The Four Sons Of Passover
Mark, Jonathan
THE FOUR SONS OF PASSOVER JONATHAN MARK The Torah, when speaking of the Passover, refers to four types of children: one wise, one wicked, one simple and one who doesn't even know how to ask. -The...
...When the grandfather died, her father blessed the wine...
...We walk through the house, feathering away the forbidden crumbs and my own conflicting memories...
...Linda's reading of the Haggadah was halting and the other three participants were getting bored...
...The exhaustion, the ecstasy in the act of a Jewish activity thrilled her in a chassidic fashion, but she understood no context with which she could connect...
...The sun, like a dying fire, passes below the horizon...
...He was quoted as saying he was disappointed in Israel, it's just like any other place, it's no big deal...
...In 1951 they landed in Brooklyn where the neighbors understood what war was The War and it never had to be further explained...
...Noah tells her about a minyan he founded for chassidim, baalei teshuvah, Young Israel refugees and drifters, in a community room of the Alameda Savings & Loan...
...The son who 'doesn't even know how to ask' might have the most possibilities of all, for he has no negative memories to erase...
...Everyone is lost and everyone has a piece of the map...
...Why does God send so many false messiahs...
...She wanted to work for her doctorate in psychology instead of working for the Ladies Auxiliary...
...He may be the most sensitive of all...
...In the spring the public schools taught Linda to paint Easter eggs...
...When Taible died, Buzzie comforted her...
...The Haggadah My parents raised me tenderly I was their only son My mind got mixed with ramblin' When I was all so young And I left my home the first time When I was twelve and one I'm a long time a-comin', Ma, And I'll be a long time gone -Bob Dylan When I was "twelve and one" Dylan was one of the few people who mattered...
...According to tradition Elijah is more likely to be found on the Bowery than on a board of directors: Our kindness must be indiscriminate...
...I want to read to her more from the Song of Songs, from the Haggadah, from Sholom Aleichem: "She keeps pushing me ahead...
...Passover fell early this particular year...
...Noah pulls out a,volume of the Talmud, its brittle pages held together by electrical tape...
...They think I'm too far out...
...Noah looks up into the Pacific night and sings "Turn us to You, and we'll be returned, renew our days as of old...
...They were preparing an effigy for Easter-a witch made of straw with eyes of colored eggs...
...Bob Dylan The Simple What does the simple child say?-"What is this...
...Buzzie invited another couple over on the seder night...
...He remembers how in 1975, while still in his 20s, he was hired to be a rabbi of a Young Israel, a middle-class, modern Orthodox congregation housed in a white brick building...
...In the Haggadah the wise son asks relevant questions...
...She remembered the changing of the dishes, and she decorated the table according to a sketch in her Haggadah...
...They learned about the pioneers who planted citrus groves and built the State of Israel...
...Over the mantle in the dining room is a photo of Noah with Surry, his 28-year-old wife, and their five children in front of a white-washed desert bungalow...
...When Taible's granddaughter Linda asked why candles were lit, why does the family gather for the seder, Taible answered, "That's the way we've always done it...
...Her children were sent to school in the local synagogue, and to please Taible, who aged into the family matriarch, her grandchildren were sent to Hebrew school as well...
...We told each other that Dylan was changing his name back to Zimmerman...
...Linda was taught that before you eat you wash your hands...
...Eva reads the Song of Songs...
...Linda was sent to the Hebrew school where for six years she was taught, over and over, the alphabet and Bible stories...
...For "me" and not for "him...
...Linda jumped ahead in the Haggadah to the songs at the end...
...The One Who Doesn't Even Know How to Ask As for the child who doesn't know how to ask, you must open up for the child, for the Torah says: "And thou shalt tell thy child on that day, saying: This is because of that which the Lord did for me when I came fortk out of Egypt...
...In yeshiva we whispered every rumor: Dylan was studying Hebrew, Dylan was hanging out with a radical Jewish collective called The Brooklyn Bridge, Dylan was giving money to JDL, Dylan was learning in a yeshiva like we were...
...Mimi Farina, Joan Baez's sister, published an open letter to Dylan in the San Francisco Chronicle...
...Right now I can't read too good Don't send me no more letters no Not unless you mail them From Desolation Row...
...But Linda's crowd took dancing seriously...
...Since the destruction of the Temple, sexual pleasure has been taken from those who practice it lawfully, and given to sinners...
...A pretty Israeli dancer enters Noah's office and dances acapella while he talks on the phone...
...Linda joined a class for jazz dance...
...I had to wed the potency of Torah to the outside dynamics...
...Her classmates were restless, indoors while the other children were in the street, and the restlessness led to spitball fights and wild games of salugi, right in the middle of class...
...As he sat before the Young Israel's Board of Directors Noah said, "When Moses built the Tabernacle, he made it portable...
...What did you think I'd say...
...He enrolled in a Far Rockaway yeshiva, Sha'ar Yashuv, taught by a rabbi who wore the same kind of round black hat that Dylan wore on the dust jacket of Nashville Skyline...
...He taps his sandaled feet, moves Jonathan Mark is a writer living in New York...
...When the meal was served, the conversation turned to other things...
...On Friday nights the teenagers had an evening activity of Israeli dancing on the outdoor basketball court...
...Students who work in the Hillel at Oakland College, where he is the rabbi, come into Noah's office with logistical problems about a concert by a singing rabbi, a Shabbaton, cases of frozen knishes and Israeli malt soda...
...The house is weather-beaten, the color of a storm...
...An embrace, a conversation, a kiss can break it down...
...Secular Jews were the first Jews to rediscover the road back to Zion, and they're the first to discover the road back to romance...
...The young marrieds in the clan preferred to be with their in-laws, or with each other in Warsaw, where many of them moved...
...Linda set the paper plates...
...What do we mean by marriage...
...He attracted to the congregation free-spirited Jews from the counterculture...
...When I was a yeshiva student I looked down at the other three sons...
...In the winter the streets were laced with Christmas lights and the doors and windows of the development were filled with illuminated Santas, reindeer and mangers...
...Rav Yitzchak says: 'Since the destruction of the Temple, sexual pleasure has been taken from those who practice it lawfully, and given to the sinners.'" Noah looks away from the Talmud...
...Taible's theology was based on memory and superstition...
...The galaxies of commentary roll through his mind...
...The excitement of the sixties, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the Kennedys, the Beatles and Dylan," seemed to Noah conductors of messianic electricity...
...The Israeli dancer tells Noah that she's getting more interested in Judaism-could he recommend a book...
...Some husbands in the community went to rabbinical court to stop the classes, but failed...
...This isn't enough.' "In the Haggadah everything is neatly slotted, but life isn't so simple...
...asks Noah in his clipped talmudic accent...
...When the fishermen left, and blue and red lanterns lit the cafe, I introduced myself to a waitress who was attractive in an accessible way...
...On the brick stoop of his Alameda home, Noah strums the guitar, at first producing melancholy tunes, then faster and faster melodies as the unknowable seems clearer than ever...
...If there's any sure sign of the restoration of the Holy Temple, if there can be any harbinger of the messiah according to the Talmud, this is it: the rediscovery of love...
...The words in English hardly fit the music...
...Noah's words quickly spill out...
...When her parents took her out to eat at the Hunan Palace Chinese Restaurant, Linda got up to wash...
...In a time of war, when God is on neither side...
...Noah goes back to the Talmud and reads in the ancient sing-song...
...They walk assuredly, slowly, confident of their destination...
...She only understood that in the time of the thaw her neighbors in the forest built witches from straw, the gypsies started fires and at the seder you got drunk and cracked jokes...
...She walks through the house with a candle...
...historical, mythical tales on the level of "Young Abe Lincoln-Rail Splitter...
...Linda met Buzzie in the dance class...
...While her parents prepared for Passover, Taible ran with the children of the Christians that she met in the tall grass...
...One summer, when Linda was fifteen, she was sent to a sleep-away camp in the Catskills...
...On Passover we learn about the Four Sons of the seder table: the wise son, the antagonistic son, the simple child and the totally uneducated...
...Our house is a palace...
...The waterfalls near Binghamton, where Linda moved, froze solid over the winter...
...The freshman warns about the collapse of civility, the end of the world, of people jumping from windows...
...She was laughed back to her seat...
...In an instant the world was transformed...
...He feels he's never reached the point where he could let his soul unpack...
...As I leave to go to shul I stop...
...The problem of anti-Semitism, which was built up by the counselors, seemed to be, with the passing of time, nothing more than a cat and mouse cartoon for grownups...
...If I'm committed to romantic love, I'm committed to trial and error, within the talmudic confines...
...The whitecaps hang almost unconnected, iced in mid-flight...
...After twenty years of just learning Torah I was like a kid in a candy store...
...We all are lost...
...The most incredible thing about modern Judaism," he said, "almost as incredible as the Holocaust and the State of Israel, is our rediscovery and reclamation of sexual and romantic love...
...The "smoking gun" was a speech Noah made at a Berkeley university...
...Like the young Al Pacino in The Godfather, Noah swore his career would turn out differently...
...They were anxious to fix me up with women whose voices were throaty and raw from years of cigarettes and whiskey...
...Elijah's cup of wine at the seder table is for strangers, and the door to our home will be opened during the seder to see if anyone in the street is in need of a seder meal...
...She was a student named Eva...
...The movie 10 is playing on the Betamax downstairs...
...There was a feeling in Linda when she danced that let her sense the possibilities of the spirit...
...When they came to the tale of the four sons, they kidded Linda that she was the smart son and they were the wicked...
...As rabbi, Noah organized a benefit for Hopi Indians, on the grounds that if we can't recognize the "promised land" of others, we can't expect help for ourselves...
...His days were spent in increasingly sophisticated yeshivas, learning under the personal tutelage of Rabbi J. B. Soloveichik, among the most respected rabbis of our generation...
...It was, for many awkward and confused yeshiva boys, a vindication...
...But in the yeshivas the wise son is no longer questioning, no longer challenging...
...But the 'wise' son may not be so wise anymore...
...Rav Kook said the last great Jewish frontier was the realization of our bodies...
...Speakers, suspended from the trees, played tinny Israeli music and the boys stood behind the girls and held them by the hips...
...We'd stand in front of our hi-fis and pantomime Dylan's guitar-playing, lip synching, blowing into harmonicas that were strapped on to our necks, spitting out, "She fakes just like a little girl...
...That the yeshiva world wasn't joining forces with the sixties was tearing me apart...
...Everything is biblical...
...The Wicked The wicked child asks: "What is the meaning of this service to you...
...laughs Noah...
...The cat that lies sunning herself in the doorway is the young deer from the Song of Songs...
...Noah looks into his children's rooms...
...And it seemed that Dylan accepted this thinking...
...A new generation of yeshiva kids, barely "twelve and one," wrote letters to Dylan, trying to convince him, using his own lyrics, "not to go mistaking Paradise for that home across the road...
...The antagonistic son is not necessarily the 'wicked' son that everyone makes him out to be...
...Slowly I start to go, and I look back just once at the bewitched princess who has now merged with the strange Passover twilight...
...Can you imagine," says Noah, "Jews trying to stop other Jews from learning...
...we must be willing to live with it...
...He ran the shul with a shoes-oflF spontaneity rather than the formality and precision that the shul was looking for...
...After you eat you say grace...
...Herman Wouk...
...In 1979 Noah Winkler was fired...
...And the other three sons aren't used to speaking with a rabbi...
...Dylan symbolized the Jewish renaissance of the sixties, an American acceptance that a Yid could be a hipster, without neologizing "Jewish" as Lenny Bruce had to...
...The anti-Israel backlash.that had been dormant during the Ari Ben Canaan days and the Six Day War was suddenly in full swing everywhere...
...Yiddishkeit has so many realms of the unknowable...
...She was able to express with her swirling, graceful body what her words could only hint at...
...We lived privately, keeping each other company...
...Linda wanted a seder but she didn't want to bother with the Jewish organization at the local university...
...As soon as the vodka and the home brew flowed, the seder was forgotten...
...The minyan has classes for women to learn Torah on all levels...
...His wife sleeps, turned to the wall...
...The faith itself, Judaism, was never discussed...
...His album covers were full of Christian imagery...
...Taible was too young to move...
...In late afternoons, as the nets brimmed with fish, the sun melted into the Sound, and we sailed back to shore...
...Together we learn the Haggadah...
...We have to hang in there for the keys to the ultimate mystery...
...Because our desires and passions can't remain idle until the 'love of our life' shows up...
...The five are asleep in knobbed cribs and narrow beds...
...towards the church bells muffled in the darkness, towards the candlelight from docked houseboats, towards an outdoor cafe on the sand by the coves...
...My grandmother was a very religious woman," Linda said...
...while today they're asking, 'Is that all there is...
...Her summer camp Zionism had little staying power...
...The holiday is about to begin...
...It became acceptable, if not downright chic, in many circles to portray the Jews as the new Nazis, die new Fascists, the moral rest-and-recuperation home for the rest of society...
...I returned with Eva to New York for the seder...
...But what faith...
...Her father was a crude man from a crude family and he didn't care who knew it...
...We identified with Dylan in a way we never could with Elvis, Jagger or a hundred other less cerebral "heroes...
...I am a prince and my love is a princess...
...Although she was told she was Jewish, the product of a mixed marriage, her religious training was absolutely nil...
...The logs of wood piled by the door are the cedars and cypresses of the Song of Songs...
...He asked the shul to care about people that others didn't care about, to awaken the complacent...
...Marriage could not assuage his passion," says the Talmud...
...A three-legged table covered with contact paper leans against a cabinet...
...There's a piece of me in all the sons...
...In an epilogue to the Anthony Scaduto biography, Dylan began to place distance between himself and the Jewish community...
...The rumors were confirmed by Time magazine, which ran a picture of Dylan at the Wailing Wall, adjusting the stapled black crepe yarmulke given to bareheaded worshipers...
...So Torah has to be portable from Europe to America, from Brooklyn to California, from one language to another, from one generation to another, from middle-class families to single parents and the unmarried...
...As we sat on the veranda during the Friday twilight, we blessed the candles and I taught her the evening prayers...
...The Song of Songs," he says...
...I walk beside her with a feather and a plate...
...There was something so dynamic going on outside...
...We all hold a piece of the map...
...The 'simple' son might not have the foundation to ask anything but touristy questions, but he might be sophisticated and intelligent in other areas we need...
...They wrote that if only Dylan could've learned with their rebbe, if only Dylan could have learned at their yeshiva, if only Dylan had waited a little longer before conversion...
...On Saturday nights we'd walk by what we thought was Dylan's house on MacDougal Street...
...The Haggadah The Wise Rabbi Noah Winkler enters his ramshackle barn-house...
...To what extent did the Jewish establishment drive him away...
...You may therefore tell him: " 'Because of what the Lord did for me when I cameforth from Egypt' I do this...
...Noah looks into his own bedroom...
...There's such a loneliness in the world...
...The Haggadah After leaving the yeshiva, hitching away into the American night, I found myself sleeping by the sides of the highway, in moving cars, in airless nights, till I found a job on a fishing trawler that sailed the New England coast...
...He wanders through the house and enters a room so filled with books that no more than two people can fit into the space...
...the women and the girls who are working outdoors, washing and cleaning and getting ready for Passover, are the daughters of Jerusalem...
...I was sent," remembers Noah, "to a succession of yeshivas that were choking me...
...His nights were spent with the SDS, listening to Leonard Cohen and rock 'n' roll...
...And now, this Passover, Linda wanted a seder...
...Within 45 minutes most of the dancers were in the woods, making out, smoking...
...They think I'm an anachronism...
...She wrote a composition about her grandmother and the straw witch with painted eggs for eyes...
...When Taible moved to New York City in the wave of immigration in the early 1900s, she worked seven days a week, and married one of her cousins, who courted her at the meetings of her old town's "society," which gathered once a month...
...The constant sparks of messianism, even if often false, lift us up and keep us going...
...He was born in Salerno, after the war, to refugees who were "wandering the world, looking for a place to land safely...
...to financially encourage one side or another is to encourage war itself, regardless of who starts it...
...My father bought for two zuzim, An only kid, an only kid...
...Taible lived with Linda's family in a flat semi-circle housing development in the marshland of Queens...
...She tried matching the English to the tune...
...Many of the wise sons don't want to deal with me...
...Rumor has it that a portion of the five million dollars to be grossed by the tour is going to Israel...
...There were picayune battles at the university as to who would "run" the Israeli dancing...
...On Passover, dozens of relatives would gather for the seder, more intent on taking stock of the family than adhering to the religious nature of the night...
...It was a time of ethnic nationalism, and while other Jews were trying to convince the world of our liberal credentials, while Leonard Bernstein was opening his home and his checkbook to the Black Panthers, Dylan was saying it's time for Jews to be Jewish...
...I read to her stories from Sholom Aleichem about the forthcoming Passover holidays...
...And you should say to the child: '"With a strong hand did God bring us out of Egypt, out of the land of slaves.'" -The Haggadah Taible was a peasant girl...
...Whistling a tune he learned as a child, Noah opens to Gemara Sanhe-drin...
...Rav Kook said that in the old days the non-religious Jews didn't want religion at all...
...The money from the tour was reputedly going to the Israel Emergency Fund...
...I can spot the pedestrians in the street who are walking to synagogue...
...There is an important question concerning the profits of your tour...
...In 1973, shortly after the Yom Kippur War, Dylan announced a hurried tour...
...I spoiled the Shabbos afternoon kugel by putting questions on the table that weren't there before...
...The wise son can argue for hours about a woman's bloody impurity, but today's rabbis have to deal with the blood on the tracks, the blood of a broken heart...
...They took turns reading paragraphs in English...
...had he been there, he would not have been released...
...She didn't even Israeli dance anymore...
...Taible lit candles on Friday nights, and spent the holidays with her family...
...Nine years ago, when Noah and Surry were introduced, when they sat in a cocktail lounge and shared their dreams, Surry said she never wanted to be a rebbetzin...
...He wrote lyrics about Christian theology, about "all those who killed Christ," and "bom already mined, stone cold dead as I stepped outside the womb...
...They had an arrogance that she didn't care to penetrate...
...They listened to the counselor explain the meanings of the songs, the Leon Uris origins of simplistic horas...
...We mean all the ideologies, causes, careers, people, yeshivas that Noah has wed himself to, feeling that none returned his passion in equal measure...
...rhymically back and forth from the waist, strokes his cropped beard and lets his fingers flow through the ritual strings that hang outside his shirt...
...Noah's parents bought a television to watch the Eichmann trial, news and wrestling...
...Noah whistles softly, in harmony with all the voices in his office...
...After the summer she never went to synagogue, but went religiously to Israeli folk dancing sessions wherever she could find them in New York...
...The sound of a bird at dawn, the cry of a baby from inside the house, the rumble of distant traffic as the sky begins to lighten, seems an answer that Noah expected...
...The first day of spring was passing...
...He's not the old-time hedonist...
...It was a Jewish camp, with tribal orientations rather than religious ones...
...As America turned to fundamentalists, Dylan announced that he was now a "Born-Again Christian...
...Joy and romance were seen as just another gentile ruse...
...The members of the family who desired something more delicate, more spiritual, couldn't stomach the pagan crudity of their kin...
...In a caf6 the fishermen talked crudely about women...
...As Rabbi Noah Winkler said of the one who doesn't know how to ask, she's "void of negative memories...
...She couldn't match her pronunciation of the Hebrew with the melody...
...I tell her about Elijah who redeems the rebbetzin's dress from the pawn shop on Passover eve...
...In Europe some of my relatives were rabbis and ritual slaughterers...
...I had to tap it...
...It was a joyless home...
...In the cabinet are rabbinic tracts from seven centuries, Lurianic Kabbalism, books on archaeology and love stories...
...their fiddles and singing carried in the wind...
...As it is written: 'Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.'" In the Talmud, which is a commentary upon commentaries, and in a talmudist's life, one word implies twenty, and doors open to reveal not rooms, but galaxies...
...Saying "you," he excludes himself, and because he excludes himself from the group, he denies a basic principle...
...Our yard is a king's court...
...Linda's grandma Taible died and the family no longer gathered for the seder...
...I saw that the goyish world was not just dandruff...
...The Israeli dancer inquires about a synagogue to go to...
...She brought the family together for big meals on holidays...
...He said he wanted a non-traditional wife, in an Orthodox society that still thought of feminine independence as absurd...
...No one else at the table knew anything at all...
...That was the way the family did things in the forest, and that was how they did them in Queens...
...Compared to Dylan, the Rosh Yeshiva-the chief rabbi of the seminary-seemed so pale, so tame...
...He wasn't Jewish, and she never told her parents...
...It says in the Talmud that "since the destruction of the Temple, sexual pleasure has been taken from the lawful and given to the sinners...
...On Friday nights her grandfather blessed the wine, and the family ate together...
...I was able to present my vision of Judaism to Eva and she accepted it and cherished it as did the biblical Ruth...
...Over a century ago she lived with her parents in the dense forests of Eastern Europe...
...Elijah will bear the news of the messianic redemption...
...In the bunks at night the girls talked about what they heard in the Oneg Shabbat: the danger of assimilation, the rate of intermarriage, the story of the Holocaust, the miracle of Israel...
...An Ichabod Crane wearing a yarmulke, a gangly, pimply freshman whose arms fall past his sleeves, whose legs propel him like a pair of pogo sticks, walks in, disregards the pretty dancer and delivers to Noah a convoluted message from his own private hell...
...The girls were inspired to be defenders of the faith...
...The young and the elderly sought to retain Noah as rabbi, but they didn't have the wealth or savvy to succeed...
...They lived in the forest for generations past memory...
...The other three stared at her, waiting for her to finish...
...At night Taible heard the gypsies in their camp in the forest clearing...
...She lit candles every Sabbath...
...There were fewer and fewer relatives every year...
Vol. 10 • April 1985 • No. 4
