TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 198b

[Tobie Shapiro]

April 10, 200007


Dear Those of a Forgiving Nature,

	I left off a few paragraphs of Life 
Stories 198.  So I'm tacking them on now.  Please 
forgive me, for I have erred.



 
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	At Passover, the rule was that we had to 
sit still and read, follow along in the text and 
wait the interminable time before we finished the 
first part of the Haggadah and dinner was served. 
To us kids, the reading of the Haggadah was 
deadly.  It went on and on and made only some 
sort of screwy sense.  The main purpose is to 
pass on the tradition, to perpetuate the identity 
of Jews with ourselves as slaves, not to forget 
the feelings of being a slave, to be able to say 
that I myself came out of Egypt, out of four 
hundred years of slavery into sudden 
(unmanageable) freedom.  We preserve our identity 
with slaves and the down trodden by passing on 
the story of Pesach, with all the miracles and 
wonders included.

	It is the children and the adolescents 
that need to understand the story because it is 
they who must grow up with these deeply rooted 
sentiments guiding them.  And they will pass the 
tradition on to their own children, and they 
theirs, and forever so.  Unless you want to 
assimilate, that loathsome, fearsome word.  But 
the standard Orthodox Haggadah that we suffered 
through every year was written in such a way as 
to be incomprehensible even to an adult who knows 
the story beforehand, let alone to a child who is 
finding a way through the world, balancing the 
mysteries of the spiritual and religious with 
documentable laws of nature.

	We giggled over passages among ourselves, 
made faces at each other from across the table or 
the room.  One of the very serious grown-ups 
would shush us as we had our fun, but with a text 
like that, who could stay solemn?

	"And so with an outstretched hand, there 
were three hundred fifty plagues on land, and one 
thousand six hundred ninety three plagues at sea."

	Nothing computed.  The pilpul arguments 
of the rabbis of history in debate were layed out 
for us and detailed in antiquated holy jargon. 
We understood not one thing.

	"Joseph went to Egypt not to live, but to sojourn there."

	You didn't want the sojourn paragraph, or 
any of the ones with the names of multiple rabbis 
of renown.  You'd creep up on this name, fearing 
your own mispronunciation.  And when you got to 
the name, Rabbi Gamliel or Akiba, Rabbi Tarfon, 
you'd hear a half dozen voices from the crowd, 
correcting you in different ways.  Thus the next 
year, at the next seder, it would be no better.

	And with five fingers on each hand, thus, 
there were twenty plagues on land, and five 
million, six hundred seventy nine thousand, four 
hundred thirty one plagues on the sea, not 
counting Louie Silberstein.


 
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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net