As I often mention, many of my friends are in intermarried couples. This just seems to be the way in my privileged scene; and there is sometimes among us the sense that we are a tribe, that we share certain values and cues that inmarried couples with their unadulterated cultures do not have.
The other night my wife and I went to visit such a couple. I was at the stove with the non-Jewish wife when she and I talked about some mishegos, which is Yiddish for craziness, in her husband’s family, and she said flatly that Jewish families have a lot of nuttiness in them. I nodded and said, I think this is one of the reasons I married out, I needed to temper that nuttiness with another reality.
Later we were sitting in front of the fire when we talked about Passover. They are going to two seders, I’m just going to one, at my family’s. We spoke about our apprehension about the festival. Mine is all to do with the Palestinians. It is very hard for me to take any part at all in the celebration of ancient Jewish liberation when the Jewish church is today firmly aligned with the Israeli government, which desecrates a Muslim cemetery and builds separate roadways for Jews in the West Bank. The wife in the other couple asked whether I would say anything. I said, No, I did so many years ago and it just upsets people. I will be a good member of the story-telling, and whisper thanks to Richard Goldstone under my breath, and maybe go outside to cry out for the people of Gaza who are shot while they pick through rubble as my ancestors were persecuted in the Warsaw ghetto. So you might say that the seder lives for me in Palestinian terms.
I said, "It is a great liberation story and that’s what I like about the seder. It belongs to all people."
The friend’s wife is sophisticated religiously, she has read widely. She said firmly, No it is confined to the Jewish people. There is the sense throughout the festival that this is What God did for us. There is a sense of chosenness throughout the seder.
I got upset. I said flatly, she was "wrong." But she persisted, and I was quiet. I just listened. She quoted some of the liturgical stuff in the seder, also the violence directed at Egypt, the ten plagues down to the slaying of the first born. I bet she knows the seder better than I do.
The next day she sent me an email saying that she took my point, that there is an interpretive aspect to the seder, and that it can be made to be a universal teaching. I wrote her back thanking her and also saying that I agree with her about the selfishness of Jewish life.
This seems to me the issue that I am wrestling with on this site more than any other, the hard hard selfishness of my people in the generations since the Holocaust. Norman Mailer said this was Hitler’s bitterest achievement, causing Jews to ask always, Is it good for the Jews? And yes I am sure that hard selfishness taps on ancient currents inside the small Jewish caravan that made its way thru history; Michael Walzer said that Jews had a great political achievement, they had governed themselves through 2000 years without territory or sovereignty but that we have not done a very good job of governing others.
And speaking of selfishness, I don’t think we know what Enough means. We’ve been badly hurt, dispossessed. It explains Madoff and it explains the failure to be satisfied with 80 percent of a piece of land that the world in a fit of guiltridden generosity said you could have half of.
This is really the only question for me as a tribal person: what can I do to help my original community enter the modern global era of respect for others? Rebecca Vilkomerson of Jewish Voice for Peace has said that the liberation of the Palestinian people is necessary for the liberation of the Jews, that Jews cannot be free so long as they are oppressing the Palestinians. That’s a good silent prayer for my seder tomorrow.
We’re alive, we have power: to change history, to change our rituals, to change ourselves. We don’t have to throw out all the old songs.
