Comments
by Delphi..
You Can't Eat Anything That Rises
The last time I celebrated
Passover I was twenty years old, and my mother was dying. We sat at the
dining room table, and while we read through the Haggadah, I ate all of
her portions of bitter herbs and roots of the earth, because she couldn't
digest anything. I didn't actually keep the Passover that year; I was a
little too involved with the impending loss of my one remaining parent.
Most of my meories of Passover
are amusing, like the time my vigorously anti-religion brother-in-law tasted
matzoh for the first time. He chewed politely, swallowed with some difficulty,
and said, "It tastes like..." He paused there, obviously unable to think
of an appropriate comparison. "Baked library paste," my mother finished
for him. One year we were very poor, and we got free lunches at school.
We couldn't afford to buy other lunches for a week, so my mother taught
us a little prayer to say every time we had to eat
something leavened, rendering
whatever we were eating "null and void, like the dust of the earth." The
cheeseburgers didn't taste any different. Of course, one might argue that
all school lunches taste a bit like the dust of the earth.
Then there was one year when
my mother and my brother had gone to New York City for a weekend, and they
came back with the soundtrack to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
Every Seder has to have a little bit of the story of
Joseph, to explain how the
Jews came to need deliverance from Egypt in the first place, but this year,
without quite planning to, we all burst into spontaneous song in the middle
of what should have been the quickest part of the story. There was the
year that I was leading the Seder for the first time, and my aforementioned
anti-religion brother-in-law was coming for his first Seder ever. "Don't
make it too religious," my sister said to me. This did nothing to lessen
my anxiety about messing up, since Passover by definition is a religious
holiday. Fortunately, during the course of the Seder, you have to drink
four glasses of wine, and in those days, we used my great-grandmother's
gold-rimmed goblets, so by the time I got to "There arose a Pharoah who
knew not Joseph," I was comfortably potted.
One ritual of the Seder is
to list the plagues that Moses called down on Pharoah's head while he was
being obstinate. As they are recited, everyone dips their finger into their
wine and makes a mark on their plate. It has the primeval feeling of a
blood feud, with silent glittering faces calmly noting each plague with
a drop of red wine. We had a kind of a hippie Haggadah that we used sometimes
too, and this one also listed ten modern plagues, like war, hatred, bigotry,
and poverty. This list had quite a different effect, possibly
because these are endless
plagues, and while the story of Moses has a tidy ending of getting to the
Promised Land, we are still in the trenches of these modern plagues.
I am once again not keeping
Passover. But here in the middle of Passover week, as Easter draws to a
close, I would ask all of you to make your own accounting of the plagues
visited upon us, whether by a stern god who wishes us to learn a lesson,
or by our own arrogance and stupidity, and for just those few moments,
declare yourself in opposition
to hatred and intolerance, strife and
misunderstanding.
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