Judaism for Dummies

or: This Seder Felt Strange for Many Reasons.


(So a Catholic, an Anglican and a Jew are about to be knighted, and they all must go and kneel before the Queen. The Catholic goes first, and kneels down before her. He says, "I solemnly do swear my allegience to the Crown, and will remain its humble servant for as long as my days have number". The queen taps him on the shoulders, then the head, and commands him to arise, for he is now a knight.

The Anglican goes next, and kneels before a Queen, and says, "I solemnly do swear my allegience to the Crown, and will remain its humble servant for as long as my days have number". The Queen repeats the process and commands him to arise.

Finally, it's the Jew's turn, but he can't remember the words. His mind goes blank. He kneels down, and begins to mumble under his breath, "Mah nishtanah halailah hazeh, Mikol haleilot..." and the Queen turns to her chancellor, raises her eyebrows and asks, "Why is this knight different from all other knights?")



Why was last night different from all other nights? Because it was the first Seder we'd celebrated since by grandfather passed late last year, and no-one knew what to do.

Seder (the Passover meal) has always been an oddly formal occasion in my family. My grandfather was very, very religiously conservative - probably the most orthodox you could be without, you know, actually being Orthodox - and so high holidays were always celebrated very solemnly. No hymns for us - no lively debate around the dinner table - no banter over the passages of interpretation. The Haggadah was always read in Hebrew. So the Seder for me was always much more grave and mysterious than it was for most people I know.

The table was always presided over my my grandfather, who was deaf and increasingly frail and demented. In between the ceremonial parts of the meal my grandmother would be back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, fretting. I don't think she has ever eaten more than two bites of any Seder meal. Anyway, things followed a pattern, and pattern becomes tradition, and tradition becomes law. We continued to do even the things that are generally just included to distract little kids - like hiding the matzo and demanding a prize for its return - long after all three of us girls were in our teens. In the last few years, as Papa grew increasingly frail, the roles became reversed, with us humouring him and playing along as he pretended not to see the square, flat serviette perched obviously on the mantlepiece, or behind a cushion. His face would break into a grin as we pulled away the cushion with a flourish, and bartered for glinting foil gold coins or lilac-wrapped blocks of Kosher Swiss chocolate.

This year there was none of that. My grandmother had a bossy Hungarian woman in the kitchen fussing over things, but she still didn't eat. No-one shouted and mimed our after-school activities to the head of the table. There was no maror, no potato dunked in salt, no wine to dip our little fingers into. There was no Hebrew, no arguments in Hungarian across the dinner table so that the kids don't understand. In another world my dad would have taken over the ceremony, but he left the shul at seventeen and never looked back. So we decided to just have a quiet dinner - my parents, my sisters, Helen, who my dad has taken to calling the Fourth Daughter, and my nagyi and her sister.

It was pleasant, but breaking with tradition after all those years is still disquieting. Towards the end, in the hospitals wards, the hospice, with the smell of antiseptic and the cheerless painting, the intubation, the drips, the dementia, it seemed better that Papa goe quickly. We couldn't imagine his anguish at conducting the Seder from a hospital bed, and frankly he was so out of touch with reality by the end that I don't think he would have been able to.

When we were young and he was babysitting, he would sneak us chocolate wafers. He worked in the schmatte trade and could fold a shirt beautifully. He refused to talk about Hungary or the war until he had Holocaust flashbacks two years ago, last Seder, and we found out that his sister died at Auschwitz with her children. My sister is named after her, although my father didn't realise at the time. When he rang to say it was a baby girl, Papa cried. He worked in the Kodak factory after immigrating, almost every day, for a year. He always called my dad's friends by their full names. His pants had creases down the front, precise. He would poke us in the back to make us sit up straight and gave us horsie bites that left bruises. He didn't know his own strength. I miss him.

Papa died on Rosh Hashanah - the Jewish New Year. He was in a coma but I'd like to believe he'd been holding on in order to go out with a little symbolism. Patterns make tradition, and you break with law, and traditions become memories. This Seder felt strange. For many reasons.