalet bakah."

The door swung open.

"Is that them?"

"That's - he never did! Harry Potter!"

A man appeared at the door. He was only a few years past Hogwarts age, handsome and quite tall, with a tidy beard. He wrapped Gold in a bear hug. It was only when Harry noticed his eyes - dark and observant, just like Gold's - that he realized that he was looking at his older brother. Apart from the eyes, they looked nothing alike. As soon as he'd finished forcing Gold into the hug (Gold looked pleased to see him, but also a bit annoyed), the boy turned around and yelled up the stairs.

"David's here! With Potter!"

Shouts resounded back through the house. It was a warm and friendly chaos. A moment later, another boy came barrelling down the stairs, cleanshaven and a little younger than the first but just as handsome. "Duddeleh!"

"Call me that again and I will hex you into the next dimension," answered Gold, allowing himself to be bear-hugged again. "Potter, this is Avriel, and the one with the idiotic beard is Samson. Where's Ben?"

"Right here. C'mere, David." This one was obviously the eldest. He waited his turn to hug Gold to within an inch of his life, while the younger ones introduced themselves to Harry. They were all, as far as he could tell, more or less interchangeable - energetic, friendly, delighted to meet him and as different from their youngest brother as it seemed possible to be. Ben took Harry's coat. Avriel ("Call me Avi!") brought him a small circle of cloth and a glass of wine.

"Sorry... what do I do with this?"

"It's a kippah, you put it on your head," said Avi, who was wearing one of his own. Then he swooped in to pin one on Gold, who was still being manhandled by his eldest brother.

Gold tried to swat his hand away, and failed. "Don't - touch - my hair!"

"Don't be afraid to ask questions, Harry. Do you mind if I call you Harry?" Samson was too eager to wait for a response. "The whole purpose of the Seder is to educate. It's a teaching ritual. The more questions you ask, the better it is."

Harry relaxed. This was not what he'd imagined when Gold told him his family were secretive with their magic. He tried the wine, which was a bit cloyingly sweet at first, but soon its warmth seemed to make up for it. Gold stared. "You're a Goy and you're willingly drinking manischewitz?" he asked, with an incredulous laugh. "You, Potter, are going to have a very good night."

"Boys, don't get the guests drunk yet."

Gold's mother was a willowy, handsome woman of perhaps fifty with short brown curls, wearing bright emerald robes and golden earrings in the shape of small leaves. She descended on David, kissing his forehead and hugging him as forcefully as any of her sons.

"Mu-uum," Gold objected. Harry, who didn't think he'd ever understand being embarrassed by your parents, tried to smile politely despite the faint urge to box Gold's ears and tell him to appreciate what he had.

"Sorry, just-" She was brushing tears out of her eyes. Harry knew he didn't have much frame of reference, but that seemed extreme.

Then Gold's mother turned to him. "Baruch haba, dear - welcome. Call me Rifke." Her English was strongly accented.

Harry straightened, mindful of what he'd been practicing. "Toda rabah. Ma shlomex?"

She beamed at him. She was more reserved than Molly Weasley, less fiery, but her smile had some of the same warmth. "Tov, toda. What a gentleman! Your Hebrew is beautiful. Well, Harry, I hope the boys told you about asking questions, but maybe you won't need to!"

Harry had one major question, but he held his tongue.

Gold's father, Avrum, a very tall, bearded, kind-faced man, arrived with only minutes in hand before sundown, carrying bags of wine and food that the three elder boys rushed to help him deal with. David tried, but as soon as he got up, his father stopped him in his tracks and hugged him with as much emotion as his mother had. Gold looked like he was getting annoyed with the attention.

Harry's enjoyment of the bad wine dulled momentarily. David Gold, nastier and sharper-tongued and far, far homelier than any of his brothers, was clearly so much the favourite son that having him home made his parents cry. Suddenly David reminded him of Dudley all over again. It was a little... odd.

But by the time the meal got started, Harry had mostly forgotten about the strange inequality. It was at least as much a ceremony as a meal. Each place had a bowl of vegetables and a bowl of what looked like water, and there was another plate in the center with everything from an orange to a bone to an egg on it, but nobody touched any of them. Instead he was handed a bound bundle of pages, which was called a Haggadah. Flipping through it, found that every word of the evening had been laid out in Hebrew, Yiddish and English inside, along with textual explanations and illustrations. A bottle of the bad wine was passed around, and each person filled the glass of the person beside them. It felt like boozy primary school.

Avrum said a blessing in Hebrew. Harry had thought just to sip his, but Gold shook his head at him. "More, Potter - most of the glass."

"That's a rule?"

"Mandatory drinking. Welcome to Judaism. When I start telling you about blessing charms in Hebrew there'll be a lot of wine involved."

Harry drank a larger gulp. It made him feel bolder. "You're the first religious wizards I've ever met. Most of them sort of... just don't talk about it."

"No, English wizards don't, do they?" Rifke shook her head, tutting. "Easiest way to deal with something is to shove it under the rug, or so they'd have you believe. So much is wrong that never gets talked about."

"It's not like that's just the Gentiles, mum," said Gold, rolling his eyes.

"But the conflict between magic and faith is a Christian thing," Rifke continued. "We don't worry about it. There's barely a statue of secrecy in Israel."

Harry thought about it. The Dursleys, although privately without much faith to speak of (after all, it took imagination), were nominally C of E. Dudley had been baptized. Harry hadn't. "The church never trusted magic, did it? Witch-burnings and so on..."

"I reckon Christians feel threatened. Who needs faith when you have spells? The whole Christ story loses its oomph, neyn?" David grinned his smug grin. "Unsurprisingly that isn't an issue for us. Early Christians gave us both a hard time - Jews and wizards, that is - so the synthesis was inevitable, really. Those great long wizard beards, those come from the rabbinical tradition - stop preening, Samson - and Hebraic magic is half prayer even now."

"I've noticed," said Harry. The word 'Adonai' popped up often enough that Harry had looked it up. The more complex spoken incantations all seemed to be imploring God for their power. There was a notion that speaking the word 'Yahweh' would rob a Hebraic wizard of his power. Gold assured him it was just superstition, but Harry didn't feel like chancing it. "Is that why all the candles?" he asked, thinking of the flames they had lit in the room of requirement to strengthen the power of their wards.

"I like this one," said Avrum, nodding. "Can we keep him, Rifke?"

Harry smiled. It would have been a lot nicer than going home to the Dursleys. Gold annoyed him sometimes, but he was still preferable to the real Dudley any day. "So - what about the Hanukkah story? The, ah, the oil-"

"The Maccabees? Eight days of light?"

"Yeah - that's not all that miraculous with magic either, is it? You could just use Oleum Facio. Or, well, I guess it would be Shemen Asah."

"His Hebrew's better than mine," Ben joked.

"I'll tell you a secret, Potter." Gold leaned in. "Nobody cares about Hanukkah."

There was a lot of rich, strongly flavoured food, in different, specific courses that came one after another after another, and even more drinking. The courses were separated by a lot of chatter, and prayers from the Haggadah, which everyone took turns reading, even Harry. Some of them made the candles in the room flicker, dimming and brightening with certain words. Some of them summoned illusory pictures in smoke, telling the stories of the text. Some of them were songs.

"Ma nishtana ha lyla ha zeh mikkol hallaylot? Why is this night different from all other nights? ..."

It was a song from the point of view of a young child, and Gold sang it because he was the youngest. He had a very good voice, rough and strangely sad. By that point Harry had drunk a great deal of the bad wine. In the candlelit warmth he felt lulled and happy and strangely entranced. The rest of the family were looking at Gold again, and Harry saw tears glittering in their eyes again. Was it their inexplicable adoration of their youngest, or just the power of the moment? Harry wasn't sure. He could easily have believed the song itself was a spell. The night certainly felt... different. In Harry's eyes David Gold had always been quite ugly, but the candlelight and the song seemed to transform him. Unless it was Harry that had been transformed.

The Haggadot had, he learned, as the evening went on, been cobbled together by generations of Golds. There were segments from non-magic Seders and segments that addressed magic directly, calling it a gift given to the Chosen People. One of them very strongly implied it had first been given to Moses as he faced the Pharaoh's so-called 'magicians', enabling him to transfigure his staff into a snake - a real magical answer to their slight of hand. Harry asked if there was a spell, and one of the brothers demonstrated by turning a candlestick holder into a small silver snake with the words Nakhash haphak.

The snake Malfoy had summoned with Serpensortia in their second year had been aggressive and ready to attack. This snake looked peaceable. The star of David pattern of the candlestick holder was printed on its back. It turned its head to regard Harry through slitted eyes.

"Hello," said Harry, without thinking what he was doing.

"Hello, snake-talker human. You seem content. Are you content?"

"I suppose."

"Feed me a little of that meat and I shall be content too."

Harry offered it a fragment of the brisket. It swallowed it whole, curled up and went to sleep, transforming back into a silver carved candlestick.

The Golds were staring at him, not with horror, but with interest. "You're a Parseltongue, Harry?" asked Ben.

"Er. Yeah, I am," said Harry uneasily.

"Well, no wonder you're so quick at picking up languages. You've got one built into your brain."

Harry had never thought of it like that. "It puts people off sometimes. Sorry."

"Why?"

"They sort of associate it with Voldemort."

"Oh, yes, because everything associated with an entire sub-order of animals is automatically You-Know-Who," grumbled Gold.

"I've met nice snakes," said Harry. "Even some alright Slytherins."

"Har-har. The Moses thing is absolute rot, anyway. Archeological records show magic turning up independently in every single human society at around the same time as agriculture, long before Moses. The Babylonians had it first. You take one look at the Epic of Gilgamesh and it's obvious he's a wizard. But everybody likes to think they're special."

"You certainly do," answered Harry, with a grin. He saw Gold's mother bite her lip, and thought he'd overstepped - which seemed strange, because that was exactly how they bantered at school, and Harry knew him to be more or less bulletproof when it came to verbal jabs. But Gold just laughed, and everything was okay again.

Later in the evening the rituals got less formal. The last portion of the ritual was nothing but singing. Avi kept refilling Harry's wine. Everyone started shooting sparks from the tips of their wands with the charm Nasar, which sent out a fine golden cascade that was much prettier than the red sparks he'd learned to conjure in his first year. Harry didn't know the words or the tunes but did his best to mumble along, and joined them all in tearing paper links ("For the breaking of shackles and chains! For freedom from Egypt! For the thorough kicking of Pharaoh's nadgers and the sincere hope that You-Know-Who is in for the same, right Harry?") and finally, in sing-shouting "L'Shana haba'ah bi'Yerushalayim! Next year in Jerusalem!" - which made the chandelier crash to the table in a magnificent cascade of shards of harmless and apparently illusory glass, to loud applause.

That, it seemed, was the yearly grand finale. Harry thought it was all pretty brilliant. It was like being at the Burrow. It made him long for something he'd never had. A tradition, maybe, an identity. But above all, a family.

By the time they staggered off to bed Harry could barely think straight, but he did manage to catch Ben alone in the corridor. "I have one last question."

"Yeah?"

Harry lowered his voice. "Why... what happened with David? You all sort of... treat him like he's a precious goblet or something. I know he's the baby and all but-"

"It's more than that. He never told you?" Ben was very red-faced. If he was trying to hide the pained look on his face, he wasn't sober enough to do it well. "He... " Ben hesitated. He disappeared into another moment and came back with a photo album. "That's him when he was four."

The young boy sulking in the photograph had Gold's eyes, but he was bald and frail. "I didn't know wizards could get cancer," Harry said stupidly.

"We're not much better at medicine than Muggles really... Magic is a cheat. Most mediwizards don't actually know that much about the body. They don't usually have to - they can magic an accelerated healing or use a charm to remove a foreign poison. But how do you come up with a spell that just takes out the bad cells and leaves the rest when it's all you? It was all through his stomach. The potions they gave him had the same stuff in them that the Muggles get. Tried to kill the cancer and they nearly killed him."

The protectiveness and special treatment suddenly made sense. So did Gold's hatred for it.

"I'm, that's what I'm studying at Salem," slurred Ben, "Integration of Muggle medical theory with magical methodology. Magic with genetics and biochemistry and im-immunology. But it's, it's so hard to get wizards to listen to anything a Muggle comes up with even if it's brilliant r'search - they fancy they're so much better than Muggles. I'm struggling for funding half the time and no matter what I do I'll be too late for David - "

"He's better now though, right?" asked Harry, thinking only to cheer him up. The Gold he knew seemed healthy enough when he wasn't getting himself beat up. He was particular about his thick, elegantly styled brown curls, and he certainly wasn't skinny any more.

"The cancer-"

"Not another word, Ben."

Gold was standing at the end of the corridor, glowering fiercely. They exchanged a few brief words in Yiddish - Ben pleading, David angry - and then Ben slunk away.

"You don't mention this. To anybody. Alright, Potter?"

Harry nodded.

"Especially not Granger."

"Why not?"

"Guilt."

Harry frowned. It didn't seem likely, but he suddenly remembered the way Hermione had blushed at the mention of his name in their fifth year. "Did you two...?"

"Neyn." Gold waved a hand dismissively. "Hence the guilt. She'll think she ought to have tried to like me more. That's no good for anyone."

"Oh." Harry felt like he'd sobered, but maybe not enough. It took him a moment to process. "You are better, though, right?"

"Don't. Surely you, Potter, must know what it's like to be stepped around on tiptoe. Bad enough my family thinks I'm fragile."

Harry could understand that. He nodded, and turned to find the guest bedroom they'd given him. It didn't occur to him that Gold had never answered his question.

More to come!

Incidentally, this is based on my experience as the only Gentile at a Reform Seder hosted by a gaggle of 20-year-old university students. It was fun. The Golds are not what you'd call Orthodox, as anyone who's been to a more formal Seder will know. If anything's flat-out wrong, please do let me know.

As a note on the Yiddish/Hebrew linguistic divide, the family are originally Ashkenaz, but Avrum and Rifke were raised in Israel and so speak both languages.