Passover: Child’s Play?

Passover Childs Play

About a year before he died, in the fall of 2000, I attended a reading on the Upper West Side of Manhattan by the great Jerusalem poet Yehuda Amichai. It was the week before Passover, in a not-really-filled synagogue basement hall—intimate enough for him to lapse into a recollection of the bedikat hametz, the search for crumbs of bread and such, in his childhood home in Würzburg, Germany, on the morning before the seder.

Jews are forbidden to eat leavened bread on the eight days of the holiday. Ashkenazi rabbis, presumably pleasing God by outdoing Him, interpreted this to mean no contact at all with leavened foods of any kind (including, alas, beer) or even grains, like rice and legumes, that swell up in water. So the morning before the seder, Amichai said, he and his father would prowl around the house searching for forbidden stuff, a feather in hand, blowing into corners, and sweeping up the dust balls, looking hopefully for crumbs. The piles would be slowly nudged together and added to leftover bread. Then the whole lot would be taken outside and burned in a newspaper. Amichai’s father would chant exotic Aramaic words, feather still in hand, asking to be forgiven for any crumbs still lying around, potentially despoiling the kashrut—the purity and fitness—of the home. Amichai looked at the audience wistfully. “Child’s play,” he said.

Childhood memory is often indelible, but historical memory is potentially lost with every new child. The point of not eating bread—Passover is all about making points—is the transmission of a great ethical claim to each new generation. Jews are enjoined to dramatize for their children the preciousness of freedom by ritualizing how quickly our ancestors seized theirs, escaping Pharaoh’s slave pits: so quickly that their bread did not have time to rise. The point here is not to refuse bread the way Jews who observe ordinary kashrut laws refuse, say, milk with meat. (Those ordinary laws encourage awe before the divine by prohibiting something arbitrary, and, in a way, the more arbitrary the better; were it not for “the Law,” Maimonides writes, eating milk with meat “would not at all be considered a transgression.”) No, the point on Passover is the positive act of eating unleavened bread, matzot, to emphasize the good of freedom.

And yet Amichai knew better than to leave things there. Children aren’t so crazy in the end about the uncertainty that comes with getting their way. They need games, rules to conform to (the banning of all bread products for eight days) and incantations to assure forgiveness (the prayers that accompany cleaning the house), sensuous pleasure and pageantry (the intricate rituals of the seder). Children—Amichai can’t just say this, but can imply it—are cute little Fascists. They’ll take the father over the freedom anytime:

I shriek like a child, feet swinging on high:
I want down, Daddy, I want down,
Daddy, get me down.
And that’s how the saints all ascend to heaven,
like a child screaming, Daddy, I want to stay up here,
Daddy, don’t get me down, Our Father Our King,
leave us up here, Our Father Our King!

(From “Open Closed Open: Poems”)

So all the rituals of Passover—what Amichai calls child’s play—do not necessarily communicate the notion of freedom they were devised to transmit. The play can become more uncannily precious than the ideas it is meant to put across. Better to have the smells of the seder meal filling the senses than disturbing ideas about bondage and release into the desert filling the talk; better to be a good Jew than a Jew worrying about how to be good. Moses himself learned this the hard way. When he ascended Mount Sinai to search out ethical grandeur, the Children of Israel, left to themselves, built an idol to worship. Hell, they were prepared to return to Egypt for a taste of the garlic they craved. They couldn’t handle the desert’s boundlessness.

I am thinking about Amichai this morning, before Passover, because I’ve noticed a new conceit this year on Reshet Bet, Israel’s dominant radio station. Almost all the broadcasters signed off with the phrase “pesach kasher,” a kosher Passover, something you did not hear in Israel a generation ago (and I have not heard since Talmud Torah, the orthodox school I went to in Montreal, in the nineteen-fifties). Guests speak about where the line in Europe passed between sweet gefilte fish and the salty kind. One rabbi, to his credit, spoke of the importance of complicating the intimacy of the family meal by remembering the refugees of the Syrian civil war and from sub-Saharan Africa, though he did not suggest what could be done about them. Not one interviewer asked about the universal importance of political freedom. (Is there even any point in asking why nobody thought to invite a Palestinian resident of Ramallah, you know, to ask what it felt like to be denied the most obvious forms of it?)

Presumably, the radio celebs were trying to be ingratiating to religious people; most of the radio hosts live secular lives in Tel Aviv, and are not fussing over cleaning their houses of leavened bread. The thing is, ingratiation suggests a communal expectation—in this case, that listeners increasingly think of Passover in terms of dietary strictures and ritual symbols, old-style laws, not the move from slavery to emancipation. I know I sound like a Unitarian minister, fresh out of divinity school and perturbed by Christ’s message being eclipsed by Christmas presents. But in Israel, there is an added loss that one may feel at a time like this: the eclipse of a specifically Zionist celebration of emancipation by, of all things, the Jewish state.

Wait, doesn’t Zionism mean putting a kind of defensive shield, military and statist, around Jewish ritual observance? Not the pioneering Zionism of my youth. That Zionism had assumed strictly religious life—especially what was found in Yiddish-speaking heartlands of Eastern Europe, dominated by stern, sentimental attachment to rabbinic law—would be undermined by contact with liberal freedoms. The Zionism I was raised with emphasized individual conscience and artistic license. Zionists argued that to redeem what was wonderful about Jewish civilization—and not everything was—one needed a national home and a Hebrew civil society to hold people together and connect them as freed spirits to an otherwise lost collective past; to replace rabbinic authority with a Hebrew politics, university, farm, press, and concert hall. Otherwise, the whole legacy would disappear—not because places like Russia would not let Jews in but because places like America would.

Jewish life, in this Zionist view, would not be crushed by anti-Semitism, but would slowly evaporate on contact with the modern world (Zionists loved the word “modern”), leaving only a residue of kitsch. Zionists were troubled about Jew-hatred, too, but did not foresee Nazis; nobody in his or her right mind could. Nor did the Holocaust remove from Jews this big choice that Zionists posed from the start, though a generation of horror and Israeli insurgence delayed having to face it. If you are not going to adhere to Orthodox Judaism, the choice would be Hebrew life in a national home or Jewish nostalgia in the diaspora, Yehuda Amichai’s poetry or Adam Sandler’s shtick.

I, for one, made my choice in the late sixties: I escaped a suffocating Montreal synagogue and came to an Israel whose poets used the Torah and prayer book as material; historians took the Enlightenment, with its “science of Judaism,” for granted; kibbutzniks invented a Passover Haggadah full of emancipationist nuance and rites of spring; and Tel Aviv unionists were more likely to have heard of Paul Robeson than Sam Bronfman. Yet I woke up this morning in a Jerusalem whose atmosphere is far more like the place I tried to escape than the one I escaped to. Sixty per cent of first graders are in Orthodox schools of one kind or another, thirty per cent are in Arab schools, and ten per cent are in the kind of secular schools I had thought of as “modern.”

I can’t quite figure out how this happened. Perhaps it was the messianic impulses unleashed by the Six Day War, which colonized Israel, while settlers colonized “Judea and Samaria.” I knew the election of Menachem Begin’s Likud would not end well. Then again, maybe the whole project was too ambitious, much as the flight from Egypt was.

Then, the first generation of freed slaves had to die before the Children of Israel would be worthy of their freedom. But the Prophets were not too complimentary about the people in the land after the second generation died; they had freedom, but demanded a king. Now Israel’s second generation—people like Amichai—is pretty much dead. Draw your own conclusions.

Photograph: Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe/Getty