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EVERY YEAR THE SEDER WAS THE SAME and every year, without our knowing it
fully, we were blessed. The family gathered around the table, and it was
very good. We grew from being the children at the end to the young adults
in the middle, goading the little ones into the giggling we remembered.
Then we became the aunts and uncles, and, shockingly, the aunts and uncles
became great-aunts and -uncles. That, too, was good, in the natural order,
as the Seder was an ordering of sisters and cousins and husbands and
children dispersed among other countries throughout the year, assembling to
enter spring together.
And then my aunt died, too young. The first death out of order is the one
that begins the teaching: Not all of us will be around the table.
Unexpected joys have come since then. New marriages, including my uncle's,
after years of solitude. New babies, including one named for my aunt. This
year, all my parents' grandchildren will be under one roof. But under the
roof, too, is the anticipation of sorrow.
When we were young, suffering was young and reversible. This year,
suffering is our companion and we do not know its end. At the table, we
will rejoice with greater fervor because, like the wine drops on the saucer
from a once-full cup, we have in our midst the babies but we have illness,
too; we have the shore of thankfulness and a sea of heartache.
Pesach celebrates the new year, not the birthday of the world but its
rebirth, not our creation but our re-creation out of slavery to freedom.
The struggle this year is to taste redemption in an imperfect world, a
world where G0d may not pass over our own houses. Intrinsic to Jewish
creation is separation; that is our story, of light from darkness, of earth
from water, of morning from evening. We are the people of separation, of
holiness wrested from darkness over the deep so that we know the
difference, always, between sacred and daily, between this night and every
other night, between life in this world and the world to come.
Everyone around the table loves this world; no one is ready to separate
from each other. And although some are evidently ill and some are not,
because of illness we know that all of us are fragile. We have prepared for
this holiday more than any other, but for the possibilities of absence we
cannot prepare.
How can we celebrate the gifts we have given each other, the irreplaceable
lives that have shaped our lives? How can we remember, as we remember
Sinai, the freedom that love has granted us, the love that has ennobled us
so that, wherever we have scattered, we have carried it within us like a
portable sanctuary?
Like memory, like my aunt's laughter that we recall and retell because she
is not here, we savor everything now, we renew the covenant that has made
us, uniquely, the family we are. We see each precious life, like the
rainbow of G0d's promise, begun in earth, ending in earth, but between
earth and earth: an arc flung to heaven, rare, glorious. We behold the
light of these lives, unimaginably beautiful, and we want the sky to be
inscribed with their radiance forever.
Remember the time we took the boat trip to the landscapes of our childhood
and we saw a double rainbow on the last, most beautiful day? Remember all
the summers, the cottages, the camps, the visits anticipated with such
excitement we could not sleep? Remember the reconciliations, the harmony
after turmoil, the renewed understanding? Remember, we plead with each
other, when we laughed so hard at the Seder we were
Jewish World Review March 30, 1999 / 13 Nissan, 5759
Going home
By Nessa Rapoport
Hinei mah tov u'manayim, we will sing before we start. "How lovely it is
when brothers and sisters dwell together." And it will be lovely, and only
Elijah knows if we will sip from the cup of joy or anguish.
Nessa Rapoport is the author of a novel, "Preparing for Sabbath," and of "A Woman's Book of Grieving." Her latest book is "The Schocken Book of Contemporaryy Jewish Fiction,
edited by her and Ted Solotaroff.
