The miracle of Passover was renewed for our family when my parents decided to make their own seder in 1941. This was six months, almost to the day, after we had arrived in Montreal from Europe, and there must have been a terrible desperation about it because when I raised the subject recently with my mother, she was too agitated to respond and later explained that my questioning had dug open a pit before her eyes—“hot mir oyfge’efnt a grub far di oygn.”

It is my—our—seder, not that of my parents, that I really mean to tell about, but all its pleasures spring from the seders of my childhood. Had my parents not decided to renew the custom of their parents, there would have been no tradition of song and story for us to inherit. In my husband’s family, though the seder was treated with full seriousness, it consisted of no more than a hearty meal with matzah in place of bread. Anyway, Passover seems always to have begun with the inherited past: the children of Israel, when they escaped from Egypt into the desert, knew that the Paschal lamb they consumed was not some new spring ritual, but the reclamation of a much older rite which their forefathers had practiced before the Pharaohs turned them into slaves.

My parents had never made a real seder before coming to Montreal. In 1931, the year following their marriage, my mother had spent Passover in a Cracow hospital undergoing ear surgery. She was then in the very late stages of pregnancy; when my brother was born on May Day, and the workers from the factory where my father was chief engineer paraded and sang outside her window—that, for her, was liberation. I gather that during the few years they spent in the Polish industrial town where my father’s factory was located, they would mark Passover with a few of their friends at something resembling a thanksgiving meal.

The 1930’s passed for them in a blur. While the rest of the world sank into economic mire, my father came to direct the construction of a new factory in Czernowitz, Rumania, where he brought his wife and (by then) two children to settle. The younger of these children, a girl, died short of her second birthday, and I was born not long after that, so that when my parents fled the city in June 1940, they again had two children, only not the same ones; two more would be born in Canada. During their eventful sojourn in Czernowitz they attended annually the communal seder of Massada—a mildly Zionist organization, really more like a cultural club, for Jewish professionals and their wives. Once, probably before I was born, they made the trip back to my father’s birthplace of Bialystok to celebrate at Grandfather’s table.

It was from his father that my father derived his nusach—his manner of chanting the text, the Haggadah, and of conducting the seder. My grandfather, a man of intelligence and learning, had honed his tongue to compensate for the steady decline of his eyesight; by the time he was blind, about age forty, he had become a fearful wit. And more than a wit: about such as my blind grandfather Shakespeare wrote, “A man may see how this world goes with no eyes.” At the seder of 1939, which we missed because my brother and I had scarlet fever, Grandfather told the assembled family members that they must set out for Canada to buy a textile factory, and thus transplant their business to the new continent. He directed his second son and eldest grandson to leave immediately after the holidays; such was his authority that they did, buying a mill in the Province of Quebec where unemployment and anti-Semitism were both at a peak (ours being one of the very few cases in which the exigency of the former phenomenon would outweigh the virulence of the latter). My parents, my brother, and I were the last ones to make it to safety. The war trapped my grandfather in Bialystok along with his only daughter and her family who had remained behind to care for him. They did not survive.

Is it any wonder that I sometimes think Passover was created for my sake, commemorating my family’s miraculous flight, just as the Haggadah says, “from slavery to freedom, from sorrow to joy, from mourning to holiday, from darkness to great light, and from bondage to redemption,” and absorbing our own private selves into the vast national drama?

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This is how the drama begins. After the customary blessings, the youngest willing child, coached for days by parents and teachers, opens with four questions:

Why does this night differ from all other nights: for on all other nights we eat either leavened or unleavened bread; why on this night only unleavened bread? On all other nights we eat all kinds of herbs; why on this night only bitter herbs? On all other nights we need not dip our herbs even once; why on this night must we dip them twice? On all other nights we eat either sitting up or reclining; why on this night do we all recline?¹

But once questions begin, who determines where they shall stop? “Why do we drink four glasses of wine?” asked a four-year-old at our seder this year. “Why does freedom have to be celebrated by such exhaustively bourgeois preparations?” I used to ask when I first began to make a seder. “Why do we deserve to be at this table when our fellow Jews, let alone so many other members of the human family, enjoy no such bounty?” Today, no matter who conducts the reading of the Haggadah, those of us who once sat at my father’s table continue to imitate his cadence, stopping as he did from time to time to ask a question, to comment on a passage, to sing a song. For years our discussion took place in Yiddish, the language of our home and of all my parents’ friends. Once we began bringing friends, Father moved from Yiddish to English, depending on who was being addressed. Everyone was encouraged to interrupt, thus creating an inevitable tension between the Haggadah and the kneidlakh, between the reading and the matzah-ball soup.

“Avodim hoyinu lefaroh bemitsra-yim. . . .” The adults approach their formal response to the four questions with a paradox that each generation of Jewish geniuses discovers for itself:

We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, and the Lord, our God, brought us forth from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. And if the Holy One, blessed be He, had not brought our forefathers forth from Egypt, then we, our children, and our children’s children would still be Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt.

So, even though all of us were wise, all of us full of understanding, all of us elders, all of us knowing in the Torah, we should still be under the commandment to tell the story of the departure from Egypt. And the more one tells the story of the departure from Egypt, the more praiseworthy he is.

First, then, a précis of the text that will serve as the basis of our commentary; then a bow to the spirit in which the story will be told. The second paragraph is one my father would recite with heavy emphasis, loving the way it twitted us “intellectuals” while playing up to our vanity. He knew just how confidently his own youthful circle had once trusted in the exclusive powers of reason and enlightenment to guide them through life. Leon Trotsky’s voice, when my father heard it as a boy in Moscow, had drowned out the more balanced Jewish faith he had imbibed from his own father. So too most of the other adults at our seder in the 40’s and 50’s, writers and teachers, had once quit what they regarded as the chauvinistic prattle of their parents’ Passover table to join the Revolution, the International, the Bund—one or another branch of the secular vanguard. Now they were drawn back to the Haggadah, not in nostalgia or repentance but in amazement at the poor exchange they had made.

The Haggadah long ago anticipated that while a “wise son” might ask to be instructed in the customs of the tradition, a “wicked son” would throw them back in his father’s face, while a “simpleton” would lack either the interest or the capacity to understand in full. My father used to like to point out that the difference between the wise and the wicked son lies in tone rather than in diction: the one speaks respectfully, the other poses almost the identical questions, but rudely. The iconography that accompanies the parable of the Four Sons usually portrays the fourth, the one “who does not know how to ask,” as very young. In my family we have come to identify him as the deprived offspring of the wicked son—after all, had our parents not taken up the unraveling threads of the tradition, we might never have learned to put the questions either.

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I adored the intellectual excitement of the seder. My model was the five rabbis, who, according to the legend, tell about the departure from Egypt all night long, until their disciples come to them and say, “Masters, the time has come to read the morning shema.” For years I pictured myself as a participant in that all-night session where the talk would be so stimulating that dawn would catch us unawares. Later at school I learned that this passage about the five rabbis who talked through the night probably recalls Bar Kokhba’s rebellion against Rome in 132 CE. The explanation made sense: at such a conspiratorial gathering, “Egypt” would have suggested “Rome,” and the story of the liberation would have served as a spring for regenerating the passion for freedom. To me, though, at least in those days, the image of Jews fighting for their national liberation was probably less compelling than the image of Jews arguing over their national liberation.

Throughout my teens and far beyond, I took the discussion of life to be its essential part. I even located in literature the ideal modern seder: in one of his dramatic narratives, Edmund Wilson, then my ideal intellectual, imagines the Prophet Elijah turning up at a seder of Jewish scholars and professionals on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He is accompanied by the Messiah, who has come to redeem the world. But the New York Jews know better. The Hebraist among them is appalled by Elijah’s faulty pronunciation; the psychoanalyst tries to figure out the nature of the Messiah’s delusion; the Marxist trips him up on dialectics; the rabbi-turned-editor tries to square the pronouncements of the visitors with those of Maimonides, Saadia Gaon, and other sources. Wearied by this brief exposure to those he has come to redeem, the Messiah decides to postpone his advent. The story is very witty, but what really appealed to me about it was the verve of the talkers. Even at the risk of becoming a butt of Wilson’s satire, I would have wanted to be a member of that party.

Mine was not the only intellectual passion in the family. My older brother Benjamin, who sat beside our father near the head of the table, the very embodiment of the “wise son,” had been encouraged throughout childhood and early teens to develop all his manifold talents, including the talent (inherited from my mother) for music. After his first year in college he decided to study textiles. It was never clear to me nor, I believe, to him whether he did this because he wanted to be useful to the state of Israel, where he planned to settle, or because he wanted to be useful to his father in Canada, where he did settle. In either event he seems to have regarded business as a form of servitude, from which he sought occasional release in music—every kind of music except opera.

Perhaps I should not be fully trusted in this account of my older brother, because I have not yet made my peace with him for hastening the end of his life at the age of forty-three and would drag him from the grave by his grassy hair if I could. Apart from my parents, he was the most important influence on my life, as he was on our Passover. For years he introduced new commentaries on various passages of the Haggadah; then he began teaching us new melodies, some for passages we had never sung before, others to replace melodies we habitually used. He taught us Sephardic melodies which were as exotic as saffron and cardamon—this was before the first recordings of Ladino songs appeared—and sometimes the melodies were so complicated it took a few years before we could get them right.

The melodies Ben taught us came to constitute a kind of Passion in his memory. I risk this image though it would have annoyed him. The great oratories, music sung to sacred text, were to him the heights of glory. He would listen to the St. John and St. Matthew Passions in the semi-dark, in votive awe. Music being his gateway to ecstasy, Ben must have felt at least a twinge of envy for those who could actually worship God by way of J.S. Bach. Theirs was the grandeur—a touch of which he seemed determined to bring to our own domestic annual rite of the seder. And so our singing grew ever more exalted, our voices more full, and Ben remained present in the chorale that he crafted, directing traffic.

One last word about music. My brother died in the autumn. When, years later, his eldest son Joshua decided to follow, he took his life in the spring. We had barely risen from the shiva for Josh when we had to sit down to the seder. Everyone knew what had to be done: the imperatives of celebration, life goes on, for the sake of the children. . . . We prepared the seder as always, gathered as always, began to read through the Haggadah, determined to hold firm. But this was not enough for our children, Josh’s siblings and cousins. There are certain songs in the seder that consist of verse and refrain, many verses and refrains. We generally sing the first three or four, quickly recite the rest, then conclude with the final two. This time the young generation rebelled, insisting on every last word of every last verse of every last song. As they realized what they were doing, two of their number slipped out of the room to return with sets of hand drums we keep in the house, transforming the song into a tribal chant. Since then, our seder has always included a reenactment of this musical battle between the young zealots and the stodgy formalists, in honor of Josh whose greatest pleasure was also music. Despair was our Egypt. Our children followed the example of their grandparents in breaking free of it, to the accompaniment of timbrels.

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Just see how this account of mine threatens to narrow into family lore, how easily a family becomes absorbed in its own high drama rather than the one that the Haggadah invites us to join. I say “threatens” because, however much we are expected to celebrate as a family, we are also warned against illusions of self-sufficiency, lest we upset the balance that Passover celebrates. Before the younger child asks the Four Questions, the host says the following:

This is the bread of poverty which our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry enter and eat; let all who are needy come to our Passover feast. This year we are here; next year may we be in the Land of Israel. This year we are slaves; next year may we be free men.

Touchstone of Jewish morality, this passage translates freedom into responsibility at the very moment we taste it. The wafer, not the body of Christ but the bread of affliction—an equally ambiguous symbol—comes complete with national instructions. Liberation, whatever else it may mean, requires that you feed the hungry and house the needy. The connection between celebration and obligation is bred in the bone.

At the seder all symbols are made flesh. The matzah enters the digestive system, the stranger comes to sit among us—nowadays more often an assimilated or Gentile acquaintance than a dust-worn traveler. Sholem Aleichem tells a story about an exotic Passover guest who makes off not only with the household silver and jewelry but with the maid as well. My friends used to invite new immigrants from Russia who chain-smoked their way through Haggadah and food. A rabbinical student once commandeered our table for his first pulpit. It seems, then, that we are not meant to equate freedom with comfort. Even the presence of family all around us, family being both the chief reward and the warrant of freedom, can be either a constraining or a liberating force. At the Passover table, at any rate, the family is enjoined, significantly, not to feed on itself but to open its door—with due respect for the dangers involved.

Edmund Wilson describes the seder as “the combination of a family party like Christmas dinner with a ritual of resurrection that resembles an Easter Mass.” The appropriateness of the analogies aside, the characterization omits the main feature of Passover, which also happens to be the one that so discomfits the intellectuals around Wilson’s imaginary table—namely, the celebration of Jewish national freedom:

This year we are here; next year may we be in the Land of Israel. This year we are slaves; next year may we be free men.

It has driven many modern Jews wild, this story of national liberation. There was Marx unveiling the great international future, and were they then supposed to crawl back into their tribal tents? Squirming, they would read God’s promise to strike down the enemies of their people: “. . . for in every generation they stand up to destroy us, and the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hand.” Here was the sticking point! They may not have minded all that talk about the “bread of affliction”; they might bask in the injunction to be compassionate, to let “all who are needy come to our Passover feast”; and as for the core notions of liberation and the struggle to be free, were these not the very stuff of class revolution, from the Bastille to the Winter Palace? But a struggle against enemies of the Jews was another matter. When the Haggadah begins robustly to recount how the liberation from Pharaoh had to be achieved, through plagues of blood, frogs, lice, beasts, blight, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the slaying of the first-born of all the Egyptians; when, adding insult to injury, it tells how the ancient rabbis, unsatisfied with ten plagues, multiplied them into fifty, two hundred, three hundred—then would these sons and daughters of the modern age run from the table in disgust.

Until recently, Jews used to flick a drop of wine from their cups as they pronounced each of the plagues, as if drawing the blood of battle. Under the influence of liberal thought, this old custom was reinterpreted in the 19th century by the great modern Orthodox rabbi, Samson Raphael Hirsch, to mean that we were thus signifying our sympathy for the misfortune visited upon the Egyptians, and in that measure tempering our joy at our own liberation. And why not? Liberal interpreters still point with delight to the midrash in which God scolds his angels for singing as the Red Sea waters engulf the hapless Egyptians: “What! Shall you sing while my children are drowning in the sea?”

In retrospect, however, it is easy to see that in attempting to upgrade morality, the liberal interpreters were trying to lighten their own moral load. Turning the drop of wine into an expression of compassion is really a form of self-pity, as the reluctant warrior ostentatiously displays his conscience and, under the guise of pitying his enemies, subtly renounces his own wish for victory. Or, if not the wish for it, then the determination to attain it, which requires assuming responsibility for the blood it may cost. Thus have many Jews determined to become tender as a people, without considering that the tender part is the easiest to chew.

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The uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, which began on the first night of Passover in 1943, after most of the Jews had already been killed, should have stiffened the national resolve of all who came after. In the only formal addition my family ever made to the seder, we included a commemoration of that event, initially one of our own devising, then the one circulated by the World Jewish Congress whose preposterously archaic style gradually acquired the power to move us:

On this night of the seder we remember with reverence and love the six millions of our people of the European exile who perished at the hands of a tyrant more wicked than the Pharaoh who enslaved our fathers in Egypt. Come, said he to his minions, let us cut them off from being a people, that the name of Israel may be remembered no more. And they slew the blameless and pure, men and women and little ones, with vapors of poison and burned them with fire. But we abstain from dwelling on the deeds of the evil ones lest we defame the image of God in which man was created. . . .

Followed by the singing of ani maamin—“I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and though he tarry, nonetheless do I believe”—this part of the seder was raw and disturbing to me. Tumbling images of burning buildings and people ablaze that I had seen or imagined came to rest always on the photographic image of two women with their hands in the air, surrounded by the Germans who would in a moment execute them. These women had been resistance fighters, and we were marking the bravery of their resistance; but it was the Germans who were walking triumphantly through the sea, and it was a sea of Jewish cadavers. Perhaps there had been people in the ghettos and concentration camps who believed with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, but he had tarried. In the meantime, we were willy-nilly celebrating the liberation of Europe from the Jews.

Can one really fault those Jews who refuse to yoke themselves to the national fate? Now that our children have taken over the job of reciting the texts commemorating the ghetto martyrs, I sometimes wonder what we are doing to them. What have we already done? In France last year I met a lapsed Jew whose grandmother had begged him to have his first child baptized: “Ça suffit!” She had had enough, this woman who had spent the war hiding in barns and cellars. Similarly with Jews who convert to other faiths, especially the ones that promise to “transcend” national limitations. They too want to escape a surfeit of grief.

Our ancestors, those who were neither killed nor cowed, saved themselves through a blast of rage. Today we follow their example, verbally. The natural place to commemorate the European massacre occurs right before the shfoykh khamoskho:

Pour out Thy wrath upon the nations that
    know Thee not,
And upon the kingdoms that call not upon
    Thy name.
For they have devoured Jacob,
And laid waste his habitation.
Pour out Thine indignation upon them,
And let the fierceness of Thine anger overtake
    them.
Thou wilt pursue them in anger, and destroy
    them
From under the heavens of the Lord!

The custom of reciting these verses, carefully stitched together from Psalms 79:6-7, 69:25, and Lamentations 3:66, originated after the Crusades of the 11th and 12th centuries when Christian Europe made the first of its several attempts to cleanse itself of Jews, and when the landscape of corpses, men and women and little ones, must have looked much the same as it would in 1945. Before emitting their eloquent howl, Jews have customarily flung open the doors of their houses. One does not know which to admire the more, the courage it has taken in some places and times to tell the Gentiles, We will not cringe before you, or the courage to keep invoking, in this connection, the name of God.

Of course, no sooner has the pain of catastrophe begun to wear off than some Jews have come to feel embarrassed by this outburst; in our time the Haggadah of the Reform movement does not include the passage at all. But as it happens we are well placed historically to appreciate the charged fury of our medieval forefathers. They could not have continued to trust in God unless they also believed in His justice. Certainly, they could not have celebrated their ancient liberation as a people without some cry for retribution in the present. My brother-in-law can cite relevant psychoanalytic writings testifying to the sources of depression in stifled anger. For myself, I need that outburst and the rush of cold air through the open door as much as I once needed my mother’s love and my father’s approval. I want those who hunt the Jews to be hunted down themselves, wiped from under the heavens of the Lord. I feel ashamed not at the demand for retribution, but at how little Jews have done to bring their destroyers to trial.

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Our local rabbi once said that if Jews did not ask God—at the top of their lungs—to pour out His wrath on their enemies, they could not properly sing His praises in the Hallelujahs that follow. When I was younger this second, post-meal half of the seder, composed of psalms and songs of gratitude, seemed frivolous compared with the high history we had recalled earlier in the evening. Perhaps because we were by then too well fed to do much gribbling—my mother’s term for our (pointless) analyses of text—or perhaps because we were following the established rhythm of the generations, we did little but sing and joke, as the Haggadah obviously intended. This was the time for satisfaction, which I used to equate with triviality.

But nowadays, when the meal is over and we have reassembled around the rumpled table, the children beginning to droop, the young people hauled back from ping-pong or the hockey playoff that in Canada perennially competes with the seder, the men with their jackets off, the women unburdened of family problems, I feel the unparalleled joy of being a Jew. The reenactment of the Exodus, which for me begins weeks earlier when I clean out the first section of cupboard and carry in my first Passover supplies, has brought us through all the stages of affliction and triumph to these hours of grace. The journey undertaken at the behest of God cannot be realized without gratitude to Him.

Since early adolescence my strongest contact with God has been through the traditions of the Jews who first recognized Him and received His word. That is to say, my contact has been indirect, which for me is sufficient. But the night of the seder differs from all other nights of the year; it requires my participation.

How can I repay unto the Lord
All His bountiful dealings toward me?
I will lift up the cup of salvation
And call upon the name of the Lord.

Our homage is as rich as we can make it, combining the hymns of many centuries composed in many parts of the globe. There have accrued to the seder playful songs, historical allegories, a mystically layered hymn, “And so it came to pass in the middle of the night,” that begins with the frightening nocturnal break for freedom. In sum, the liturgy proclaims, “The breath of every living thing shall bless thy name, O Lord.”

It is my younger brother who undertakes to recite this particularly glorious hymn in a single swooping breath, just as Father used to do. Father may have done it with a touch of irony, to show that he was not altogether comfortable with the language of sanctification. But so much for irony: my younger brother, who devotes his life to teaching and forging Jewish continuities, has translated the irony back into homage for both his earthly father and the One in heaven.

The story of the Exodus concludes when the Jews have achieved their freedom in the land of Israel.

Concluded is the Passover Seder,
According to its law and custom.
As we have lived to celebrate it
So may we live to celebrate it again.
Pure One, who dwells in His habitation
Redress the countless congregation.
Speedily lead the offshoots of thy stock
Redeemed, to Zion in joyous song.
Next Year in Jerusalem!

At this point my tongue begins to fail me. I cannot explain, least of all to anyone who may require explanation, the joy of Jerusalem in our lives. Many of us around the table have lived in Israel, plan to live in Israel, want to live in Israel, or believe they ought to live in Israel, though we could not separate out these impulses or even account for all of them.

When our daughter left to spend a year at the Hebrew University she said, “I’m afraid I’m going to like it there.” One of our sons recently wrote from Jerusalem that the city felt like a book he had begun five or six times but had never read through to the end. Our niece stopped us this year as we were reading the passage, “And he [Jacob] went down into Egypt . . . and sojourned there.” The Haggadah interprets this to mean that Jacob did not go down to Egypt to settle, but only for a temporary visit. Nothing has changed, she said with a rueful smile, no one ever intends to settle outside the land of Israel, we just sojourn elsewhere—for hundreds of years at a time.

I know there are Gentiles who suspect and modern Jews who fear that this longing for the East makes Jews less trustworthy citizens of their adopted countries and native lands. Yet even in Israel, Jews recite the verse, “Next year in Jerusalem rebuilt.” They are expected to accomplish the trick of enjoying their national freedom while remembering that they—that we—are not yet fully redeemed.

After the Exodus from Egypt it took Moses forty years to turn a slave people into a nation sufficiently disciplined and worthy to reenter its land. Forty years used to seem a preposterously long time, but now I doubt whether in the forty years since the Jews of modernity reclaimed their homeland, they have even yet begun to shed the bonds of slavery. There are still so many who prefer victimization to the onerous tasks of governance. And this time they are without a prophetic leader. Moses, the hero, is not even mentioned in the Haggadah story, as if in warning that once the Jews had the law in their hands and had been pointed in the direction of the promised land, they would have to manage themselves as a people, and venture forth together and alone.

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This past year there were changes at our seder. Some of our grown children were elsewhere, at the tables of hospitable strangers or friends, while we again were hosting small children and an infant, my parents’ first great-grandchild. Suddenly, the rhythm of adult discussion and song was punctured by fresh excitement. As in years past, children controlled the main action: the theft of the afikoman, the matzah that is required to end the meal, and its concealment with breathless squeals somewhere in the house. My husband could be counted on to conduct a search sufficiently vigorous to convince the children of his sincerity, and sufficiently careful to avoid accidental discovery of the purloined dessert. He then “redeemed” the stolen treasure with a promise of toys, invoking for anyone paying sufficiently close attention yet another echo of the theme of the evening.

Which may also be why, the following night, we rose at the conclusion of the second seder in my sister’s home to sing Hatikvah—“Hope”—the Jewish national anthem. All evening long we had been talking about the nonstop bombardment of Lebanon at the hands of the Syrians. An Armenian friend had been vainly trying to contact his family in Beirut. That morning, our daily newspaper had reconfirmed, through its silence about what was going on in Lebanon, that an Arab is of human interest only if he is threatened by a Jew. As for us, we thought, and as for our kinsmen in the Holy Land, there but for the grace of the Israel Defense Force go we. The more we talked about the political war against Israel and the failing spirits of the Jews, the more discouraged we grew. We tried to walk the tightrope of the Haggadah between festivity and grit, but when we arrived at the end we had still not managed to fight off our dumb dejection. Let’s sing Hatikvah, someone said, and we all got to our feet. Standing erect we found it easier to believe that we were now and would forever remain a sovereign people.

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¹ For the most part I will be quoting from the translation by Jacob Sloan in The Passover Haggadah, edited by Nahum N. Glatzer (Schocken Books).