Ask Me a Story, Tell Me Your Freedom

Props support our storytelling, too.

Passover is a storyteller's holiday.

Everyone gathered at the table is called on to "see" that they themselves have come out of the narrow place of slavery into an expansive freedom. This creative remembering is drawn out of us through the Haggadah, a book whose very name means "the telling" but does not actually ever get to the business of telling any story. Rather, the Haggadah is a book that prompts us to tell the story, or rather stories, of the holiday.

Those of us who gather at a Seder table every year (sometimes twice or more) work our way through an orderly array of prayers, and a somewhat disorderly array of symbolic acts and questions that amount to nothing less than a long evening of storytelling prompts.

Our first radical act of the evening, departing radically from a regular Shabbat dinner, arrives early and emphatically - we must dip greens, symbolic of the season, in salty water, symbolic of nothing less than emotion. Are we seriously meant to do so with as few words as a blessing for eating the greens? The basic Haggadah simply says that we dip greens in salt water, bless, and eat. But who can resist the question that invokes? Not any Jew I know, for whom questions are as autonomic as breathing.

Still, we haven't arrived at the youngest child's query, "How is this night different from all other nights?" The notorious Four Questions, commonly written as one line with a question mark followed by four lines ending in periods, don't arrive until after we have blessed and drunk our first cup of wine - while leaning on pillows - and after we have washed our hands, dipped our greens in salt water, blessed and eaten them, uncovered a plate of matzah, broken the middle cracker in half, wrapped one in a napkin and begun the magic of making it disappear until late in the night.

By this time, just writing this, I'm simply itchy with (no, not the lice from the plagues) questions!

What? Why?! Where? Why? What did you just do? What just happened? Why????

As a storyteller, as a writer, I feel the words tickling my tongue and fingers - the desire to respond to this amazing series of prompts, of question-makers, of story-guides.

How many ways does the Haggadah encourage us to tell the story that it never tells?

There are the ritual acts and the symbolic objects strewn across the table, from Seder Plate to the salt water and matzah, not to mention Elijah's cup; and more recent symbols from an orange to Miriam's cup.

There are the questions: not just the Four Questions, but the Four Children - consisting of four biblical quotes containing three questions and a non-question, all prompts about how to tell the story. And each an opportunity for type casting family members as "wise" or "wicked" or "simple."

There is a listing of plagues, without any real context - and the fabulous removal of wine (read "joy") at the listing of each plague, lest we rejoice in the suffering of any human being.

There are intriguing dialogues between ancient rabbis.

There are the songs. Dayenu, Had Gadya, Who Knows One (more questions and answers!), and more!

I have hardly exhausted the list. But you get the idea. From this one evening alone (or two), I could, as a writer, have enough prompts to keep me busy at least long enough to get me through the long trek through the wilderness, through the counting of the Omer (oh, and there's that) to the next holiday filled with symbolism, Shavuot, when we receive Torah.

What story or stories are we meant to tell with all of these prompts?

"In every generation, every person must see him/herself as having left Mitzrayim," a narrow place of slavery under a harsh taskmaster. Each of us!

What stories are we meant to tell? We are meant to tell the story of our freedom. Each of us. Every generation at the Seder, indeed every individual, will have a unique story or set of stories to tell. Each of us will likely to tell the "original" story differently, flavored by the way we have learned it, and influenced by the stories we have, whether we tell them or are even conscious of them, of our own experiences of narrowness and oppression, expansion and freedom.

And why - what is the purpose of all this prompting rather than telling?

I have one idea: the Seder is a family or communal opportunity to share - to tell or think our stories of personal oppression, and to free ourselves spiritually by finding the shared experience, even of different oppressions. In Torah, the Israelites don't cry out under the oppression until after Moshe kills the Egyptian taskmaster, though they had been enslaved and oppressed for many years.

Perhaps we need the prompts of the Seder to remind us to look for the narrow places in our own lives, to cry out and be recognized, and to seek and do the work involved in becoming free. I know I am thinking about it differently this year than I have in past years, and have been prompted to a whole new layer of understanding and storytelling.

So at your seder, I hope you will ask your companions for a story and tell them your own.
May the season bring you insight into your own story, and may you be free to rejoice.
A zissen Pesach - with blessings for a sweet Passover.

Torah and Tigger - Finding Community

Torah and Tigger: Creative Reading

Perhaps a year ago, I took this picture of the bag of "groceries" my son brought me during some free play time. It contained, among other things, a Tigger book and a stuffed Torah. 

There is meaning in everything - and there is most definitely a connection for me between the imagination that leads to a story like Winnie the Pooh, and the creative reading that makes Torah a personal experience.  

When we come to Leviticus, as we do this week with Parashat Vayikra, and we jump straight into the old, earthy, sacrificial system, the blood and guts - it might be time for a little creative reading.

(Maybe that's why we go back and read the Exodus stories again, now, in preparation for Passover - so we have something else to occupy our minds with through the sacrificial readings.)

But perhaps Tigger can teach us something about how to approach Leviticus. Tigger is a hopeful creature - and a very social one at that. In The Tigger Movie (2000), Tigger searches desperately for other tiggers, looking through the woods for his family tree. He loses sight of the circle of friends around him, his community-family - who try lovingly to help him find (and even understand) family, even as it means he is looking away from them.

The book of Leviticus is a biblical, priestly attempt at understanding and creating a cohesive family unit out of a dozen tribes and reportedly a couple of million people (600,000 able-bodied men, plus women, elders, and children). We may not feel a particular connection to the sacrificial system - it may, indeed, rub against our contemporary sensibilities (against killing animals unnecessarily, in favor of cleanliness and community conversation). But we can nonetheless learn something - both from Leviticus itself, and from the evolution of the system presented there to our present day Jewish practice. Because we Jews don't make burnt offerings anymore, but we do still have community!

The book of Leviticus starts right in with אדם כי יקריב מכם קורבן "When a person brings a sacrifice..." (Lev. 1:2). When, not if - and the general term of אדם, a man, but easily read as "a person." Skip the details of how to bring that sacrifice, for the moment - and come to the list of "unwitting" trespass - of the law designed to sustain community.

The unwitting part is, I think, important here. If we do not intend to neglect or cause harm, are we liable? The reminder here is that our actions, witting or unwitting, impact community. Like the proverbial pillow whose feathers cannot be retrieved, or the ripples flowing out from the impact of the stone in the pond - our actions fly or ripple out into the community, irretrievably. We must do something to change the impact, to heal it or sooth it, regardless of intent in the action itself.

Tigger does not realize the impact on his friends until he sees that they have costumed themselves as (spoiler alert) tiggers, in order to help him feel loved. He is fortunate not to have lost his friends in his moment of neglect of them.

When the Temple was destroyed, the sages wisely transitioned the sacrificial system into a prayer system. Each person remains responsible for prayer, but while some prayers can be recited in solitary, a handful require a minyan of ten adults, thus encouraging community connection. As Rabbi Maurice Harris puts it, in his book, Leviticus: You Have No Idea, "The newly designed religion [of the post-Temple period] valued literacy and excelled at maintaining communication between diaspora communities."

In the contemporary Jewish world it seems that the current community model of synagogues and JCCs as community gathering places is, at minimum, not reaching a great many of our Jewish population. I will not tackle this extensively here, but I will say that I was reminded this week in a conversation that Leviticus indeed points us to an evolving community model, and that we are responsible for maintaining communication even (especially?) with those looking outward, as Tigger was looking away from his Hundred Acre Woods community, and for active contemporary reconstruction. 

Stranger In My Native Land

Seven months ago, I moved back to Seattle after 24 years away.

You have to understand that this whole city is home, to me. In many ways, the place I live now is less home than other parts of the city, but still I have my childhood connections here. My parents sold my childhood home right after my wedding, more than a dozen years ago. And sometimes I find myself drifting about the question, "where is home, exactly?"

From the synagogue that my husband and I joined, and our son is growing up in, I drive westbound, past the avenue (in Seattle, that's a north-south road, with "streets" running east-west) that would take you to the synagogue I grew up at -- an avenue that feels more like home than most of the other roads I am driving on, though I rarely actually drive on it anymore.

Bridge I knew in high school, never knowing there is a
beautiful walking path underneath, which I now enjoy.

Continuing westbound takes me past some places becoming more familiar, including a café / bookstore that I have recently taken a liking to, and ultimately right past my high school. Now, memories are evoked as I pass by not only the school, but also places -- stores (all but one now closed, and that one moved across the street), into which we used to occasionally venture, or mostly climb behind to explore things high school students sometimes do. Some days, emotions that kept me from moving back to Seattle all those 24 years rise up -- and, if you are nearby and my car window is down, you might hear me laugh as I pass by, or you might hear me cry.

On westbound I go, past one of the first Thai restaurants I ate at, thirty years ago -- now there are gazillions in Seattle, and we have tried three in our neighborhood, with one repeater. The two other early Thai restaurants I went to regularly are gone.

Continuing from there, I cross into much less familiar territory, soon turning southward onto one of the main roads of my "new" neighborhood. I recognize the names of avenues and streets, but not the roads themselves. A mile down I will turn westward again, almost home. In this neighborhood, I took ballet as a kid (I was even in The Nutcracker one year); Mr. Darrah, the best taxi driver in the whole world, would pick me up at school and bring me to my lessons, or pick me up at lessons and drive me home. We didn't have a car when I was a kid, and as I got older I would ride the bus through this neighborhood, sometimes stopping for a movie at the cinema whose popcorn smells now waft through our kitchen window. The little bit of familiarity I have with this neighborhood -- parents of dear high school friends live a few blocks over, and a dear friend, may she rest in peace, lived just around the corner -- does not shake the deep feeling of unfamiliarity.

This is strange, to me, to drive every day down an unfamiliar road in the city I grew up in, to live in a neighborhood that I know and don’t know, and after seven months I’m not sure if it is me or the city who is the stranger.

Probably it is a little bit of both. The city has grown and changed in my absence: restaurants and stores have turned over, closed, been torn down completely (most of these changes I followed in my annual pilgrimages home). I am just discovering some places that existed, that indeed I was right on top of, all along. Businesses, start-ups, have popped up and down, some have boomed, the population has exploded. Seattle's Jewish population has soared. 

I am close to an anomaly, a native Seattleite, nearly everywhere I go -- and yet, I question my right to call myself a native, though clearly I am. I was born at Swedish hospital on First Hill; I lived the first 19 years and 10 months of my life on Capitol Hill; all of my primary education through high school, and some college credits, happened in the limits of the city; I even had grandparents who lived here! But I lived for eleven years in Ohio and Indiana, six in Philadelphia, five in New Hampshire, and two in Connecticut, not to mention three summers abroad.

So call me a stranger in my native land, sometimes more at home than I could possibly imagine, and sometimes lost in neighborhoods I know well. Sometimes I know the name of and have strong memories of a person I am encountering, but they don't have the same context for me as I have for them -- that in fact their context of me is either me as a child, or more often my parents and not me at all.

I am profoundly happy to be back, to have weekly time with my parents, to be finding my way in this city and its Jewish community, both of us having grown up in the time since I left. Even in those moments of strangerhood or nostalgia or both. Seattle continues to grow, much to the delight of my son, who will never be a native (all of the construction has slowed us down, more to watch with excitement than because of traffic redirections), and I hope I will, too -- in and with my native city.

Purim Lies and the World We Create

"I had to decide whether to lie or tell the truth," I heard someone say this week about creating a Purim play to share with kids.

Ultimately, this person chose to "lie," to not tell the truth about what the Megillah really says. "It reads like a Harlequin novel," she said, not without merit - and not even bringing up how we reduce/remove the violence.

My initial instinct with regard to the "lying" was, "is it really lying?" But to be honest, I often  feel the same way - that I am lying, or not telling the real story - and not just at Purim, but throughout the cycle of Torah reading and holiday celebrations.

When I was a kid, we sang "Oh, once there was a wicked, wicked man...he would have murdered all the Jews." I did not hear that song once, this year, in the celebration of Purim at the day school where I teach, in my child's preschool. I included it in Purim celebrations as a congregational rabbi, a few years ago, received by a palpable tension among parents.

When political correctness (PC) came into vogue in the 90s, it instantly became a joke in itself. We have followed it with helicopter parenting, and now parents calling the police on other parents for letting their children walk alone to/from school and in the neighborhood. In elementary school, I walked alone and with friends to school, park, and neighboring homes within a few blocks of my own Capitol Hill, Seattle home. Did I encounter creeps out there in the small world I traversed? Yes, I did. And as a result, I have a much stronger sense of what the world is, I think, really like.

What world do we make when we shield and protect our children from knowledge and experience of violence, even as it is found in our wisdom traditions, from Torah (bible) to fairy tales and folk song?

Our wisdom stories are there to teach us not only about the glory of the good, and how to behave well in the world. They are also there to teach us to protect ourselves from the likes of Esther's Haman, or Hansel and Gretel's witch, or the Three Little Pigs' wolf.

On the other hand, as a parent, I am astonished at the violence in old cartoons from my generation (and before), and I find myself not wanting to share a lot with my son. I'm talking everything from gratuitous bopping on the head from character to character in such cartoons as Woody Woodpecker, a staple of my childhood, to the violence of the superheroes of comic book and television fame, let alone the war propaganda of old Donald Duck and Three Pigs & Wolf cartoons. Even the good guys are violent in so many of these, and I find myself cringing.

What I wonder is, what are the benefits of the old-style stories with at least some violence? What does it teach our children when Haman is hanged at his own gallows? What does it say about us when we glorify this with a whole holiday? Yes, I know, the holiday is more than that; but as I have heard said/sung about so many Jewish holidays, "they tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat." What does it teach our children when we eliminate the violent sections of our stories (let alone the sexist, not to mention sexual parts) in our telling them to children, and then they go and read the whole book as teens or adults?

But what happens in each generation when someone stands up and says, "I felt like I had to lie"? What value are we teaching with this?

Are our old wisdom books passé? Should we stop reading them altogether? Do we continue to change them for younger children, but intentionally teach the more difficult parts to young teens, even as part of sex(ual) education and tikkun olam (for the violence), so that they don't discover it on their own and feel "lied to"?

How do we intentionally make use of the more difficult parts of our stories -- and our neighborhoods -- to help our children become wise world navigators? Or do we need to consider tossing these wisdom stories out entirely and creating new gentler stories?

I don't have an answer. Indeed, inside my head there continues to be a jury of my younger ("lied to") self, my parent self, my rabbi self, my anthropologist self, and an odd assortment of other voices debating the various values and issues associated with how we pass down wisdom about good and not-good in our world, how we teach caution, and how we make the world a more loving and peaceful place with less violence, less danger, and yes, less patriarchy (or frankly less domination by any one class of people).