My
mom just came back from the trip of a lifetime, a weavers? tour of
Guatemala. Right now (the day before the first seder) she is in
the next room with our friend Annie Lee, who has family in Guatemala
and just got back from there yesterday. They are looking at
pictures and glorious woven pieces that Mom brought back and sharing
stories. I?m hearing excited sounds as they exchange experiences
of this country they both love.A few minutes ago Annie was telling us about the Holy Week ceremony in some of the larger cities; among other things, each night of the week before Easter, or in some places, as I understood it, many of the forty nights of Lent, people arrange elaborate patterns of fruits and colored sands into something almost like carpets that run through the main street. At nightfall monks shuffle through the beautiful patterns, kicking them apart. The next day new carpets of fruit and colors are laid, and the next night ritually disassembled.
I remember hearing stories in the past from travelers in Bali about street processions in which huge palanquins of fruits would be paraded through the streets with a similar kind of ceremonial solemnity. I remember musing then, and I?m imagining again today as I listen to Mom and Annie, that various people (probably women) have lists of fruits to get together, have to find volunteers and arrange schedules and make sure that the mechanics of the ritual are in place so that friends and neighbors can be transported by the pageantry. I can just imagine the griping a couple of days ahead: ?So-and-So said they would bring ten kilos of pineapple, and they just called to say they can?t get them after all...? ?I can?t find anyone to do the colored sand on Thursday...? ?Why do I have to be the one who takes responsibility ever year?? ?Where are the young people??
So today Mickey and I and my folks are bringing in the Pesach dishes from the shed and taking out the hametz. I?ve already cleaned all the crumbs out of the stove, cleaned the oven, repapered the cupboards with dishes and glasses. But I didn?t boil the coffee cups, and we do sometimes put soymilk in our morning tea. I washed the little divider thing that holds our silverware, but I haven?t kept track of which silverware has been washed in the dishwasher (my modern boiling technique) and put back in there, and which got hand-washed. In town there seems to be a little horseradish crisis this year; with all the rain the new crop can?t be harvested, and so the only roots available are old and moldy and probably not hot enough to make us tear up. And of course our matzah bake was rained out. Back here at home, Mickey is busy trying to borrow enough chairs and figure out how to fit everyone into our living room. There has been remarkably little complaint among my crew -- they are well-behaved and well-acclimated. But I?ve been fretting about various details for weeks. I have a shopping list highlighted with different colors and a schedule of what to cook when. Will there be enough for the vegetarians? Should we iron and lay the table with my grandmother?s linen tablecloths, or should we use some of the new Guatemalan fabric for table runners, which would look funny on all that pastel Irish linen?
At Shabbat Ha-gadol this year -- the Shabbat before Pesach, when the rabbi is supposed to give a big sermon about Passover -- I talked (not at great length, I don?t think) about the afikomen, how it is a material representation of enlightenment, how when we eat it at the end of the seder meal, we are taking in all that has been hidden and broken and lost, how the second half of the seder indeed invites us to actually partake of the World to Come in bliss.
And that?s the key: it is not only a symbol or a story, but an actual experience, a real journey which is facilitated by the symbols -- all of which have to be purchased, washed, ironed, arranged, cooked and so on. We put them together in a certain order, arrange ourselves around them, light the candles, say the blessings, and suddenly we are actually in transit from slavery to freedom, from Narrow Place to Wilderness to World to Come.
There is usually a certain amount of bump-and-grind at the seder itself; spilled wine, fidgety guests, people?s wants and needs. Knowing me, I?ll wake up the next morning with a couple of complaints: something won?t have come off perfectly as I envisioned it. But if I look back over a lifetime of s?darim (that?s the plural of seder,) I can?t imagine my life without taking that journey every year. Without all of it, I would still be a slave. With it, I see myself as though I came out of the Narrow Place, and as though I can again and again.
Likewise with staying up all night to receive Torah at Mount Sinai in Shavuot, mourning the burnt Temple at Tisha B?av, hearing the shofar saying, ?Awake you sleepers!? at Rosh Hashana, walking the path of the High Priest into the Holy of Holies at Yom Kippur. I shlep and fuss, and then I am transported.
There is this mysterious, funny, annoying, somewhat taxing but ultimately transformative alchemy of the mundane and the sublime that is achieved through ritual. We bring our material selves, with all our worries and complaints, and we place them in a greatly-enlarged context. Ritual is a portal to meaning.
My dear friend is in the hospital today, as I write, newly-facing a difficult diagnosis. And I don?t think she will mind if I paraphrase something she said -- that she is happily surprised to see that the faith which she has spent years developing and cultivating through study and practice is firm in this time of crisis, and she feels calm, at least for now.
The whole month of May is part of the omer, the 49-day interval of wandering in the desert, counting each day and week, trying to remember the meaning ascribed to days 1-49, preparing for Shavuot. I?ll be counting and forgetting to count, and I will also undoubtedly fretting a little bit about whether we should really stay up all night again, who will teach, who will xerox, what to do for that 4 AM craft project, who will bring blintzes...
But I will also be looking forward to that delirious, ecstatic moment at dawn on June 8 when, for a split second at least, I know it will all come together again: past, present and future, the mundane world and the World to Come, the written Torah and the Torah of white fire on black fire.
Grump grump grump, shlep and grind -- but I can?t imagine life without it!
- ©2011 Rabbi Margaret Holub