My Father's Ritual

...The mishaps were many, and the fulfillment of the dictum "He who is hungry shall come in to eat" went slowly, for each had his own needs and peculiarities...

...Those nights, the feeding done, the thanks recited, the singing would begin...

...Besides the regular guests, there were always some new faces—a rotation of doctors, a new patient of my father's who had not seen a Seder-ritual in years, perhaps the parents of a child my father had delivered in their home years before...

...Nevertheless, at our table they were—these children cast off by their families—an integral part of our People, of our Greater Family, no more or less normal for their chromosomal defects and their birth-traumas, the disorders of their nervous systems and their Mongoloid features, than the doctor who fed them, their Father...

...The names were impressive in their Latin and Greek configurations, but the symptoms and the sufferings were a terror to conceive, a travesty of creation...

...That is why it is better to be a human being than an angel...

...From the first Seder-nights I can recall, our guests were our closest friends, plus soldiers (there was World War II, and Korea, and they were far away from home), and students at universities in the area who could not afford to go back to Missouri or Illinois or California for the holiday...

...You will say the children needed watching every minute: they would spill things, they would throw up, they might start to shout, and that, too, is true...

...That is true...

...It was a dissonant chorus resembling in my early imagination a choir of Heavenly Hosts, but with flesh and blood instead of halos, twisted words and sounds of human beings in place of the perfect harmonies of angels who need neither food nor drink, nor the affection of my father...

...The following afternoon each disease was explained to me...

...come down to acquaint herself with six or seven of the children, to talk with them, to bring them things, and to tell them Passover was coming...

...And a special element, as if Chagall or Dali or Kafka designed the scenery and script: a month before the onset of Passover, my mother would call local institutions for brain-damaged children...

...The meals would last long past midnight...

...Two nights a year twenty to thirty people would sit around our table and join my father in the recitation of the tale of the Jews leaving their bondage in the Land of Egypt...

...That is true...

...And then, the afternoon before the first Seder, my brother and sister and I would set the tables as my parents took both cars to the institutions to bring the children back in preparation for the evening in our home...

...She would ask to Danny Siegel is a contributing editor of MOMENT...

...My grandfather was there, of course, and my grandmother, until she died while I was still a teen-ager, an aunt and some cousins, a friend or two of mine, and the six or seven children...

...Yet each was to be fed with the utmost care...

...Our guests-of-many-years knew what was to happen, and the newcomers soon learned, became momentarily uneasy, then leaned back against their pillows (as free men must have pillows on Passover night), and partook of the wonders of freedom...

...No one winced, no one sat in silence while my father's personal ritual was performed, no one ignored or paid extra attention to what was taking place...

...In our household on Passover nights, everyone felt at home, everyone was comfortable...

...And when it came time to eat the meal itself, my father would rise in his white robe, having tasted of the food as prescribed by Jewish law, and would go from seat to seat, cutting the lamb or roast beef and spoonfeeding whoever needed to be fed in such fashion, and joking with each...

...But next to each member of my family and in between other couples was one of these children, and each of us was charged with caring for the child, watching over all of them and treating them as best as Moses might have treated them among the masses being taken from Pharaoh's slavery—for we must assume that there were palsied and polioed children three or four thousand years ago, too...

...You will say my mother was burdened enough cleaning house and cooking the week through for fifty or sixty people...

...Each of us was to bring the message, however dimly perceived, to these children...

...You will say their noises disturbed the recitations...