When I was a kid, Passover was a really big deal.
My earliest memories are from my maternal grandparents’ house in Miami. They set up a long table around which four generations of family members gathered with my Great Grandpa Victor at the helm. Those seders lasted a very long time. He led the service in a mumbled Hebrew chant he carried with him from Poland and asked every post-bar mitzvah person to recite the full kiddush. Until I was about 7 or 8 that meant the men, but then my mom’s cousin Elinor demanded to be heard. As the youngest girl at the table, she invited me to rise with her. In hindsight, this was my first act of religious activism; of reconstructing the Judaism I was raised within.
When I was 9 my grandmother died followed a few days later by Victor, and the festivities, and my memories of them, migrated to New York. My mother hosted her side of the family one night and we spent the second night with my father’s family. They used the Maxwell House Haggadah which seemed right. That side of the family was much more American Jews than Jewish Americans. We went through all the rituals, but there was more laughing, like when my Uncle Joel used funny accents to narrate the debate between Rabbis on the order of the Seder.
My first husband’s father, Leslie Brisman, was a professor of English. He was an educator everywhere he went and introduced me to Reconstructionism and started bringing supplemental offerings to our seder. This inspired my parents to prepare differently to host and lead. Dad collected and shared from alternative haggadot and mom began attending women’s seders with the Sisterhood at her synagogue and bringing new ideas to the table alongside the matzoh stuffing.
I have so many more memories of Passovers gone by. Funny memories. Boring memories. Delicious memories. Learning memories. and more recently, as my family has scattered across the country, various kinds of Skype and Zoom memories. In many ways, it really was the biggest holiday of the year.
It’s interesting to reflect back on my family’s evolving celebrations and note that they weren’t the monolithic events I sometimes make them out to be. And that’s a liberating idea. Because, as an adult, Passover hasn’t been such a big deal for me. And sometimes I feel guilty about that.
This morning, as I finally set time aside to complete my pre-Passover love letter to you, my friends in Sukkat Shalom, I’m reminded of R’ Alan Lew’s high holiday missive that This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared. I feel unprepared. I haven’t cleared out the chametz. I haven’t even shopped for matzah or ingredients for my Grandma’s infamous chicken soup.
What I have been doing an awful lot of as winter moved into spring, however, is working on clearing the spiritual chametz from my life – though I didn’t really have the language to describe it that way until I read some commentary from R’ Danya Ruttenberg earlier this week. Traditionally, the rabbi explains, spiritual chametz was equated with pride, a bloating of ego. In her feminist critique of this interpretation, she suggests women and minorities have been told far too long to take up less space. Rather, she suggests we focus on the idea of chametz as sour behaviors – the wrongs we do to others (willingly and unwillingly) and the wrongs others do to us that cause us to behave badly, to others and to ourselves.
I know I’m not the only person still trying to find new equilibrium in our post-pandemic times. So much has been shaken up and the dust is still settling, if it ever will. Learning to live within the shmutz, especially the unhelpful expectations I set for myself, means taking moments to push the chametz aside and make some sort of fresh start. It doesn’t mean starting from scratch, but finding pathways into and through the wilderness, ways to rub the sleep from our eyes and see things anew each day, to return to the land of our souls as we say at Rosh haShanah.
So, once again, I’m grateful for our Jewish traditions that invite us to clear time and space for re-newal, re-grounding, re-freshing, re-dedicating, re-birthing, re-starting, re-seeding… I hope that where you are in your celebrations, you are finding something new.
Chag Sameach,
Jodi Kushins
KSS Board Chair and Lay Leader