(FNI*) “Not feeling up to par” (C,S,N&Y), this year, the Paschal Yam collapsed on the way to the K’arrah, the Seder Plate, just before arriving, as the picture shows, at the Chayim Berlin Yeshivah. It is not known what happened to him … COVID or excess Kavod. It was rumored that “he looked into his mirror and saw a poh-lice car” or maybe it was an ICE-Cruiser. While the Rabbinate hadn’t mentioned Kavod (excess egotism) as a suspected catalyst for Paschal Yam’s fall, the KKK was a subject of interest. Ka’as/כעס/”rage,” Kavod/כבוד/”egotism,” and Kin’ah/קנאה/”malignant envy” purportedly bring a Jew to the Gates of Sin and Ole Paschal Yam was as Jewish as they come.
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Feels like a Pesach different from all others. I suppose I’m feeling sad for all the differences that COVID-19 has brought our way. I’m usually not angry at Pesach time. Since the early 1960’s, Pesach has taken on an increasingly important role in the Jewish Community … maybe the central one … in the Jewish calendar. I’ve long thought that Eichmann had done a great service to my Judaism … his trial being a dividing line between the Before (the Pogroms to all the way thru the Holocaust and the Rosenberg Trial) and the After (Shlomo Carlebach taking Elvis a step further, new liturgical musics and glorious Seders). Truth be told, I still have a bit of embarrassment when we read שפך חמתך על הגוים אשר לא לא ידעו שמיך … “Pour out thine rage on the nations who don’t know you, God!” How can I welcome Eliyahu into my home with those words on my tongue? The same Eliyahu whose task finished the Prophetic Reading on the Great Shabbos … Shabbos h’Gadol … that just precedes Pesach. That Eliyahu has but one job, according to Malachi, and that is to return the hearts of parents to children and the hearts of children to parents. How can that great day that Malachi mentions occur when the World and I are so full of anger and hatred? It was just on this past Shabbos ha’Gadol (6 days ago) that I wrote a Naming (also, a new celebration among the Jews … a Naming) and an homage to our President:
The Butcher of Queens
(hhc/3 weeks into Git-on with Armageddonald)
We're on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
Driving at a petty good clip.
The Driver knows the destination
He's told us where he was going all along.
We keep not listening well-enough
And we keep forgetting.
We're driving on the BQE
While people are dying in droves at St. Elizabeth's.
The Driver told us all along.
From the beginning.
He told us where he was headed.
Hearing Aids aren't covered by Medicare.
The Driver told us
That giving people jobs
Was a sacrifice.
He told us, too, that
"Soldiers who get captured?
They're fools.
I am America.
America is First."
We're driving on the BQ Expressway.
The Blaupunkt brings us Jared's voice.
"Nothing is yours anymore.
Nothing is the People's
Not Of. Not by. Not for.
Get your own ventilator!
These are ours, not yours anymore."
We're on the BQE and
We pretend to be surprised.
When the Butcher of Queens is driving
When Aunt Sadie is dying alone
When we're being driven on his BQ Expressway
And we're sitting in the back seat
Together but all alone …
When Jared is singing on the radio
And the Bible thumpers are calling him God.
Hey!
Now is a particularly inopportune time
To begin reflecting or imagining
A Respirator
That's still in China
marked:
Gefahr! Achtung!
PROPERTY OF THE BUTCHER OF QUEENS
Et FILS!
I arrived at the Seders, this year, with seething anger in my heart. Marsha and I have been hunkered down with the dog for 4 weeks and anticipate months more. My life? I have little to realistically kvetch about. The End of Shabbos prayer, גאט פון אברהם/God of Abraham includes wishes for the next week … צו מזל צו ברכה צו געזונט צו פרנסה … Good Fortune and Blessing, Health and a Sufficiency of Sustenance … I had them all when I wrote (above) about the Little Rich Boy who Would Be Emperor, the man about whom all the different words for the male Member with all those words different connotative meanings apply. What was I complaining about?
I was sad, I suppose, that I couldn’t spend the time with our 54 year old son on this day that 54 years ago … on Pesach … the Cosmos decided it couldn’t go on without our little Ari … our יצחק אריאל. We were mere children when he came to make us a family. Ari wasn’t social-distancing in a way any of us thought made sense for communing about the Seder table. He didn’t want to endanger his parents of his three immuno-compromised nieces. And his little brother Akiba (not yet 53) couldn’t be there, either. But we had our youngest and her husband and their three girls … one is home from College and the other two are computer-based in high school and all 5 social distancing, just as we were. So, it was a nice table! My WW2 Soldier Boy Tata would’ve asked, were he still alive: “What-TF are you complaining about? Look at what you have?” And he would’ve been right.
And when Marsha and I married in 1965, Marsha had become my parents’ favourite child and learned so much of the cooking that was my Hungarian Mother … נחמה/Nechama/The Comforter. So, I could feel quite at home with our cooking … hers and mine … more hers, this year, than mine. Indeed, at the end of each of our Seders, I channeled my Mother in her Shattu, (Zabaglione) her foamed wine sauce which added to the Four Cups of Wine sufficiently to have Marsha suggestively pull the wine bottle away from her husband who might end up not so unlike the Paschal Yam and one who might say just about anything is sufficient shikkur/snockered. She told the 16 year old identical twins about Pesach ‘69 when the Emergency folk, the EMT’s were called for my Grandfather who was having chest pains after eating a wad of Marror the size of half an Ostrich Egg. His tradition was that Marror had to be consumed in that quantity … half of some-kinda-bird’s egg and Grandpa didn’t wanna come up short on his dose of Marror. Any case, Marsha explained how the EMT’s came and tried to carry ME off as I was collapsed on a nearby couch— likely drunk — when they came in. Worry not! I was still well enough to do the cleaning on both nights. I have many faults but being like Abraham is not one of them … when he entertained by having his wife and son prepare food while he schmoozed the Three Wise Guys who came to tell him that he was gonna knock up Sarah, Good and Kashered.
You know the Old Jewish Joke about Food, Family and Filosophy? Maybe I’ll tell it another time. But that’s the Seder. Food, Family and always some new ideas. I suppose it’s already traditional at our Seder for me to emphasize that each stanza of Dayenu ends with a question mark. Quotidian for me to emphasize that the road from Slavery to Liberation REQUIRES each of many steps. Common, too, is my pressing my next generations about each mention of words that reflect on Jewish Exceptionalism, each having to be contextually understood and not taken as a given, no more than should American exceptionalism or Deutchlande uber alles … that was clearly not a חידוש/Chiddush/New Understanding but Old Hat made new and relevant, I suppose, by the Butcher of Queens’ daily rants and escapades.
Maybe, though, it was the Four Questions that were new. So often, the kids look at them as questions about symbolism. What does the Matzah? the Marror? the odd Dipping? and the Comfortable seating have to do with the Exodus from Egypt? And they all know the answers as much as formally they know the answers to אחד מי יודע/Who Knows 1, 2, …,13? But this year conversation went off the symbolic into non-rhetorical queries. Questions like:
Why do we do this Pesach/Matzah/Marror Shtick? Why do we carry on our rituals. Many of my born-Jewish patients have asked me over the years why I would be so self-destructive as to continue to be openly identifiable as a member of a hated minority? Yes. I have other Jewish patients who do it for the Brisket … I never knew about how important Brisket was to the Seder, beginning my life in Brooklyn’s frum/religious community upstairs from Rebbe/Grandpa. Neither the Brisket nor the Silver that Grandma didn’t have played any part in our Seders. And, anyway, Roasted Meats were not permitted so as not to confuse “THe Brisket” with the real thing, the Paschal Offering.
But, still, the question lingered in my head. Why do I/we do it? Why the struggles to make the Seder? Why do I bristle inside when it’s not taken seriously … Why can’t I just do it with joy as the Torah says about holidays (והיית אך שמח … and on these pilgrimages, you should specialize in only JOY). Why so serious, Howard? One year in the late ‘80’s, one of my sibs was making fun of it and I took a pinch of Charoses and flung it at them … reaching its mark on a much irritated sibling’s forehead … ) … My Mosaic rage, alas, pretty much ended that Seder and my sib and their family’s visit to our home, too, and has been written about, as it is written, in “the Chronicles of the Family Covitz, to this day.”
Why is it important for me to be a Jew? Why is it important for me to keep the rituals? Why do I pay $24/pound for Schmurah Matzah, price-gouged by the Chareidim or people in Ukraine (our Schmurah, this year, came from the Land that Puty wants next) pretending to be Chareidi’s? I know Tevya’s answer: “I dunno! It’s tradition!” That answer doesn’t do it for me.
I can’t say that I consider it an epiphany but during these past 3 years I had something of a Eureka moment. It goes like this:
I don’t have to consider myself as if I was saved from Egypt and Phar’oh’s autocracy because even in a representative democracy, when I leave the voting booth each November, I am putting my future life in the hands of a process that in the United States has most often resulted in the appointment of folk who have, at least, some sense of noblesse oblige, some idea that their good fortune to have a great deal of their own should move them to care about others and to give gifts they have themselves received … to pay it forward, as others have said. But not this time. Einstein famously said that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. But there’s another kind of insanity that has to do with doing the same thing and expecting the same result, even though contexts may have changed. These years I’ve/We’ve lived through the exceptions to that hope for good leaders. Indeed, it can be said that I owe to this Phar’oh my “new learning” … that freedom gets fought for each election, each year and, under the Butcher of Queens, each and every day. The Butcher has in fact taught me far better than Civics Class in a Frum Yeshivah how fragile democracy and freedom are. Ah! The sense of entitlement I felt before I realized how easily Democracy can be sullied! … My Father! I have sinned!
The G’morrah says twice (in Tr. Sanhedrin and Avodah Zarah) that the appointment of an unfit leader is the equivalent to faithless idolatry right next to the Altar of God … כל המעמיד דין שאינו הגון כאילו נטע אשירה אצל מזבח ה׳. What’s there left to say?
The delicacy of our freedoms is memorialized in each attempt we make to butter schmurah matzah … it appears in each crack of the Matzah that as Rabbi Leonard Cohen of Montreal held: “lets the light get through.”
Gutte Yom Tov …
* Fake News International
