Monday, April 05, 2004

Rites of Spring

Me and my crew do up a big ol’ Passover ("Pesach") service ("seder") every year.  I really get into it, and my friends enable this in me by letting me run the seder with the help of my enormous manly hagadah, which is the guidebook to Passover celebrations.  As far as I can tell, Passover actually starts tonight, but my Pesach posse (in hebrew, posse shel Pesach) is stretched too thin to do a decent job of it on a weeknight, so we typically wait for a saturday (Passover being eight days long) to have our event.  Out of respect for those who are doing it right (that is, at least, right on time), I’ll post this insightful essay here and now.  But please don’t finish all the horseradish before saturday night, okay? - We’re going to have a lot of gefilte fish and without horseradish it’s barely worth calling food.

Pesach approaches me this year not so much by stealth as under cover of distraction.  Barely a week before seder and I’ve just started thinking about it.  It will be the same big party at the same big house, attended by substantially the same crowd… I haven’t been called on to cook anything, I just need to sit there and look pretty in my white trousers and matching knee-length white tunic, leading 25 or so of my closest friends through a highly organized (and somewhat orchestrated) festival of....

...of what?  This is where the seder distinguishes itself, truly makes itself unlike all other nights.  It could just as easily be nothing more than a party, a good one or even a bad one; there is a lot of wine after all, and some tasty grub, and I’ve been at seders where the whole hagadah fit on one side of a single sheet of paper.

Seems to me, though, that you can get together with friends and drink four cups of wine anytime you’d like.  For a seder to get some real traction, for that wine to help illuminate something deep and meaningful, you need to bring more to the table than a cup and fork. What you need, I think, is an agenda - a goal, a quest, a desire for more than food. Consider Passover as if it were an essay question: the theme is redemption; show your work for full credit. 

For me this makes Pesach the queen of the festivals.  Rosh Hashona and Yom Kippur are cerebral occasions, celebrated from the deindividuating seats of the synagogue with words and songs, exaltations and abnegations, an intellectual process in which we separate ourselves from the world, even from our bodies in a sense, and by doing so, we gain perspective, maybe a share of enlightenment, and, ultimately, peace.  We think, remember, confront those things about ourselves we find most difficult to look at directly; we train our minds and teach ourselves honesty.  It starts between the ears and from there it reaches down to the heart, filling us with hope, resolve, humility and clarity.

Then there’s Purim - another favorite of mine, antipoidally opposed to ceremonies of cerebration.  Purim is the festival of forgetting, of drunkenness, of roleplaying and parades in the fractious hubub of the street, of sweet cakes and strong drink and laughing till you can’t remember why.  And why?  Because the soul needs a body just as the body needs a soul.  Purim instructs us to take our eyes off the heavens and to be here on earth, sharing good fortune and joy with the community.  It’s your one best opportunity each year to maximize the heartiness of your partiness.  It’s exhausting, but it’s fulfilling.  Purim is a festival for the belly. It catches us, not between the ears, but at the beltbuckle, moving from there up to the heart, uplifting us and recharging us, empowering us and binding us to each other. 

But Pesach partakes of a share of both these kinds of festivals.  The seder is full of complexities, invocations, lessons - before and after the meal, the mind is buffetted, queried, enlisted, immersed in symbolism and layers of meaning, all surrounding the central theme of redemption.  But at the same time, we begin with wine and keep drinking it all night long; we symbolize our memory of mud bricks with spiced minced drunken apples, we play games with the children and sing till our lungs are empty and our faces hurt from laughing.  We eat like kings, reclining on thrones; even the bitter moror horseradish is a sensory overload, overwhelming our intellectual capacities, leaving us teary and gasping at the power even in a humble twisted root.  And the festivities take place in the home - a precious precinct, more personal than the sacred space of the synagogue and more refiined than the bustle of the streets, the daily living space being transformed for the duration into the holiest acreage since the destruction of the temple in the year 70.  It’s comfortable, convenient, and fun.  On Pesach we think and play, we drink and debate, we feast our bodies and our minds at once.  My appetites for the sights, sounds, smells, games, words and flavors of the seder have been building for almost a full year now.  I am almost ready already, and I can’t wait to get started. 

For those who want to get a taste of authentic unleavened soul, you can check the sidebar for my “scrawlings” and there are two listings for the New New New Hagada.  The hebrew didn’t make it through to MT but if you want the version with hebrew, email me.  If you don’t, don’t.  Do I have to spell everything out for you?

Oh that all sounds wonderful!  Blessings on this day of redemption.

holy crow, but that’s a wonderfully insightful post. i’ll be celebrating easter this weekend, and i wonder if anyone in my house will be thinking beyond “where is that last egg?”

i’ll be sedering tomorrow night with some folks here in town.  baked the tsimmos today...made the house smell yummy.  i went out last week and got plastic report folders to hold my copies of the haggadah....the giant staples just were not doing the job anymore.

i’ll be thinking of you!!

I’m like Bob.  Thankyou for taking time to explain so beautifully.

Yep. What you said. I’ll save some horseradish for you. Short story: first time I made horseradish from scratch, I chopped up a little first, and sniffed it. Seemed fine. So I tossed the whole (cubed) root into the Cuisinart. Added some vinegar and sugar and let it rip. Old Cuisinart. Had to really put some muscle into it to get the top off. So I did. Which meant that my face was directly over the bowl when the top finally came off. The blast was like mustard gas. I was on the floor, red faced, then blue faced, gasping for air. I was alone in the house and had visions of being found dead in the kitchen, killed by my own horseradish.

Oh, great horseradish stories! 

I’m not sure what the right saying is, but have a wonderful Pesach.  It’s great that in your religion, you combine a great celebration with a time of reflection.

Wow, no wonder I’m not Jewish--far too cerebral for me.  I’d probably make a good Scientologist, where you only need as much brain power as it takes to watch cartoons.

Greg - Battleship Earth was like a post-doc theology thesis blended with incisive Jungian analytical idioms.  No wonder they say that Travolta is the next Tom Cruise.  They’re “scientists,” man - that’s why it’s “Scientology.” You want a religion without too much thinking, go buddhist.  Word of warning though - not thinking is harder than it looks....

And Lynn, that’s a beautiful, classic story. In my family it’s a tradition to eat a coin of straight horseradish root - slice and munch, no games.  Newcomers look at the little slivers of pale vegetable and are dismissive of it.  That only ever happens once.  That stuff can power a factory.

i just learned this - chag sameach!

and thanks, as always, for a thoughtful and thought-inspiring post.  i would love, btw, to see the hagadah in hebrew, though it will take me another messianic age to decipher it.  :)