Is on my side, claimed Mick Jagger. Topol as Tevye saw it swiftly flow and then swiftly fly. Virgil watched it fugit. And Einstein thought it was all relative: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.”
Ben Franklin claimed that “in this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” For me, and I suppose it’s implicit in the former, what seems certain, inexorable, and unavoidable, is the passage of time. This pandemic has thrown into sharp focus how that feels.
Certain events, both external and internal, make us acutely aware of its procession. Children grow, presidents come and go, and styles shift. The tides rise and fall, the sun (as Tevye noted) rises and sets, the seasons change. Hair greys, skin sags, and belly fat becomes preternaturally stubborn. Time can alter our beliefs and perspectives. Reading King Lear as a young, childless student felt very different to reading it as a midlife empty nester.
But this pandemic has, for me, at least, heightened and focused my perception of time in some acute ways. Just recently we celebrated both of my sons’ second birthdays in captivity (I did manage, unintentionally, to have them four days apart two years apart. Their birthday celebrations over the years have been our own personal March Madness). Similarly, we sat for our second Seder in the time of Covid-19.
Last year, as so many, I could not participate in Seders with my sister or her friends who often host us. Fortunately, my blended family (my ex-husband, an amorphous Christian, his wife, a Muslim/Hindu, their son, and my two boys) stepped up and we sat down together to observe the ritual.
I felt deeply grateful that they offered to host this meal that means so much to me, more for cultural and ancestral reasons than religious ones. Both sets of grandparents were Orthodox, and we observed this solemn rite with them annually. My mother’s father was the most devout of all, and Seders lasted what seemed like an eternity to a fidgety, hungry child. They lived in a dark railroad flat across from a bus depot in Union City, NJ. Chickens squawked in the minuscule, fenced-in backyard, and my grandmother’s sewing machine often hummed inside. The kitchen, which, in my mind, resembled the one in which Nicholas Cage claimed his love for Cher in Moonstruck, smelled of kreplach and brisket. We sat crammed for the Seder at a dining room table made longer by leaves and card tables, jammed in an alcove whose only window faced a sooty, bricked air shaft. My grandfather insisted upon completing the entire service (we now skip pages like happy children skip rope), much of it in Hebrew. He was a stern man who did not suffer wiggling and squirming, and so tensions rose as our blood sugars plummeted.
As the oldest grandchild, he assigned me the task of letting the ghost of the prophet Elijah in at the end of the meal to partake of the wine set out in the middle of the table. I felt a mix of honor and horror at this responsibility. It meant I had some stature in this situation – something which women in Orthodox Jewish homes do not garner. But it also meant that I had to walk alone down a very long, very dark corridor that ran through the apartment to open the door that led to a very long, very dark staircase. To let a ghost in. My hand trembled as it turned the crystal doorknob, and I steeled myself while I held the door open for what seemed like a long enough time for a ghost to enter. I then turned, and walked casually back, even though I wanted to bolt for the safety of the dimly lit dinning area.
Once seated, my grandfather would read the passage about that jet-setter Elijah, who managed to make it to every home celebrating a Seder all across the globe in one night (he and Santa must compare notes and tips), and then, unbeknownst to us until we were allowed to drink the stuff ourselves in our tweens, he would gently shake the table from underneath, so it looked like Elijah was sipping the thick, sweet, red Manischewitz wine (let’s not even talk about drunk flying. Santa drinks milk). He never asked me to let Elijah out; this remains a problematic part of the evening. And then, finally, we searched for the Afikomen, for which he rewarded us with either a silver dollar or a fifty-cent piece. My mother collected and kept them for us in a miniature blue and white striped replica bowling bag in the freezer, lest a burglar try to find them during a break in.
All my grandparents are long gone, and my parents, too. So I am that generation now – the one charged with passing along traditions. This year, though, I lacked the energy. As the time for the second Seder in bondage stealthily approached, the enormity of the pandemic hit me hard. I could hardly believe that we had circled the sun again during this, the advent of Spring, and still stayed mostly inside. I thought of what we have lost. The school years, the jobs, the rites of passage. The lives. I just felt deflated and disinclined to recline and eat unleavened bread.
The passage of time in this moment weighed heavily and weighed me down. “But you have to,” said my ex’s wife. “It’s important to you.” And therein lies one of the silver lining of the time-warping, time-sucking eddy in which we’ve swirled for the last year plus. The kindness of strangers and friends. This woman, who married my ex-husband, who started as a stranger to me, has become, over time, a friend. She had my back just as my family did as I walked down that scary hallway in Union City. This year, not only did we, in our wonderfully dysfunctional blended family, celebrate the liberation of the Jews from Pharaoh’s tyranny, but we celebrated the hope for liberation from the tyranny of this tiny, vicious virus. We FaceTimed with my sister so the assembled children could ask the Four Questions. After the meal, my boys’ eleven-year-old brother (my “bonus son”) and I went to the bright foyer to open the door for Elijah’s spirit, whereupon a multi-layered pink sky bathed the space and swaddled us with warm light.
At the end of each Seder, the celebrants chant “next year in Jerusalem” in unison. Perhaps some hope for that literally, but for most it’s a figurative wish that when the earth travels around the sun once more we will all find ourselves free of any tyranny that hampers us. The passage of a full year filled with so much negativity felt oppressive, indeed, but subtle rays of hope made me feel that we were, indeed, actually already in Jerusalem in our own “green and pleasant land.”
I love the description of your family Seders celebration traditions and your grandparents! It must have been a very special time for you every year. <3