Passover

“Ritual is metaphor enacted.” (GB)

As a child, Passover was a great occasion.  On the seder nights relatives gathered under my grandparents’ roof.  My cousins and I would play, the men would chat, while the women would set the table and prepare the great feast. My grandmother, a wonderful cook, commanded the kitchen. 

My grandfather was the unquestioned family patriarch.  He sat at the head of the table while the rest of us sat along that great long table, each according to age.  Every year the same blessings were recited, the same stories were told, and the same songs were sung.  We ate great quantities of the same great and familiar foods.  Every year, on cue, the same adults told the same corny jokes. 

I understand now, what I could not understand at the time, how much that annual celebration mattered.  It offered to me, as a child, a sense of continuity and reassurance.  No matter what had happened during the prior year, there was a time and a place in which to return, where life was rooted in the sameness of the ritual and the cycle of the year. 

With nostalgia, I think back to my grandparents and those Passovers.  They are no longer.  My children and grandchildren will not have sat at that table and tasted that wonderful food.  They will not have known my parents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, my sister and me, as we once were when we were all young. 

Inevitably, almost imperceptibly at first, Passovers changed.  It started when some of the older cousins moved away or married and had families of their own. The change became more noticeable as my grandfather’s health began to fail.  The gatherings no longer had the comforting sameness.  Instead, we observed my grandfather’s decline from the year before.  He died when I was 16.  Though at the time I was too adolescent to notice the void, there was a void.  For the next several years my family tried to recreate the Passover ritual, but it was never the same.  Cousins continued to move on and out.  My aunt and uncle divorced.  The family composition changed.  Then I too grew up, moved away and eventually had a new family of my own.

Married, and with children, a new tradition began.  For 32 years now, Sue and I have made Passover our great annual occasion, gathering family and friends at our table.  We have written and rewritten a family Haggadah that has evolved as our children have grown and changed, and it continues to evolve with the addition of grandchildren.  For now, my wife and I sit at the head of the table, the makers and keepers of our family tradition, knowing that sometime, in the not-too-distant future, there will be inevitable changes and it will become our children's task to create their version of the Passover tradition.

Time has two shapes, a circle and an arrow.  My thoughts about Passover have two shapes.  Each year Passover is celebrated with family traditions, familiar food, and the retelling of a timeless story, from Passover to Passover we come full-circle.  Each year, Sue and I look at the faces of children and grandchildren sitting at the table, noticing how they have grown and changed, reminding us that the arrow of time moves forward.