Aleinu: When We Were Very Young Danny Siegel
AKIVA'S FROG AND OTHER PASSOVER THOUGHTS VERY YOUNG DANNY SIEGEL Danny Siegel, author of two books of poetry, is a new contributing editor of moment. On the Eve of Passover, Rabbi Akiva would...
...I was scared of the plague of darkness as a child, but the others were harmless enough...
...Francis Joseph Weiss, born in Vienna, three doctoral degrees, member of a dozen scholarly associations, reciting long passages of poetry in exotic languages, entertaining me as he would have his own child...
...In Spring— A Talmudic Conclusion In Spring, a young Jew's fancy turns to — Yerushalayim...
...There will be no haste, no suddenness, no uproar as in the Redemption from Egypt...
...And yet we tasted the wine, and it was only wine...
...Just once more...
...I never knew, as a child, that there was death on the other end...
...And he was not well...
...I did not know the immensity of the Suffering in the World that required a Mashiach's relief...
...Here was no lily-white hero, but rather a man whose first real act as a Jew was to kill an Egyptian...
...But the demand of Mitzvahs demanded I visit him again years later...
...We are told that God was with us not only in the slavery in Egypt, but He is with us wherever we are oppressed...
...And he was a mum-bler, a stutterer perhaps, ridiculous to hear, trying the patience of the Jews who were waiting to hear the Word of God...
...They would throw off the oppression of Rome...
...He had retired and was living in the Jewish Home for the Aged in Washington...
...Enslaved for centuries, ravaged by the taskmasters, slaughtered wholesale for generations, and yet we are told not to rejoice when they drown in the Red Sea...
...His colleague did not understand him when he laughed at seeing the Temple in ruins...
...How does predetermination come into play...
...Including the latterday critics of anti-ZPG Jews who dare to speak out for more and more Jewish babies...
...Later on there would be time to examine slavery and freedom from a more abstract perspective: what does it mean for a person to be free...
...It was a joke, and the younger Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah did not follow...
...Are they well...
...Before another and yet another is dead...
...Imagine...
...Weiss walked with a cane—one leg was obviously much shorter than the other...
...At times the disappointment of no one there was unbearable, so I would send my nephew or another child to peform the Mitzvah...
...These are our promises...
...How dare we sing...
...And I certainly did not know that once upon a time there were things called blood-libels, and that doors were opened to the Outside World, just in case...
...The last was too young to be a Zeyde, but he would do well as another uncle...
...Some time later, as a too-inquisitive adult, I learned his up-and-down stride began when the Nazis threw him from a window and left him for dead...
...But the Talmud pounds away at his irascibility, and the Bible says he killed an Egyptian...
...We were to let our imaginations roam free, adding stories and pictures of our own, examples of people breaking the chains of slavery: wherever, whenever, whoever...
...Biblical and Midrashic Disturbances Moses approached Pharaoh by the Nile...
...They were weeping...
...if only we had heard Aki-va's laugh...
...We Jews," I think...
...We should integrate the broad span of Jewish History that the Haggadah portrays into our mundane experiences...
...Guilt, T'shuvah, sympathy for the suffering of all mankind, death—all these were for some later, more mature moment...
...But Akiva spoke wisely...
...One of my favorites was the collection of grandfathers gathered in B'nai B'rak for a night of discussing the Exodus: Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Tarfon, Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua, and Rabbi Ela-zar ben Azariah...
...I had wanted to hear the Iliad again, or some medieval text only ten people in the world could recite...
...Whether we will see a banquet with Leviathan as our portion, or some other grand display of God's favor, this is a valid, meaningful goal of Our People...
...Learning more, living more, the disfigurings of life took hold, and the essences of Pesach came to resemble the full acrid taste of the fresh-grated horseradish...
...Justifiable—yes, but devastating...
...So the children rose up and slew their fathers— 600,000 of them...
...We had our empty chair for Soviet Jews, too...
...A very great moment in the history of the Jews, the Bar Kochba Revolt, but the innocence of the Night in B'nai B'rak was destroyed in the clash of armies...
...Our Leader had blood on his hands...
...And the end of pain, senility, and death...
...My mother, from Highlands, New Jersey, treated like a princess...
...We are reminded of Creation, the lush of the Garden of Eden, and the revelations of the Holy One are at hand, dazzling our senses...
...The one that I particularly remember was the printed sheet that said, "But we should not dwell so long on this, lest...
...I could have carried him in my memories as another Hidden Tzaddik...
...It was the proper Kavod-re-spect, for he was a Rebbe...
...Bomb the tracks, bomb the Camps...
...That was nice...
...Now I have lost his magnificence...
...They, too, are God's creatures, the Midrash tells us...
...Then I discovered that someone in some commentary said the Rabbis were planning a revolt...
...The Jews would again fight to be free...
...Here, again, he is laughing, and offering future generations the same opportunity to explode in a full-bodied laugh...
...Each looked so wonderful, and they were all so devoted to being Jews they failed to notice time passing so quickly...
...The Rabbis were cutting him down to size, punching holes in the myth of the Great Enemy of the People, thereby comforting their Jews...
...Oh, yes...
...The long, drizzly nights and days in the Holy City give way to six months of sun...
...The smashing intrusions into our innocence were everywhere: in the Bible and Mi-drash-stories, at the Seder, in the Haggadah itself, that special book we loved so much for its pictures of the four sons and the baby goat of Chad Gadya...
...Coins were struck during the years of victory...
...Magic...
...Ever since I could walk, I opened the door for Elijah the Friendly Prophet...
...But Moses, too, fell by the demythologizing wayside...
...Who among the gentiles, and who among our own...
...Who will understand us...
...I will not let them go...
...Then I discovered that Rabbi .Eliezer was excommunicated by his chevra, left to live in loneliness at home...
...The starkness of the many slaveries in the world should not be ignored, but encountering them differently may help us grasp the nature of things with rejuvenating insight...
...The Big Boy privilege I felt drinking myself silly (was I four, five...
...And he was bald, wore thick glasses, and was not pleasing to look at at all...
...And then, they, too, were killed in the last plague...
...It was glorious...
...It is impressive, the symbolism of it...
...This is absurd...
...In thinking and speaking of Egypt, we are instructed by Jewish Tradition to set up relationships of pasts and presents, and to pull down from Heaven the future-visions which are promised to us...
...For now it was enough that the table was more special than Shabbos, set with more dishes to accomodate the extra relatives and guests, a glistening spectacle of utensils laid aside for a year and newly-washed for the Event of the Seder...
...I was the youngest...
...Moses laments: Yes, I know You will save them, O God, but what of the agony of the infants buried in the bricks of Pharaoh's palaces...
...Another plague—this one on the Jews...
...So many of us were raised in that tradition...
...Flashes at the Seder Those were the Good Old Days...
...I am afraid to ask my parents: Where is Larry...
...That too is a comfort: the panorama of plagues, the screams of agony, the crush to leave will not be a part of the phenomenon of That Time...
...Akiva's frog, what an exquisitely ridiculous joke...
...But he was so humble, so refined: I would lead him through the front door, and he would sweep off his beret, bow low, and kiss my mother's hand in the European manner...
...How many shrieks of Jewish mothers could be heard, as their sons were destroyed in the Nile...
...Pharaoh was relieving himself, states the Midrash...
...That Divine Sympathy is a consolation, though it has a tinge of the abstract-conceptual matrix that lacks the immediacy of day-today faithful living...
...But then we grew up, coming of age in a clashing-together of scars and blemishes, deformities and gore...
...What happened to that sergeant from Michigan...
...Explaining Redemption in their child-terms may allow us to see-again that this, too, is Redemption...
...We even licked our finger after dipping ten times in the wine, ten bloody plagues-full...
...The Midrash explains that in the time of the Ultimate Geulah, we will be allowed leisure to prepare ourselves...
...Then I discovered Akiva's torture-death at the hands of the Romans...
...Their robes were so grand, their presence—like a fairytale from, a storybook...
...Golda Meir explains to the Arabs: We can forgive you for killing our people, but we cannot forgive you for forcing us to kill yours...
...Lest we bend our minds to the limit and see the abysses of what we do not understand of God's ways...
...A laugh for those occasions when we believe the reality of suffering, and the pain of reality, are so overwhelming that all becomes senseless, a drudge to be lived through with a groan...
...On more than one occasion Akiva was known to laugh...
...When I saw him, he was sitting in a corner of his room, senile, raving of his childhood Vienna, unable to recognize my mother, The Princess, his dear friend...
...They would add sighs to and spoil the Opening of the Door...
...Another scar...
...Another disastrous Passover memory...
...I should have...
...We always had soldiers in Arlington...
...Regenerations Where is the relief...
...But the Midrash says the killing of the firstborn was really the killing by the firstborn...
...We should accustom ourselves to being in the company of children...
...Those days were the good days, and though the texts read blood, screams, suffering, and death, what did we know of these things...
...How many times did they ask their husbands: Why have children at all...
...We were told to concentrate on two Mitzvahs: that each of us should imagine ourselves as if we personally left Egypt, and—the more spoken of the Redemption, the better...
...We, the children, were the focus of attention: the sounds and sights and flow of things were directed towards us, that we should have freedom deep in our souls from our earliest days...
...If only we knew more of his jokes...
...And the murder and anguish in the opening chapters of the Book of Exodus...
...When these threatened souls approached Pharaoh to plead with him to let the Children of Israel go, he replied, "Let every Egyptian die, I do not care...
...And there was Dr...
...Geulah, the word for Redemption that is the central theme of Passover, refers—besides the Exodus from Egypt—to a Final Geulah, when Elijah will come to assure us of the Mashiach's arrival...
...Abbaye says: This is to be recited after it has rained all night, and in the morning the cool North Wind comes and reveals the Heavens.(Berachot 59a) In the change of Jewish seasons, with the approach of Pesach, the Heavens return to their pristine beauty...
...I remember my nephew at seven or eight asking why no one was sitting there, and I remember his grandmother explaining: Russia, oppression, the struggle for freedom...
...The connection had not yet been made...
...I suppose I did . not know until my grandmother died when I was 14...
...Poof...
...Thousands of Akiva's students would die in the revolt, and Pesach-to-Shavuot simchas would be muted in memory of their deaths...
...The Jews Are Everywhere would be a theme heard again and again in literature and newspapers and in not-so-veiled diplomatic statements...
...As they must have asked in Warsaw, Vilna, Bialystok, where there were weddings and births even in the most catastrophic days of the Shoah...
...He was so genteel, so different from anyone I had ever met...
...Some day he will act out the Scene of the Empty Chair as an adult, though he could have hardly known just then what Soviet oppression is...
...Passover was to be celebrated with the utmost regard for the children, and he wanted them fully awake for the Tale of the Exodus...
...Unsettling Haggadah Insights At first, the Haggadah was a joy The big books had many pictures, funny-looking pictures of the four sons, pyramids, people who dressed so differently...
...And we had our readings about the Warsaw Ghetto...
...My Aunt Anna elbow-deep in ge-filte fish, the best of the best tablecloths, pillows on the chairs, and so much wine...
...Lost...
...The rainy season ends on Pesach...
...Pesach is the Spring Festival, and thousands pilgrimage to her holy precincts...
...While it is true that we may not hope to return to our childhood naivete (nor is it necessarily desirable), there are ways to re-appreciate the Event of Passover in our lives...
...One frog...
...The Seder table should be surrounded by the young, so that in explaining to them the signs and wonders of the Exodus, we will regain, to some degree, our sense of initial wonder...
...Noting that the second plague is narrated in the Book of Exodus in the singular, "The frog came up,"—the Master explains, Yes, there was one immense frog that came out of the Nile and filled the entire Land of Egypt...
...There is yet another way to soften the blows of Life in its more savage aspects...
...carried to bed by my father and put to sleep with a kiss...
...I suppose we should have another now for Syrian Jews...
...Akiva would give nuts and roasted corn to the young ones, to keep their attention—so that nothing should escape their notice...
...Stationed too far from their own homes, our Seder table set them at ease...
...How are we to revivify ourselves after such a catalogue of realities that have eaten away at our visions...
...Something registered with my nephew...
...Akiva's colleague, Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah chided him for his narrischkeit: Go back to Halachah, he says...
...Their general, Bar Kochba, would become a name that would echo and echo again through the centuries...
...And they won, for a while...
...Perhaps his naive excitement would remove my depression of the empty doorway...
...It was dawn, said the students, and time to recite the Sh'ma...
...I knew him as a friend, another uncle-figure who would have wonderful stories to tell me of his travels to the Jews who lived in caves in the Daghestan Mountains, and Jews that looked like Persians, and Jews who spoke Hungarian and Swedish...
...The weight and extent of these examples need not squash the warm sensations we felt as children at the Seder...
...The same theme, the same urgency...
...On the Eve of Passover, Rabbi Akiva would conclude his Torah-teaching before the regular time, so that he could begin his Seder at an early hour...
...The Talmud alludes to this reawakening: Rabbi Joshua ben Levi says: He who sees the sky in its primal purity recites, "Blessed be God who provides moments reminiscent of Creation...
...Weiss, a regular guest over the years...
...We put miniscule pats of marror on big chunks of matzah, softening our awareness of how bitter, how searing slavery could be...
...He was fighting death by madness, as if to say: I am not the one you seek...
...But there were the soldiers...
...These were to be the lessons of later-on...
...He was discharging his very human wastes in secret so that his people would not know that Pharaoh, a god, should have such unseemly needs...
...I can see the portly Rabbi Yo-chanan, a century and a half later, splitting his seams at the sight of such a frog...
...How many were killed in Korea and Vietnam, our American wars...
...It is found in a Midrash in the name of Rabbi Akiva...
...On the one hand, he was the caring shepherd, chosen by God for his infinite rachmoniss for each individual sheep...
...The ten that struck down the Egyptians were very vivid in my mind, because they were so different from each other, so many exciting pictures of wild beasts and hailstones and insects...
...Horror added to horror...
...Nor did his executioner, Tineius Rufus, understand his laughter as he was being tortured to death...
...The Night in B'nai B'rak must have been filled with outbursts of laughter: despite the Romans, in the face of the higher seriousness of the rebellion, in defiance of History thrown in their faces...
...But then I discovered that the Romans did not need fertilizer for seven years for their vineyards: the Jewish blood that was spilled was sufficient to make the vines grow strong, healthy, for their bacchanals...
Vol. 2 • February 1977 • No. 5
