I tipped my last mouthful of Earl Grey latte from the mug and set it down on my parent’s kitchen table with a muted ka-thunk, the far rim hitting before the near rim. The adjoining living room was strewn with comfy pillows, coloring materials, and home-printed haggadahs now showing signs of so many years of use. My husband had claimed a spot for us on one of the couches and he held an arm out to me like we were still newlyweds, inviting me to join him. I always smile when he does that. Easing between the couch and coffee table laden with the sedar plate, a big bottle of grape juice, and fancy glasses grown cloudy with countless washings, I curled against my man. He raised the footrest, which just cleared the end of the coffee table. A Passover sedar is a time to get comfortable and settle in for a good long while. I opened my haggadah and the cover immediately came off in my hand, the three-hole spine worn too wide for the rivets binding it. Time to reprint. I wondered how long it had been since they had last redone the haggadahs, more than ten years anyway. I tucked the detached cover beneath the back cover and found the familiar text as my father began reading the introduction to the ceremony.
The beginning to basically any Jewish ceremony includes lighting candles and blessing them. Traditionally it is the woman of the house who does this, but my mom had recently injured her knee and getting up from a seated position meant tightening the straps on her brace and heaving up onto a knee that couldn’t be bent, so she asked me to fill in. I fetched the box of matches from beside the fireplace and crossed back to the kitchen table to face the elegantly tall and tapered white candles in the old cut glass holders. There is something of a moving meditation in the act of lighting candles, such simple motions that require so much focus. I struck a match and held the flame to the first wick, watching for the second tip of the new flame to appear before moving to the next one, before shaking out the half-burnt match and placing it carefully on the edge of the candleholder so it wouldn’t scorch the tablecloth. Reaching deep inside I found the words I had heard every Passover for more than two decades:
“Barukh attah Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha’olam, asher kideshanu be’mitzvotav ve’tzivanu le’hadlik ner shel pesach.
Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the universe, who sanctifies us with his commandments, and commands us to kindle the lights of pesach.
Amen.” (originally adapted from, A Believer’s Haggadah, long lost and I can’t find it online to see who it was written by, but the basic wording of the blessings is the same in most haggadahs).
Beneath my voice I heard echoes of my mother’s voice, of her friend, Cheri’s voice, who hosted the sedars my family attended for many years before they began hosting their own. I heard the voice of every woman I had ever heard sing this traditional blessing, and I thought, nowhere in the bible is it written that we are to kindle lights, that’s just what is done to signify an important occasion. And also, “sanctifies us with his COMMANDMENTS?” Aren’t we sanctified by God’s LOVE? I opened my eyes and returned to my seat, troubled but serene.
My father and I poured the first of four cups of grape juice, the cup of sanctification, and passed the cups around. We all held our glasses up and sang the blessing I knew from years of shabbat services and festivals, watching my daughters watch the nearest adult’s mouth moving around the unfamiliar (to them) words as they tried to follow along. Grape juice is the taste of sanctification to me, something we only drank on Friday nights or festivals, but for Passover we always got the good stuff. If I breathed in deeply enough I could smell October in Napa Valley, the grapes already fermenting under the California sun. Sanctification is a heady thing.
We blessed and ate parsley dipped in salt water, symbolizing new life born from the tears of suffering. We blessed and ate matzah, the unleavened bread. My father hid a broken piece of matzah, called the afikomen, for my girls to find later. The afikomen is considered dessert, and is found and eaten after the sedar meal. In Messianic sedars (the term Messianic refers both to Jews who accept Jesus Christ as the prophesied messiah, and to Christians who view Jesus’ Jewish heritage as important to understanding his life and the prophesies he is said to have fulfilled), the afikomen is said to be symbolic of Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection. It is even common, among Messianic and other Jewish traditions, for the afikomen to be “purchased” from the child who found it, just as Jesus was “sold” for 30 pieces of silver (see Matthew 26:15 in the Bible). We adults kept our eyes on four-year-old Lee, who has a very hard time not peeking, while my dad trudged through the living room, dining room, kitchen, entryway, and back into the living room. After my dad returned to his seat, wearing his “cat that ate the canary” smile, it was time for Q&A.
My mother asked my seven-year-old daughter, Rena, if she would read mah nishtana, “the four questions,” for us. My breath caught as I realized that I hadn’t even thought about this. It is tradition for the youngest able child to read the questions. Last year, she hadn’t taken off with reading yet, so although she had been asked to try she hadn’t been able to get past the first few words. I should have remembered, should have practiced with her. She had never even read in a group before! Keeping my face calm I called her to me and pointed to the spot on the page. My mother had taught me to trust children to rise to your expectations of them, and this was a safe space. She dove in with far more aplomb than I would have managed, confident with most of the words, hesitating over longer ones. The room held it’s breath, nearly everyone leaning forward to catch the old words made new and special by a young voice speaking them in an unpracticed cadence for the first time. It is tradition to read or sing the four questions first in Hebrew then in the group’s spoken language (I stumbled through the Hebrew part), as an introduction to the telling of the Passover story. A child’s curiosity is employed to ask why this night is different than other nights.
“On all other nights we eat leavened or unleavened bread, why on this night do we eat only unleavened bread (matzah)?
On all other nights we eat all kinds of vegetables. Why on this night do we eat no vegetables except bitter herbs (maror, usually horseradish or bitter greens)?
On all other nights we do not dip our food even once. Why on this night do we dip our food twice (parsley into salt water, bitter herbs into sweet charoset)?
On all other nights we eat sitting or reclining. Why on this night do we eat only reclining?”
(also originally adapted from The Believer’s Haggadah, but, again, the wording of the questions are very much alike in most haggadahs).
My brave girl finished reading and looked up with the shy proud smile I had first seen when she was seven months old and discovered that she could make her hand sign a word, her first conscious communication. My mother and sister murmured approval, and I squeezed her and let her return to her spot on the floor next to her sister, amid the crayons and coloring pages my mom thoughtfully provides to keep the girls entertained during the long ceremony. My dad launched into the process of answering the questions, in traditionally long-winded fashion, through the telling of the history of the Jewish people and their Exodus from Egypt led by Moses, which is the event celebrated by the festival of Passover. For many Jewish people, it is a time of thankful remembrance and hope. For me it has always been a chance to add my own link in a chain stretching back thousands of years, joining with people all over the world in a united celebration of the triumph of freedom over oppression. This year, though, I felt distant. I felt like I was desperately trying not to lose yet another pillar of my childhood faith identity, while also wondering if it was right for me to participate at all when I no longer held the…er…requisite humble and penitent attitude towards God. And, like so often lately, I just felt tired of asking so many hard questions.
I was my daughter’s same age the first time I experienced the liturgy of the sedar. My family is not Jewish, but we attended a Messianic congregation for a year when I was young, and celebrated the Biblical festivals (the festivals ordained in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, as sacred to the Jewish people) from then on. Sitting on that couch, guiding my daughter through words that were as familiar to me as my family’s favorite movie quotes, I wondered if it was hypocritical of me to be enjoying the familiarity of the sedar for the sake of tradition’s comfort, without choosing to examine the meaning of the rituals I was training my children to participate in. Passover was one of the main holidays we celebrated growing up, we didn’t even celebrate Easter or Christmas for most of my early life, and I have always wanted to share such foundational experiences and traditions with my girls. But, would I be able to if I stopped and looked at the tradition more closely?
It is a bloody story. After three hundred years of living in Egypt the Jewish people longed to leave. They had gone from revered guests of the Pharaoh (during Joseph’s lifetime—see Genesis chapters 42-50 for that story) to a multitude regarded with fear and hostility by those who viewed Egypt as belonging to them, to becoming slaves of the Egyptian government as a way to keep them under control so they wouldn’t take over the country. Enter Moses: born of a clever Jewish slave woman, raised as a prince by the Pharaoh’s own daughter, fled the country one step ahead of an execution for killing an Egyptian who was lawfully beating a Jew, and then returned many years later to lead his people out of slavery and into the desert. During the reading of the story, drops of wine or grape juice are splattered onto a plate as the plagues that God supposedly sent to convince the Pharaoh to let Moses’s people go are recited in order of escalation: from the turning of the sacred Nile River to blood, to the divine slaughter of all firstborn children and animals residing in houses not marked by the blood of a sacrificed lamb. At which point, mourning the death of his own firstborn son, Pharaoh wanted nothing so much as to be rid of the people he had kept as slaves. Repeatedly within the text it is stated that God “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” so that he would not let the people go until the nation had suffered greatly, in payment for all the suffering imposed on the slaves. It is also stated that God even commanded the Jewish people to plunder the Egyptians when they were finally allowed to leave, thus garnering their wages so long withheld (the story is found in the first twelve chapters of Exodus in the Bible, if anyone’s interested. Those who read it’s entirety will understand why a sedar takes so long). As I said, a grisly story. But not without Karma. My mother, seeing that I had not brought a Bible, held her Bible out so we could both see the text as the group of us took turns reading the story straight from the source. I had an unusually hard time focusing, however. My mind kept pulling away from the raw human emotions attributed to the God who is supposed to literally define perfection, and eventually wandered into dark memory.
I was born in LA a few months before the city went up in flames after four white police officers were acquitted of using excessive force in the beating and arrest of Rodney King, a black motorist, in 1992. My father worked on the Light Rail train system at the time. My earliest exposure to racial tension was hearing my parents telling friends, years later, about how my mother fled the city with me during that fateful spring. She prayed through every shift for fear my dad, a white man in a city uniform, with a job that sent him into whatever area of the city there were tracks in need of servicing, would be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. He nearly was once. A black woman yelled to him out of a car window that he had better get his “white ass out of (t)here”, so he did. That woman might have saved his life, but that’s not what I grew up internalizing. I grew up believing that I nearly became fatherless before I was even old enough to know my dad, just because he had the wrong color skin in the wrong part of the city. There is a world of fear and bewilderment in a realization like that, and it grew in me a root of racism as tenacious as the horseradish I dig up each spring. Only within the last few years, as I found myself reacting to the recent outpouring of anger over the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and all of the other victims of a police force trained to shoot first and apologize later, have I been able to recognize the significance of my parents’ memories of the LA riots on my foundational beliefs about white people and black people. And although I understand that a shout is sometimes the only voice that will be heard, and that my childhood fear and bewilderment is a drop beside the ocean of those who have spent generations living under the burden of prejudice, I still feel in my soul that no victory won in blood should be celebrated. And yet…I sit and read about God killing children in retribution for the children of “his people” who were slain…and I celebrate it with an upraised glass of Welch’s grape juice. L’chaim. To life, indeed.
I have no answers here. Sometimes growth must happen slowly. I cannot recover in a year from decades of breathing racist air and absorbing the toxins, but I can choose not to ignore that those toxins are still in there, still poisoning my thoughts and words and body language. I can be grateful for the privilege my skin has given me, and sad that something so basic as being deemed worthy of respect and safety depends on genetic coding that is determined before we are even born, and cannot be changed. I can’t make the world a safer, healthier place for all people, but I can make it a safer, less toxic place for the people I come into contact with. In small ways I can live peace and healing. And, I can choose to participate in a festival that has brought hope to millions of people all over the world for thousands of years, and has been a standing tradition in my family for most of my life, while holding the tension of the beautiful and the ugly. Maybe. At least for this year, I can.
After all, nearly every holiday has its dark side. The tradition of dying Easter eggs, for instance, is supposed to have come from dipping eggs in the blood of children sacrificed to ensure an abundant harvest. And one early Middle Eastern version of Santa Claus is supposed to have been a glowing red man-shaped furnace where babies, the children of virgins ritually impregnated during the previous year’s spring festival, were burnt alive. Humans can come up with some pretty sick stuff when we are afraid. Reading accounts of such rituals is the reason why my family stopped celebrating Christmas and Easter. Hearing shit like that at a young age definitely shaped my incredibly strong internal fear response, and probably explains a lot else about me I’m not sure I want to excavate, but I have always been fascinated by history in all its grisly forms. Together as adults, my husband and I have decided to embrace the holidays, as many holidays as our families celebrate, for the importance of tradition in our kids’ lives. We even decorate the whole house for Christmas, and do multiple Easter egg hunts with the girls, although I have not yet been able to bring myself to dye eggs with them (can you blame me?). One of these years I probably will, though. They would enjoy it.
In the meantime, I’ll remember that life is not perfect, it never has been. And really, why should it be? No choice is without consequences; that’s how we learn and grow, as individuals and as a whole. Passover is a festival of freedom, and freedom means I am forgiven for doing no better than the best I can in the moment. I can extend myself that forgiveness. I can forgive those who have shaped my experience in ways I wish they hadn’t, because those shadows give me definition, the way a piece of art is flat until it is given contours through shadowing. I have a unique perspective because of my unique experience. Seizing that freedom is a choice we all can make, no matter our circumstances.
I’ll drink to that.
Together, we lift the second cup, the cup of deliverance, sing the blessing, and tip the red liquid into our mouths. There is sour in this sweetness, but it is all the better for it.