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.