Bequeathed To Us

Rabbi's Notes - March 2001

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

Tu B'shevat was amazing, if I do say so myself... And so was the planning that led up to it. Our little group met every week in Luna's apartment, each week with a breakfast feast set out by our gracious host. And the ideas, the dreams for this year's festivity, just kept bursting forth, braiding together, intensifying. By the time the Shevat moon was waxing towards its climax, which would be the night of our seder, I could hardly sleep I was just so excited. A couple of days before Tu B'shevat we all started gathering greens, candles, cloths, fruit, fruit, fruit, knives, cutting boards, trays, bowls, plates, glasses, and schlepping them to the shul. A tree was dug up, the dirt shaken off its roots, and it was hung upside down from the height of the ceiling. Luna stayed up late into several nights constructing a truly amazing "pictographic haggadah," a collaged illustration of the four mystical worlds with trees bursting upward and downward. Sherry Glaser was home writing spells in poetry to call forth the four worlds. All year, maybe even for longer than that, Sandy Berrigan has been collecting wine glasses at garage sales and such, so that we will have a full set for Tu B'shevat. We found them (!), washed them, set them out, rented some extras, picked them up. The afternoon of the seder, Roberta Belson's gold harp arrived in a station wagon full of Benna Kolinsky's drums and shakers. The Bahkti Tribe rolled in with didgeridoos in their hands and more drums... While we were furiously cutting up mountains of every possible kind of fruit, the biggest, fullest full moon in history rose out of a cloud bank over east Caspar. We turned off the lights, lit ten tall tapers, and the merriment began...

Some of you know my Grandma Sylvia, who lives and thrives outside Chicago and is about to turn 94 years old. Grandma Sylvia came as a young teenager from a shtetl in the Carpathian mountains in what is now the Ukraine. She and her mother and sister left, as did almost all of the Jewish immigrants of that time, under dreadful circumstances, and arrived in a New World that offered them more poverty, more hard work -- and, thank heavens, a chance to raise children and grow old in relative safety and well-being. This past spring I visited Verece, my grandmother's hometown, with Mickey and my parents. Even now, eighty years later, we crossed the border from Hungary into the Ukraine and the road turned from a modern, paved highway into a rutted, almost impassible dirt track in just a few feet. Crops growing on the sides of the road were suddenly half as high as they had been over the border. On the Hungarian side we saw tractors and farm equipment -- on the Ukraine side we saw people standing in their fields with sticks, occasionally an emaciated horse. Verece itself was as poor and simple as a town can be -- charming to me as an affluent tourist in search of my roots, but still dirt roads, rough houses, chickens underfoot, little plumbing. A couple of years ago I actually got it together to ask my grandmother some questions about her childhood and to tape the conversation. By her account, her family in Verece was one of the poorer ones in even this poor shtetl. They had little in the way of material comforts. But, she says:

"There was something about the holidays, Margaret. Because we had so little in our life, the holidays were very joyous, and when it came time for a holiday that called for decorating, like Sukkos, there was so much joy in decorating, and everybody was involved, and everyone had a sukkah of their own... it was build out of corn stalks, a lot of corn stalks... [And we would decorate it with] flowers. Fresh flowers. We couldn't afford to hang the fruit up there... If we had small -- what do you call them? -- pumpkins, then after Sukkos we took them down and cooked them. We couldn't afford to throw them away... And the High Holidays were observed like they haven't ben observed here, except among the ultra-ultra-orthodox. And we stayed in our homes... and we went to shul. Everybody belonged to the shul."

I've never been to a place like Bali where, I hear, visitors commonly see native Balinese celebrating festivals with huge parades of fruits and flowers. I once wandered into the street festival of San Gennaro (I think it was...) in Little Italy in New York, and of course I've read plenty of National Geographics and seen images of these exotic customs, so quaint, so lovely. I remember once seeing a photo book of religious festivities of the world's peoples. There were the Balinese parades, Hindu holy places, all red and pink and gold, Buddhist temples with great gold Buddhas surrounded with oranges and flags, Eastern Orthodox cathedrals with their gorgeous gold icons and blue tiles and candle chandeliers -- and a very familiar-looking image of a shul on what was evidently a weekday morning, a couple of men in black and white tallitot with tefillin on their arms and heads, gathered around a bimah. All black and white and grey. I moped when I looked at that book -- Judaism seemed so plain, so colorless, so cerebral next to these sensual images of other traditions.

How could I have thought such a thing! Obviously that was before I had ever made a sukkah of my own in my yard in LA -- decorated in my case with colored lights, streamers, paper chains, photos from calendars, gourds, ears of corn, bright cloths, tables full of candles. Clearly that was before I went to Shira Milgrom's seder in a striped tent erected in her Bronx living room, which drove me wild for years until I bought a parachute so I could have a "tent seder" of my own. Certainly that was before I ever celebrated havdalah with huge armsful of herbs from Deena's and Harriet's gardens (or, for that matter, with a fragrant little box of marijuana from the garden of _____)

Most definitely that was before the first year Ella and I and my folks baked our matzah outdoors in the Crouching Beaver adobe oven in Elk. It has to have been before I even saw a photo of the roomsized menorah sculpted by Arella Bar-lev out of pampas grass and purple thistle flowers, and well before I listened to Arella's heavenly singing voice floating above Mike Shapiro's Viking-sized fire on the first night of Sukkot, right next to their two-roomed sukkah festooned with clusters of dates -- a full moon hovering at eye-level because we were up on top of such a high hill in the Anderson Valley that we could watch the moon rise below us in the valley. And it must have been before that four AM visitation on Shavuot, when we were studying mystical texts all night, and Anne and Mike (according to the holy practice of Israeli youth as reported in Hadassah magazine...) broke out the squirtguns for a middle-of-the-night water fight, Torah being, duh, like water.

Mickey and I have made a tent in our house for our seder for a couple of years in a row now, and I'm already starting to mull over whether it's worth doing yet again, or if we should move on to some other kind of seder treats this time 'round. But each year, when my Mom and I have been climbing around pinning the tent up, hanging the colored lights, arranging our motley rugs to look sort of Bedouin-like, I've always had a little twinge of embarrassment. After all, Mickey's kids are all grown-up. Most of our guests don't have young kids either, and some years our seder table (or seder floor, I should say) is just about all adults. So why, then, am I so childishly excited about my farout tent? If it's just adults, shouldn't we just read the haggadah and talk about it, tell the story, do the mitzvah? Why the fuss?

The reason I used to think that Judaism was colorless was not because of anything Jewish. After all, our tradition is every bit as earth-based, as sensual and festive as anything in Bali or Tibet. My misconception was because of assimilationism, which a generation or two of American immigrants and children of immigrants (Jewish and every other ethnicity too) bought into in order to survive in this new "melting pot." My childhood synagogue was boring and colorless -- but so, too, I'm sure, was the church down the street.

Still I've felt a residual sheepishness about "high production" holidays, at home or in the shul. No more! Holidays -- holy days -- aren't supposed to be modest. The very nature of a holiday is to step out of our routine into a different kind of awareness. Each holiday has its own flavors, its own colors, it's own scents and sounds and textures. These are given to us as opportunities -- not just to impress children, so that they will in turn try to impress their own children (though there is nothing wrong at all with impressing children!) Our souls and our senses are connected, and one refreshes the other. We might think of each holiday's particular array of sense pleasures (even the biting ones like maror at Passover) as a particular concoction, a spell, a magic potion to take our souls to a particular place. It is the wisdom of our tradition that over the course of a year we should take all these prescribed journeys. They refine our souls, intensify our experiences of life. And if they are gorgeous and festive besides, so be it.

We are coming into the spring holiday run -- Purim! Pesach! the omer! Lag B'omer! Shavuot! Sounds of groggers, the snap of breaking matzah, crackling bonfires, midnight prayers for peace - - tastes of alcohol, horseradish, blintzes -- the smell of a mask in front of your nose, of those vile cleaning agents you only use once a year for pre-Pesach cleaning, of greenery brought into the shul for Shavuot -- holy spells, concoctions, an inheritance (says the Shabbat kiddush, "hin- haltanu" -- "bequeathed to us," a favorite expression of mine from the siddur) from our ancestors to make the most of our lives. Happy holy days all, my dear community.

Copyright 2001 Rabbi Margaret Holub

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