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April 9, 2004/Nisan 18 5764, Vol. 56, No. 29
Retelling the story
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
"We Jews are all born wanderers, with shoes under our pillows."
So captures the poet Marge Piercy the pathos of the Jewish story, from the Exodus from Egypt to the Promised Land, to our history of persecution and suffering, to the miraculous founding of a Jewish homeland, to the underlying imperative of the Passover story that the journey, the story, continue.
You must tell it to your children, we are told - so that they may tell it to their children, and theirs and theirs.
Immersed in the middle days of the holiday, sated at our seders, basking in the warmth and closeness of family and friends, we are reminded yet again of the blessings we enjoy. Z'man cheiruteinu, the rabbis call these days, "the season of our freedom." Yet they herald the beginning of the counting of the omer, the 49 days leading up to Shavuot and the receiving of the law on Mount Sinai, the quintessential covenantal act as a people.
And so, while the essence of the maggid, the "retelling," is informed by the questions asked around our tables, so, too, does the holiday remind that our obligation does not end with the singing of the traditional "Chad Gadya" at the close of the seder. It is only beginning.
As we tire of matzo - and our digestive tracts begin to rebel - we recall that like many words in Hebrew, matzo is imbued with double meaning. Frances Weinman Schwartz, in her instructive, "Passage to Pesach, Preparing for Passover Through Text and Tradition," (UAHC Press, $13.95 paperback) relates that it is both matzo oni, "poor person's bread," and matzo oneh, "the bread of reciting and answering."
So it is both the bread of affliction we hold aloft at our seders - and hide for the little ones to find - and the bread of freedom, the bread of responsibility.
Especially during chol hamoed, "the intermediate days" of Passover, we reflect on the duality, our passage to freedom and its underlying charge.
Politically, socially, economically, morally, issues abound. There are myriad questions to ask, yet it seems as if from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Jerusalem to Washington, there are painfully few answers. Or conflicting ones. Violence continues on the streets of Falluja and Baghdad, on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. U.S. soldiers are at risk, Israeli civilians in danger. At home we see those without work, those without food, those without hope. And we see those who are willing to risk their lives for the promise of a better life, wending their way across the parched desert on Arizona's southernmost borders for a chance, any chance, to reach what they perceive as their promised land.
The irony cannot escape us, even as we savor the last few days of the holiday, that even as Pesach impels us to look back to last year in Egypt, so, too, it inspires us literally and figuratively to look ahead to next year in Jerusalem.
And it is our turn to continue the journey, to write the story.
Contact the writer at vicki_cabot@jewishaz.com.
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