Red Hook, NY, April 6, 2020
This year's Seder will be weird and foreign, different than any other Seder I have experienced over my lifetime. Passover, and especially the Seder, is usually wrapped in layers upon layers of traditions and meanings, restrictions and rebellions, recipes, memories, nostalgia, and humor.
All those layers have been removed this year, leaving us close to the real thing, the actual experience it celebrates with its nostalgic sugarcoating: the memory of our ancestors' last night, their most fateful and awesome night, in Egypt.
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What will be missing above all is the sense of family. The Seder usually has a hyper-familial setting that often provides a cozy environment but also occasionally becomes a burden.
Every year our relatives gather at our home for a noisy feast laden with wine and delicacies, we read the Haggadah (most of it at least...) and we end with off-key renditions of American folk songs.
This year we will be alone, enclosed in our own place; we will try to compensate for this void by being overly occupied with Zoom as we try to lower the volume and adjust the angle of our laptop, along with other petty matters that will disguise the emptiness, the uncertainty, the concern, and the sadness that we will obviously feel.
It's not just the familial setting that will be left out. All the Passover tableware, the special recipes of the dishes my late mother used to prepare, the beautiful dresses, the white shirts, and the other Passover paraphernalia have all been left behind in the city.
Some three weeks ago, when we left New York, it was unthinkable that we would not be coming back for the holiday. They are just objects, right? They are not germane to the actual meaning of the holiday, right? But the truth of the matter is that these objects keep the memory alive for us and create, just for several days every year, a feeling of a different era, a beloved and special period. This will be very much missing this year.
But what is particularly missing this year is the celebratory feeling; that calm, free and joyous atmosphere. Who wants to browse the internet for new recipes or new ideas for the Seder these days? Why would anyone be in the mood to actually look at flower arrangements and decorations for the table or think about wine and novel interpretations that would make the Seder a little more interesting? The general anxiety is eating us from within, leaving us without a lot of room for anything else.
Ironically, this year we will actually deal with the very deep meaning of the holiday, the very core of the holiday that has been hidden well from us through many generations of traditions and rituals. This core belies a deep memory of collective trauma that has accompanied the outburst of freedom, a trauma that has been bigger than anything our imagination has allowed us to imagine.
The final night of the Israelites in Egypt, referred to in Judaism as the "Passover in Egypt," was a night of great horror. The destroying angel did not differentiate the wicked from the righteous. Our forefathers convened for their Seder in their lousy slave huts, protected only by the thin layer of blood that they painted above their door and mezuzot on the doorposts. What a terrible sight it must have been.
Freedom, which was inconceivable for them after generations upon generations of bondage, was born in this moment of total existential anxiety and complete uncertainty. Seder, which means "order" in Hebrew, wasn't even remotely present. It was a night of total chaos.
But here we are, preparing to celebrate the ancient holiday that was born from the mix of trembling and happiness in a horrific night in Egypt, even as some of the very components of this horror are felt now.
There are news reports on field hospitals in Central Park and in Javits Center; the dozens of mobile morgues that have been brought to the city, alongside reports on the mounting death toll of a scale not seen in a hundred years.
The destroying angel is on the loose in the empty streets and deserted avenues. The doors, the lintels and the mezuzot of the closed apartments will once again serve as the last line of defense as we hide from something that is beyond our control, something that has shattered the myth of freedom we had and brought us back to reality regarding what a real Seder is all about. It reminded us what we can and cannot control.
Reuven (Ruby) Namdar has lived in New York for the past 20 years. His novel "The Ruined House" (2017) won the Sapir Prize, Israel's most prestigious literary award.
