Chag sameach! If you celebrate, I hope your Passover* is a meaningful and joyous one. (If you don’t, I hope you have a meaningful and joyous whatever-you-do-celebrate in the near future!)
I had the great fortune this year to be able to really spend time prepping for the holiday, because I turned in the first half of the manuscript for this book to my editor this week! Sent it off Monday night, so we can talk about things like general direction, balance of essay style and focus, where there are holes, where there is too much of something, etc. Collaborating with an editor during the first draft such a different and more wonderful way to work.
I’ve just set the table with china that belonged to my great-grandmother. Not the Jewish one, but the Episcopalian one. I don’t actually have any family heirlooms that are specifically Jewish, or any from my Jewish family that are from more than two generations back. I expect this is more common than not for American Jews, and maybe for Jews in most places. (Do you have things handed down for more than a couple of generations, friends? I’d love to hear what they are and their stories!)
The same is true with family histories. I can trace the great-grandmother whose china we’re using all the way back to the Revolutionary War (because I have her DAR paperwork), but even with local help wasn’t able to find anything in old records for the Polans before they emigrated to the US, even with the help of a Lithuanian researcher.
But tonight, I will tell this very, very old story… a story we have told for thousands of years. In the wake of all the discontinuity that comes from being a diasporic people, this story is at the very center of who we are. I think it’s even possible that this story—and the retelling of it—is what has kept Jews, well, Jews in spite of the many difficulties between the story of our liberation from Egypt and today.
This isn’t the first time that I’ve been struck by how strange it is that what I know of my Jewish family history, had a gap of eons in it. Basically, my knowledge went my generation, my mother’s generation, my grandfather’s generation… and the generation in which we were freed from slavery in Egypt. That’s a pretty hefty chunk of years about which I knew nothing. And all the research I’ve done for this book has only added two generations worth of stories.
Think of it like this. According the Chabad’s website, Moses parted the Red Sea in 2448**, and it’s currently 5783, so that’s a gap of 3335 years. The oldest piece of information or family story I’ve been able to recover is the date of my great-great grandfather’s birth in 1843, which means that of three eons of history, I only know anything at all about the last 180 years.
So, why does this matter? Because the stories we tell about who we are make us those people. This one story—the story of the exodus from Egypt—is that makes us Jews; nothing that came after it would matter if it hadn’t happened, and the retelling of it is what reminds us of who we are. The stories we don’t have, the stories we then can’t tell ourselves or our children, diminish the possibilities of who we can be. And as my time doing the research in Europe showed, in the absence of those stories almost all anyone remembers about our ancestors is how they died and who killed them.
So I encourage you to capture the stories of your parents, your grandparents, and your own life. Write them down, even if only for the members of your family who have yet to be born. Give them stories that they can build new, stronger selves out of, stories that are about moving through hard times to good ones, stories that don’t always end in tragedy. Give them stories of journeys out of bad times and into good, so that they can understand themselves as people who do the same.
This night is different from all other nights. Chag sameach.
* In today’s issue of Deep Shtetl, Yair Rosenberg presents a pretty compelling argument for the possibility that we’ve been mistranslating “Pesach” to mean “pass over” when really it means “compassion.” If you’re not reading Deep Shtetl, I recommend if very highly! It’s one of The Atlantic’s newsletters.
**If there was ever a calculation more appropriately done with the Hebrew, rather than Gregorian, calendar, this seems to be to be it. But if it helps, that’s 1313 BCE.)
Congratulations on turning in the first half of your book! As far as heirlooms, I have Kaddish cups that came over with my grandfather when he fled Europe (Poland then, Ukraine now) in the 1930s. They were from his family so my guess is they go back mulitple generations. And I only use one of them, once a year, for Elijah.
YOU TURNED IN THE FIRST HALF OF YOUR BOOK!! That is wonderful. The angel of publisher revenge will pass over your house! I do wish you a good Seder, and love the fact that dinner will be served on Miss Anna’s china. And I love you.