This Pesach promises to be my last major holiday here before I make yerida back to Brooklyn and since I cite the “Next Year in Jerusalem” chant at the end of the seder to prove the Zionistic motif existent in ”preZionist” Judaism it is a bittersweet occasion for me. Being near my aging parents was certainly the overwhelming immediate cause of my aliya four and a half years ago and so guilt about abandoning them is a major element of my thinking these days. But if they had retired to Florida, Australia (or Uganda) I would not have moved to be near them, so being in Israel was the overwhelming underlying cause for my aliya and so guilt about abandoning Israel is also a major element of my thinking these days.
This is my fifth Pesach in Israel (this “visit”) and it was the fourth Pesach that my parents, two youngest sisters and their husbands and kids gathered on Kibbutz Shluchot for the seder where my oldest sister, her husband and children live. This will probably be the last get-together of the extended clan before I exit. (My ultra Orthodox brother is a clan onto himself who avoids away games and thus celebrates his seder in Jerusalem separate from the modern Orthodox clan that gathers in Shluchot.)
Shluchot is in pre 67 Israel, but it is located less than two miles south of Beit Shean and thus the quickest route from Jerusalem to there is via the Jordan Valley and thus through the occupied West Bank. (Except for three intentional visits to the occupied territory and numerous visits to East Jerusalem and numerous uses of Highway 443, my trips to Shluchot are the most significant times of passing through the O.T.)
We were slaves in Egypt and God freed us is the quick summary of the seder and the essence of the Pesach/Passover holiday. There is a tension between the freedom and the Us portion of that sentence in today’s Israel, but that tension is not highlighted at all at the family seder.
One of my idiosyncrasies is to think of the Holocaust on Passover. At the seder itself I mentioned it at the ceremonial breaking of the middle matza known as “Yachatz”. After the middle matza is split, the bigger half of it becomes the afikomen saved for the end of the meal and stolen by kids the world over and held for ransom. And the smaller half of it is the “showbread” for the “This matza we eat because…”, or “This is the poor bread that our fathers ate…” And I like to mention that in “the camps” the ability to split a piece of bread exactly in half was considered a useful talent, for if half a piece of bread was the price between inmates for whatever, he who split the slice did not get to choose and if he had the ability to break it exactly in half, he would get to keep exactly half after the other inmate had chosen.
In Shluchot in general I do not think of Palestinians or the Ultra Orthodox as I do constantly in Jerusalem. But once when I opened a closet there I was “attacked” by twofold ghosts that resided in the closets. Most of the original members of the Kibbutz were survivors who had lost their entire families in Europe before coming to Israel. And the ghosts of that closet were both the Holocaust dead that had haunted the founders coupled with the exiled Palestinians that had lived nearby before they had been exiled by the founders of Israel.
