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Agitated son speaks, soon-to-be age 20: Mom! NO! Your seder supplement this year (for Bard College) totally misses the mark! Hiroshima? Scorched earth warnings?! Mom, the seder is supposed to be uplifting! We remember being slaves, we don’t carry the burdens of living in challenging times all the way through the night. Mom! Look at this Dayenu you picked – it reads like a Yom Kippur liturgy! Dayenu is about faith and feeling supported and guided! Pesach is an inspiring celebration of freedom, not a tikkun olam guilt-a-thon. Mom (aka Rabbi Goldie Milgram): Wait a minute. Two short years you were USYer of the year planning kinnusim and creative services, and hoping to move to Israel and today you major in both philosophy and Buddhism, sit in weekly mediation sangas and work tirelessly for a Palestinian homeland without worrying for a second about the survival of Israel. YOU want a more traditional seder? Son: Mom! I’m bringing MY FRIENDS to this seder, most of them are from intermarried families who only had a Passover meal growing up, not a seder. They don’t even really know the story or the metaphors for transformation within it. And the rest are diplomats kids – from Spain, Bangladesh, and Denmark, they’re not even Jewish! Mom, look at all this women’s liberation stuff in your seder supplement. There’s supposed to be a big difference between a thematic political-action model seder and the real one on Passover night! And, mom, get all that extra fruit off the seder plate – an orange, an olive, and you’ve got to be kidding, this year you’re adding a FIG for gay rights?!! There’s a woman rabbi at our table already - dayenu! I’m all for peace and gay rights, but let the GUESTS have some room to place contemporary parallels on the table. It’s going to take long enough to explain all the usual symbols. Mom, I want my guests to see how spacious, non-dogmatic and creative Judaism really is. Doesn’t it say something like those who “add to it are to be applauded?” (Not exactly) But do you see the Haggadot passed down through the generations having two pages of alterative explanations of the four cups? Mom, it’s the people at the table who are supposed to be doing the mitzvah of adding to it! Mahhhhm… feel the size of this thing! No, don’t get all upset and throw them away, they’re still useful - you can have our seder guests pile them up to feel what it’s like to be enslaved by creative liturgy! Mom, really, just hand out three examples of how to be creative and relevant and trust the structure of the original. Mom, LET MY PEOPLE GO! Mom: Son! I . . . . He walks over and puts an arm around my waist. My resistance melts, it’s true, I love reading everything in sight newly developed by colleagues – this year especially the Michael Kagan’s Holistic Haggadah, Arthur Waskow’s New Freedom seder, and a whole stack of Project Kesher Women’s seders by and for women in Eastern Europe. And of course, preparing a new piece or two, myself. Again, a deep, warm, silence. I feel something old and very true just happened. A practitioner of the contemplative skill known as Focusing, I notice a flush of warmth and light in my torso and two memories come rushing up like a healthy belch: One day at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in a course on Cosmology, our teacher Reb Zalman moved over and let every one of the us take turns teaching from his chair, from the rebbe’s seat. And an earlier memory, of my father looking up from the Maxwell House Haggadah when I was slightly younger than my own son’s age saying, “Next year, it’s your time to lead.” Barry had earlier suggested that I head over to my son’s dorm room and do some Pesach parenting, cleaning up the impassable. I knew that was a suggestion to pass over. My son has initiated a real opportunity for Passover parenting. When memories bubble up, they are like dreams, a clue – no, a cue to ask: Mom: How would you do it? Lead the seder? My arms are now on his shoulders, like in a blessing. The warm silence re-commences as he reflects for quite a long time. I can feel the tension draining from his body. He moves back a step, and answers enthusiastically: Son: Passover is, what is it my step-dad Barry is always saying? It’s a supposed to be a Gestalt experience – taste the bitter herbs and see what comes up inside yourself that you want to share out loud; break the middle matzah – what is the wisdom at the table about surviving brokenness? Crossing the sea – what do people know that they can share about overcoming fear? Mom, my favorite seder times all these years are when the ritual experiences become questions that are asked and explored. Mom: You’re saying to trust the Process. Son: Right! You’ve got it. (I see his face fall a bit…. problem?) Oh, but if I’m leading, mom, what about your stories? Pesach wouldn’t be the same without your stories. Will you bring one? Wait, know just the one. Mom: What was that about tyranny? Are you going to tell me which story to bring too? Just kidding. (sort of) I’d love to know; which one has come to mind for you? Son: What happened to that posting you were working on about your trip to South Africa? You got too busy and never sent it, right? I mean the story about that lady you met on the breakwater looking out toward Antarctica? Tell it to me again, because that lady really expressed what I’m trying to say. Goldie: I almost forgot about that, never even wrote it down. Hmm., it started in 2003, we’d been for training to a center specializing in care for victims of torture and trauma located in Cape Town. This healing center was started for victims of atrocities committed by both sides during apartheid, and today it cares for people from around the world - prisoners of war, earthquake, rape and other victims of crimes. In the center’s waiting room I sat next to a woman who shared her story with me. She lived in Cape Flats, one of the oceans of tin shacks and more commonly now, teeny houses built by the government on the hot plains on the outskirts of beautiful Cape Town, South Africa. She had a job as a housekeeper in the city, coming back to her house and five children late at night. Her husband died of AIDS some years back. She’d been stopped at the entry by a gang who demanded her wages. She refused, offered them a percentage but said she had to be able to eat. They threw her to the ground, took her money and cut off one of her fingers as a reminder not to ever cross them again. This same scene took place again a few months later. On her right hand I saw to my horror only three whole fingers and two stumps. A minister first brought her to the center when she told him of her plan to kill herself because she couldn’t figure out how to survive. A counselor has been working with her for three sessions; two more sessions remain, based on their funding. They were using the Exodus as a metaphor and building up her spirit as they studied each step of that archetypal journey. She looked up at me and said: “I’m assigned to bring a vision today, of my promised land. The counselor says we’ll create a plan to get there. But I don’t know if I can bear any more years in the wilderness.” January 2004. We are again in Cape Town, teaching and visiting family. There is a stunningly unique mall at the end of town, where seals climb up onto walkways beside you and every imaginable native and visiting international group comes to offer their music, dances and crafts. The mall is on the sea and has an huge and lengthy concrete breakwater that many use as a promenade. I walk down it beside an unusually calm cerulean sea imagining Antarctica, the next stop on the horizon. At the end of the breakwater a slender woman stands holding a baby and staring out to sea. I sit down on the edge, legs dangling, to do a gazing meditation and emerge surprised to see her still standing there a half hour later. As I turn to walk back, so does she; our paths begin to parallel. I comment on the beauty of the day and ask how she is? She turns toward me, her hands uplifted against the baby she is cradling – deep brown, weathered fingers are silhouetted against the light yellow blanket. Her right hand is missing two fingers. I seek her face and we recognize each other. We look deeply into each others eyes in a warm silence. She answers so softly with a great smile: “I was thinking about things that are not missing. Mine has become such a good life and this is a perfect day.” I ask if she’d relate how her life has changed. “Since you saw me I have a live-in nanny job in the city, far from Cape Flats, in a beautiful house with a wonderful family. My promised land has come to be.” Son: Mom, do you see my point? Passover is primarily about things that are NOT missing. I’m taking a Utopian Literature course this semester and I think Passover is kind of an annual utopian week-long experiment in Jewish living. Mom: What do you mean? Son: Well, we don’t just say “Let all who are hungry come and eat,” we contribute to Passover food funds, right? We have guests with nowhere to go for Pesach right at our table; we experience treating the stranger well. It’s not about berating ourselves with the mitzvot we aren’t doing, it’s about living a mitzvah-full week, it’s about fully being it. We know we don't have it perfect yet, but we do our best and stock up on hope and joy - it's supposed to be a festival mom! Mom: I’m so proud of you – your ideas and thoughts are wonderful. You trigger me to realize that Passover is also about that other thing Barry is so big on – self care – we are to treat ourselves well! We recline, we feast and we heal into a messianic consciousness that some day when we open the door, everyone will be in cities that are whole, healed and healthy. Every city will become the Yerushalayim (Jerusalem), the utopia that we have dreamed of creating in Israel. You know the saying, as above, so below. The seder renews us and imbues us with hope, it is a form of springtime for the soul. Son: Remember that phrase you always used to quote during rabbinical school, “the force that makes for …..” Mom: Salvation. The force that makes for salvation. It is how Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan described God. Son: On the way here I was thinking about how you always send children to open the door for Elijah. When I would open the door, I’d always wonder if you or dad quickly drank down the wine in Elijah’s cup – where did it go? But now I know what matters is that the fifth cup is for the Elijah IN US – Elijah is when we open ourselves up and drink in hope, the extra bit of life force that we need to keep opening the door of freedom ever wider for all. He blushes. Oh no, Mom! Now I sound like a Passover supplement. Mom: (I take a step forward and place my hands on his head in a parenting smichah that folds into a hug. It’s time to let my children glow.) |
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