Blogs

I am going to share with you two versions of the same two sentences.  In both versions, the first sentence is exactly the same.  In the second sentence, all the words are the same, but the clauses are inverted.  Listen and let me know if you hear a difference:

VERSION ONE:
My daughter makes Pesach.  She serves gefilte fish from the jar.

VERSION TWO:
My daughter makes Pesach.  From the jar she serves gefilte fish.

That second version is from Theodore Bikel’s telling of that classic Pesach story, The Carp in the Bathtub.  Bikel tells it as though it were personal experience, which would set it in 1930s Brooklyn.  It tells of two children trying to save the life of a carp their mother keeps swimming in their bathtub in the week before Pesach.  The mother buys the carp so far in advance to be sure of having a big, fresh fish with which to make her gefilte fish for the Seder.

My kids grew up listening to this story and they have imbibed every nuance of the way Bikel, with his delightful old-world Jewish accent, tells it.  Their favorite part comes when the children try to enlist their father in their plan to save the carp.  “Would you eat gefilte fish,” the fictional Tedya asks his father “if the fish were your friend.”  The father’s slow response, spoken with that delightful Eastern European lilt, has become a meme around my house: “Tedya, what have you done with your mama’s fish?”

My kids probably know as much about Pesach as any who were not themselves brought up in Brooklyn.  They have watched the cupboards empty, the pots get boiled and the silverware re-sorted. They not only know the four questions, they know the four sons and the biblical verses on which they are based.  They know every word to  אחד מי יודע and אדיר הוא.  And they actually understand why their father envies the five rabbis of B’nei Brak whose Seder drags on until morning.

And yet, none of those things have made any bigger impression on their sense of Pesach than the story of The Carp in the Bathtub.  It’s not that they mistake this work of fiction for biblical or rabbinic writ.  It’s just that it has become for them an intrinsic part of the holiday - as much as matzah and the seder plate.

For me, the key words of the haggadah are בכל דור ודור חייב אדם לראות את עצמו כאילו הוא יצא ממצרים  - in every generation, one is obligated to see oneself as though he or she personally came out of Egypt.   The very purpose of the Seder is to impress a Jewish identity on those who attend.  And that identity begins by being able to place yourself within the massive scope of Jewish history.  

Which brings me to the two sentences with which I began this talk.  Objectively they mean the same thing.  And yet, a Jew hears a world of difference between saying “she serves gefilte fish from the jar,” and saying “from the jar she serves gefilte fish.”  The first is a simple modifier of how she presents the appetizer.  But the second is an accusation, dripping with outrage and umbrage.  It's a charge of betraying one’s heritage, as though Jewish survival depended on boiling our own fish cakes.

But it is also something more.  It's an identification with the peculiar rhythms of speech and quaint turns of logic of our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.  That identification allows us to see our lives as continuous with theirs.  And that in turn teaches us how to stretch that continuum back even further; all the way back to Sinai and to Egypt.

Pesach - along with Shabbat - constitute the single most important means of transmitting Jewish identity to the next generation.  Shabbat regulates our lives to the Jewish sense of time, with its division between the common and the sacred.  Pesach places those lives within the broadest of historical contexts.  But in order for it to do so, it must somehow capture the idea that when we answer our children’s four questions with the words “we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt,” we really do mean it.

And this to me is Pesach’s peculiar power.  Because whether it comes from donating our chametz to the local food pantry, or re-experiencing that once-a-year-taste of parsley dipped in salt water, or singing about a little goat who sets in motion a chain reaction that extends all the way to heaven, or telling and retelling a story about a carp in a bathtub, whatever we do to make this night unlike any other night, has the power to create a person whose identity stretches back more than three thousand years and stretches forward to the distant future.  

It has the power to make someone Jewish.