Public Thoughts To Be Read At The Passover Table

By Talia Carner

This Passover, as we celebrate our ancestors’ freedom from slavery, we reconnect through our most important holiday with our centuries-long traditions. It is incumbent upon us to contemplate the broader concept of freedom and what it means to us as individuals, as members of our immediate communities, and as members of the community of Jews across the globe.

Throughout history, Passover has also been a time of increased blood libels and pogroms against Jews. While Jews celebrated freedom and showed benevolence toward fellow humans, they were reminded how hated they were—hatred so strong that it “justified” killing them by the dozens, thousands, and millions. In these days, as a new wave of anti-Semitism is sweeping over the globe, gathering tsunami-like power, it lands right in Manhattan's UN building. The global Jew-hate fest from Venezuela to Spain—and renewed in Poland—has  metastasized into leading universities, mainstream media, civic organizations, and even Western governments. The tale of the Haggadah we read at the Seder stands to remind us that hate comes knocking on our door first with words, then with economic and academic boycotts, then with biased UN resolutions, and, as in the past, it may end with guns, bombs and incinerators.

Passover also marks spring in our ancient agrarian society, a beginning of a cycle of life, with the blooming of trees and the planting of vegetables and flowers. Spring’s fresh start and the tradition of inviting others to share our bounty at the Passover table reminds us of Israel’s extraordinary achievements in agriculture and science—efficiencies, discoveries and inventions she has shared for decades with over 120 countries to help nourish children, improve global food production, and wipe out starvation.

While these past seventy years Israelis—both civilians and soldiers—have given each Jew everywhere reasons to walk tall and proud, their existential threat from Iran is real.

“Every Jew should consider himself as if he was freed from slavery,” says the Haggadah we read tonight. In today’s climate we should add that “Every Jew should consider himself as if he’s just escaped a terrorist bomb.” There but for the grace of God and twist of history, we would not have been spared the wrath and bombs of Palestinians or extreme Muslim murderers taking shelter in our sacred freedom. Let’s give our prayers and charity to the families who have suffered unimaginable, senseless losses. And as we do, let us search within ourselves whether we have done all we could for them and for the Israeli soldiers who take the first bullet for us.

And while we’re at it, let’s remember our American soldiers on the forefront in the desserts of Iraq and Afghanistan—and the thousands of families who would never get to put their arms around them upon their return.

The tradition of Passover also calls us to invite to the Seder table any Jew who does not have one. Let’s invite—at least in our thoughts—all our Jewish brethren in countries that do not offer the freedom and protection that the USA guarantees us. For them, we can raise our collective voice with indignation and outrage and use our collective power to fight tyranny and fanaticism that calls for our—and their—demise.

Israel’s president Shimon Peres once said that even Ben-Gurion had not dreamed big enough. Let us dream big tonight—stretch our dream to encompass all the vast possibilities, and let us dream tonight of a world of peace.

Let us bless all the good things God has given us so far, and celebrate our resilience and our heritage of strong Jewish values that we have shared with the world over for centuries. And let's allow that dream bring joy to our hearts and to our Passover table.

Amen.

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Author Talia Carner's novels are heart-wrenching suspense dealing with social issues. Please read the first chapter of each on her website at www.TaliaCarner.com .

One People--Passover Surprise Guests

  

            It’s breakfast at Club Med in Mexico. I select a white-chocolate bread, a croissant, and a slice of banana cake for the last time; as of tomorrow, my family and I must stretch my box of matzos for the remaining four days of our stay. Surrounded by a merry crowd in bathing suits and scant coverings—standard daytime apparel here—my heart is heavy. This evening, instead of a Passover Seder at a table laden with fine china, polished silver, and sparkling crystal, I must improvise a Seder on the beach. What kind of message am I giving my children when opting to trump our most important holiday by a resort vacation?

            I approach the Chef-de-Village and ask for a secluded spot where my family and another Jewish couple we’ve met here could conduct a pre-sunset ceremony. He points to a beautiful thatched-roof area over a dance floor, facing the sea. “Anything else I can do?” he asks.

            “A bottle of sweet red wine, please?” Besides the box of matzos and a silver kiddush cup, I packed a dozen Hagadahs and baby-blue yarmulkes stamped with the date of our youngest daughter’s bat-mitzvah. I write down my recipe for charoset, a chopped mix of peeled apples, walnuts, pecans and dates, all flavored with cinnamon, honey and red wine.

            Moments later, I am surprised to hear him over the PA announcing that all who wish to participate in a Seder, should meet at five o’clock at the designated area.

            I cringe and glance around at the crowd, busy picking from mounds of fried bacon and pork sausages. Is someone cracking a comment about the invasion of the Hebs? No one seems to pay attention, and I decide that throughout history, Jews in far more dire conditions managed to celebrate Passover. So will my family, down to the lengthy reading of the Hagadah, the yearly retelling of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt.

            At lunch, a sous-chef presents me with an industrial-size baking tray filled with charoset. Imagining that most of this huge quantity will be baked in tomorrow’s pies, I dip a spoon into the mix. The familiar taste of Passover festivity is already inside me. “May I also have a plate with a hard-boiled egg, a lamb bone, horseradish, and sprigs of parsley?” I ask. “And a cup of salt water?”

            The sun is still high when I drag my family off the beach to shower and dress in what passes in Club Med for evening attire—shorts and Polo shirts for men; white slacks or gauzy dresses for women.

            At five o’clock we arrive at the dance platform, carrying my Passover paraphernalia. To my annoyance someone must have double-booked the place, as dozens of his guests, dressed for a pre-dinner party are hanging about. “Now we must go look for another quiet spot,” I mutter, and go search for the sous-chef to locate my tray of charoset and Passover plate.

            In a cluster of people, I spot the couple we have invited and wave.

            As they wave back, some guests turn toward me, smiling. Only then it hits me: All these people are here for my little Seder!

            As my husband counts them—a hundred and forty—more bottles of wine and crates of glassware are brought from the kitchen. We place the Seder plate in the center of a table covered with a white tablecloth and dedicate my kiddush cup for Elijah. We break my matzos into the smallest pieces, and ladle charoset onto serving plates.

            Then we distribute the twelve Hagadahs—the story of Passover told in biblical Hebrew. I watch as Jews from South American countries speaking Spanish and Portuguese, Jews from France and Austria and Israel, speaking French, German and Hebrew, and Jews from North America, Australia and Great Britain speaking English, all squeeze close around their respective single Hagadah. A man from Venezuela assumes the role of the Seder leader—luckily his pronunciation is the Sephardi version, that of spoken Hebrew, not the archaic Ashkenazi version of most USA synagogues—and we begin taking turns reading aloud, with the congregants responding when called to do so. The Sepharadis chant their melodious renditions of some of the hymns, and the Ashkenazis respond with their musical versions. Regardless of our home language, we all utter the same ancient Hebrew words, recite the same sages’ arguments, and sing the same prayers. Together, we retell the narrative of liberation from slavery and urge our children to pass it on to theirs, so they, too, will forever appreciate freedom.

            I examine the men’s heads covered with baseball caps, dinner napkins, and my dozen yarmulkes in baby-blue like the undulating sea beyond. For one hour, strangers to one another, we are connected by one culture and unite through the ancient language of our ancestors in a tradition that transcends all geo-political barriers, that has stood up to centuries of persecutions, pogroms, and repeated attempts at our annihilation. “Next year in Jerusalem,” we chant together, expressing our shared vision of the place that for two-thousand years has anchored Jewish faith. For one hour we reassert to ourselves that we are one people. My people.

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Author Talia Carner’s most recent novel, HOTEL MOSCOW, (HarperCollins 2015,) tells the story of an American daughter of Holocaust survivors who travels to Russia shortly after the fall of communism, encounters anti-Semitism, and must come to terms with her parents’ legacy.

Crossing The Street

There were several influences and inspiration to my writing the novel Jerusalem Maiden. Here I recount odd friendships that have haunted me over the years and which opened a window into the world of religious girls’ and their limited choices.
This story appeared in the eZine 614 (May 2011).

 

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            I had been playing hop-scotch for an hour with Deena, a sixteen-year-old Orthodox girl who lived across the street from my grandmother in central Tel-Aviv. The summer heat scorched the sidewalk and baked the asphalt in the street. Deena shook her calf-length skirt to cool her stockinged legs and tried in vain to blow into the top of her neck-to-wrist blouse. A year younger than she, I drank water from the faucet in the yard and splashed water on my prepubescent exposed midriff above my short shorts.
            My friend cupped water near her mouth, and asked, “Will you come to my wedding?”
            Even though I assumed she meant light years away, the notion of marriage had never crossed my mind. “You’re getting married? Seriously?”
            She shrugged, her eyes downcast. “Tuesday.”
           
            From the entrance to the wedding hall, I could see hundreds of bearded men in the Hassidi garb of black hats and long, belted coats. An usher blocked my way and directed me to the women’s hall, where the ceiling was lower and the harsh fluorescent lights made the panels on the wall look like Formica. Holding glasses of orange and grape juice, women in long modest dresses and head covers eyed my white-and-red mini suit with disapproval. I pushed my way through a cloud of fruity and sour smells and hordes of children running about until I reached a throne chair.
            There was Deena, crying.
            She didn’t just weep. She wailed aloud, her words garbled by the cotton handkerchiefs with which her mother and another woman dabbed her face. “Shhhhhh, Shhhhhh,” they repeated, but their tones suggested they were ready stuff a handkerchief into her mouth.
            I was about to approach her, when a woman yanked my arm. “Where do you think you’re going?” She tossed a glance at my exposed legs. “Don’t contaminate the bride.”
            I gulped and took a step back. There was something else strange about Deena I couldn’t pinpoint from under the veil pulled back over her head, until it dawned on me: She was wearing a wig. Her a thick black braid had been cut, never again to present a temptation to men.
            I watched with horror as more women surrounded Deena, speaking to her in Yiddish, their tones ranging from comfort to indignation. Her hysterical crying continued unabated. Finally, they pulled her to her feet. From the main hall, the men’s singing crescendoed as if preparing for the messiah’s arrival. I could just decipher the line calling for the bride and the groom. “Yavo’u ha’chatan ve ha’kala.”
            Carried by the wave of women, I was herded through a narrow passage into the back of the main hall. Moments later, squeezed against a wall, I managed to climb a chair.
            The field of chanting and dancing black hats parted like the Red Sea.
            There walked a gangly, tall teenage boy, led by two men, all three dressed in satin black coats and hard-rimmed black hats. Unlike the men’s chest-length, untrimmed beards, the boy’s meager, curly facial hair had barely begun to sprout. His Adam’s apple bobbed behind a sheet of skin in his long neck, and his eyes were wide with fear.
            The men’s chanting was suddenly disrupted by Deena’s screams. “No! No! No! I don’t want to!”
            I turned to see her mother and another ample-bosomed woman, each twice Deena’s size, propping the veiled bride on both sides like bookends, forcing her down the aisle.
            Her crying continued throughout the ceremony. The rabbi stopped twice and ordered someone to give the bride red wine to calm her nerves.
            Horrified, I ran to the bathroom and threw up.
           
            A year before, when I had entered high school, I chose to commute to a French school instead of walking two blocks to the local high school.
            On the first day, I was surprised to see Leah at the bus stop. Tall, blue-eyed, with pretty strawberry-blonde hair, Leah was the daughter of a wealthy family that owned Israel’s largest sweets-and-chocolate company. They were modern Orthodox; Leah’s father and younger brother dressed in European clothes and only wore skullcaps. Although she lived just a block away from me, on the same double tree-lined boulevard, we had never talked. Leah attended an all-girls religious school and never mixed with our neighborhood youth. Whenever she left the house, her mother watched her from their second-floor balcony. Leah seemed to be surrounded as much by her religious upbringing as by her family’s money.
            Now, hidden from her mother’s view by the trees, Leah gushed as if she’d known me for years. “Are you too going to Alliance Française? I’m so happy! It will be wonderful to have a friend so close!”
            She did not stop chattering throughout the forty-five minute ride, during recess, and on the drive back. She was giddy with excitement at having convinced her parents to let her attend a secular school and anxious to befriend my secular girlfriends. Could I invite them over as soon as we returned from school this afternoon? Hanging out in my room, she asked me to teach her how to tease her hair and listened ceaselessly to “forbidden music”—the Top Ten recorded on my suitcase-size Grundig reel-to-reel player.
            On our fourth day of school, when I came by her house in the morning, her mother stood on the balcony. “Leah will be transferred back to her school,” she announced.
            Leah stood behind her, silent, her eyes swollen and her nose red.
            The following Saturday morning, I saw her in the boulevard with a group of religious girls after synagogue services. Dressed in their Shabbat best, they sat on a bench and kissed their prayer books. Leah did not return my wave.
            She rarely acknowledged me in the ensuing years, even as I traded my Alliance Française uniform for a military uniform. On Friday nights, when I teetered on high heels in a pencil dress next to my boyfriend on our way to a party, I sometimes caught a glimpse of her watching me from the lonely darkness of her balcony, unlit throughout the Shabbat. Her longing to join me was palpable through the less than thirty feet separating us.
            However, eventually she must have won another battle with her parents: a religious girl who was not obligated to serve in the army, at age eighteen she left for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to live away from home.
            The reason for their capitulation became apparent when I arrived at the university after serving two-year in Israel Defense Force. Beautiful Leah was beginning her third year. She had already dated the heir to the country’s largest hotel chain. When he broke the relationship, she dated another heir.
            Alas, by the end of her final year, she was not engaged to an heir. Then, within days of graduation, she married a particularly swarthy and hairy young man from a wealthy Jerusalemite Sepharadi family, a match I guessed her Ashkenazi family viewed as a compromise on the grandest scale. Still a student, I was dating a close friend of that Sepharadi family and attended a couple of their china-and-gold laden Shabbat dinners. Polite and demure, Leah never acknowledged our acquaintance. And when someone at the table made the connection, asking about our growing up on the same boulevard where both our parents still lived, she brushed it off. 
            Watching her, I recalled Deena at her wedding and wondered about the painful struggles Leah was covering behind her patrician demeanor. There was no sign of the animated girl who chattered on the bus to school, buoyant by the prospects of starting a new life. Her desire to break away from her parents’ control merely eight years before was still vivid in my mind, and I ached at the realization of how little freedom she had gained in the intervening years.
            Several years later, a mother of two boys, Leah walked into a hotel owned by her former boyfriend’s family. She paid for a room and locked the door.
            Her body was found the following day by the cleaning crew.

            These two friendships with religious girls pressed into a life with few choices framed my perception of my grandmother’s life ninety years ago. In her youth, the absence of electricity under the backward Ottoman rule meant that no news or outside influences reached the insular Jewish community, helping it to further isolate its girls. An elite society of scholars, the ultra-Orthodox community viewed the dancing and singing simpleton Hassids with derision. Instead, they prepared themselves for the messiah’s arrival through austerity, suffering and diligent studying, while assigning twelve- to fourteen-year-old girls the responsibility of supporting the Talmudic and biblical scholars through marriage. Teenage girls were thus burdened with the daunting task of saving the world’s Jewry.
            What if my feisty and artistically talented grandmother had bolted to follow her heart instead? What if Deena had run away, or Leah taken more time to find her way? While writing my grandmother’s fictional alternate life as a Jerusalem Maiden, I also commemorated later-day Deena and Leah who couldn’t or wouldn’t break away.            
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Author Talia Carner lives in New York. Her novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN, about a young woman's struggle between her passion and faith, was published in June 2011 by HarperCollins. www.TaliaCarner.com