The Gefilte Fish Can Wait

It’s nearly Passover. First seder is tomorrow night. I’m not remotely ready. I never am. I’ve done some cleaning, emptying deep drawers and scrubbing their bottoms, restocking them with Pesach victuals. My husband is in charge of most of the cooking, by his own choosing. I’m relegated to vegetables, charoset, and the rest of the seder plate.

I decided that I do not want to go page by page through the traditional readings. I just cannot hear myself or anyone else go on about the rabbis in Bnei Brak. Not this year. Maybe not ever again. I’ve chosen some random other readings, including an excruciating meditation on Dayenu by an Israeli woman I follow on whatsapp and instagram. She captures everything I would want to say, only better than I could say it, and from the perspective of someone living in perhaps the narrowest place on earth in this moment. Her mitzrayim is one I cannot imagine, but one that allows her to wrestle with complexity, pain, hope and determination in ways that are frankly breathtaking. Her honesty, and her humor — yes, her humor — are gifts I feel guilty taking for free.

For me, the Jewish holiday calendar carries too many reminders of loss. My father, z’l, was the leader of our little family tribe, and his absence is something I feel acutely at every holiday. I never won’t, I think. And Passover is a reminder as well of the murder of my grandmother, Asna, her son Beryl, his wife Sonja, and their two children, Hershele, 4 and Shepshele, 2, shot and burned to death at Ponar, in 1943.

It is perhaps uniquely Jewish to meditate on liberation and mourn. It is also psychically and spiritually exhausting. I struggle every year with this story, with its meaning, with its resonance and relevance, and its having no ending, ever, that doesn’t open a door to more of the same. This year, this moment, especially.

I struggle with what I believe and why. I struggle with God, an entity I beseech and turn away from, often in equal measure. I am tired. I try to rise and rally for my children above all, so they see me as someone rooted in our story, one that is also their inheritance. But I worry about a world that for them seems to be growing narrower and narrower. How much mitzrayim can one people stand? How long must we dwell in this narrow place?

Then I remember that narrow is a multiplicity of things: it is physical, yes. But it is also spirtual and mental. It is possible to emerge from one mitzrayim while dwelling in another, to let your spirit or mind soar above the narrow space in which you are confined. I think about the ghettos my father and his family were in, the hiding places in a barn. I think about the shelters Israelis run to now, to avoid the bombs aimed directly at them. I think of the secret seders in ghettos and concentration camps, where bodies were chained and starved, but spirits still had the possibility of roaming free. I think of the courage it took to make those choices, and the fear of being found out. I think of the absurdity, the cruelty, of finding one kind of freedom while wrapped in the barbed wire of another kind of enslavement.

I think it all. And it wearies me. And yet. What choice do I have? I am who I am and what I inherited. I cannot turn aside from that. I would never want to. Not because my inheritance is easy. But precisely because it demands of me something that is hard. Yes, as my husband often reminds me, angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. But who among us is an angel, after all…