Charles Spicehandler, the investment banker patriarch, was beginning the seder by intoning the Kiddush. He was an investor for hedge funds and was able to live anywhere. After many years on the Upper East Side of New York, he and Judy had moved to Israel. Charles began to recite the familiar words and tune of the Kiddush prayer. Even at this distance from Grandmom Essie’s New York row house, the sound of the prayer made Wendy nostalgic. She should have gone back to the States for the holiday like many in her Fulbright group. It made her sad not to be with her family on Passover, squeezed into the narrow dining room with thirty relatives, eating Grandma Essie’s famous brisket and her sponge cake with sunken cheeks that was always served with strawberries on top. Her cousins were constantly joking around, kicking her under the table, changing the “He” for God to “She” with her for English readings. Family seders for the Goldbergs were chaotic affairs, older children “encouraging” or forcing—depending on your perspective—the younger ones to really sniff the horseradish since it was “so good, try some” and visiting dogs consuming the afikomen, or trotting in on key when it was time for the cup of Elijah. This was the first time her niece Margo, Lisa’s daughter, would be asking the four questions. But, Wendy had wanted to finish interviews and writing here, in case she wouldn’t be staying in Israel next year. And, she was excited about the trip she and Orly had planned to Eilat in a few days. Going to the beach with her favorite girlfriend or home to New York? Not much of a choice. Still, this was the first Passover she had spent away from her family. She had never seen a Haggadah without the Maxwell House imprint; at this seder each person had a different book.
The Spicehandlers’ Filipino maid brought a pitcher of water, a cup, and a towel first to Judy and Charles, and then around the table to the other guests. Charles took a piece of parsley from the seder plate in front of him. The seder plate was a Lucite container that stood upright, with Hebrew words on it in sterling silver letters in a modern typeface. On the side of the box for the matzoh were three glass dishes, tiered, one slightly farther out than the next and held up by silver wiring. The Hebrew on the container read, “Ha Lachma Anya”—“This is the bread of affliction,” Uri translated for her in a whisper and added that the seder plate had been designed by Ludwig Wolpert, a craftsman known for his infusion of modern design into Judaic objects. Wendy remembered the gallery in the Israel Museum that was filled with items intended, with their beauty, to amplify the sacredness of the rituals performed with them. Charles passed around the dish with the parsley, and the assembled guests dipped parsley in salt water and pronounced the blessing over the fruit of the earth. The maid returned with an assemblage of vegetables, plated for each person, the karpas course. Uri had warned Wendy that the seder would be long; eating early in the proceedings was a pleasant surprise. All baby vegetables for spring, Judy was explaining. Each plate displayed lightly steamed beets, carrots, parsnips, and frisée lettuce, exquisitely formed; a tasty vinaigrette was drizzled carefully on top. Wendy had never seen this produce in these shapes, so delicate, plattered with an attractive doily underneath, a print of a Persian rug, dark maroon with white and green designs woven in. She nervously grasped the salad fork, looking at which one the others were using, praying she had gotten the utensil right, and then whispering to Uri that the beets were delicious. She heard a clatter as another guest must have dropped the utensil first, and saw a second maid bring a new one to the Spicehandlers’ older neighbor. The maid also wielded a bottle of wine, and circulated, refilling the cups of all the guests.
As they began to eat the karpas, Judy told the assembled, “Karpas is also mentioned in the book of Esther, as a tapestry. I found these doilies reminiscent of tapesty for our course, since karpas, as a symbol, invites us to pass between the holidays, between Purim and Pesach.”
Oren Laniado, the artist, commented, “The two are so different though, Judy. Purim is . . . carnival, free, and Pesach, bound to tradition, stiff. Why the connection?”
Charles said, “To encourage us to incorporate a more free-form modality, a kind of play, into the seder. A seder has been compared to a tea ceremony, each aspect and moment designed to provoke an understanding, an emotion, with precision. But within that rigidity we need to remember the uncertainty of Purim; we can’t get too comfortable in our roles. We have to glide between certainty and uncertainty.”
“Are you going to throw nuts on the table now, Saba? You just said the seder was for play,” a four-year-old grandson burst out while his mother shushed him. The fond grandfather gave a smile and reached into his pocket for a handful of walnuts with their shells on that he rolled down the elegant table, towards the children. The clatter of the rolling nuts was startling in the stillness of the room.
Wendy was surprised to see his goofy grin while tossing the nuts and to hear him speak of gliding between roles. She didn’t expect someone so affluent and well situated to be thoughtful or profound. As they ate the salad, Judy asked the guests to introduce themselves to the group. The Spicehandlers’ adult daughter, Emanuella, was first. Wendy, eating and half listening, decided “Emanuella” was a plutocratic name, the heft of its many syllables able to be hoisted only by an incredibly wealthy person, a Hebrew equivalent of lavish Victorian names like Lavinia or Cordelia. Emanuella’s Israeli husband, Oded, and their three young children were next, and then the artist Laniado and his actor partner, Yehuda Dahan. Wendy and Uri were seated by a young American man who worked in Charles’s office, and a post-high school girl in Israel for the year from New York, whose parents had been Upper East Side friends of Judy and Charles, before they made aliyah. The company was rounded out by an older couple who lived in Yemin Moshe a few houses away. A recent knee surgery had prevented the husband from flying. They had planned to spend Pesach with one of their grown children on sabbatical abroad for the year, and their other children were vacationing with their sibling, so they came to the Spicehandlers’. Prompted by Judy, each person had to bring up a question they wanted to ask at the seder.
Wendy, who questioned people for a living, felt flustered. When it came her turn, she said, “How does one achieve a state of certainty? You mentioned Passover as a holiday when we have more certainty than on Purim. How is it achieved?” The actor, Yehuda, asked whether there are any questions too dangerous, threatening, or disruptive to ask. Uri asked whether questions such as are asked on Pesach can heal. The six-year-old grandson wanted to know if he’d get a prize for a good question, which all the guests laughed at and affirmed; he looked around, surprised at so much attention to what he saw as the only obvious thing to ask.
Charles uncovered the three matzot on the table. He asked his grandchildren what he was about to do and all three screamed, “Hide the afikomen; hide the afikomen.” He smiled and broke the middle matzah with a resounding crack. He waved the grandchildren into the kitchen and told them to help Graciela the maid while he hid the matzah.
Judy, taking over Charles’s role as leader while he was busy finding a good hiding spot, said, nodding to Oren, “Afikomen always reminds me of the negative space in a painting; you see as much from what is there as what is not.”
“Does hiddenness also enclose a form of presence?” the artist responded.
His partner concurred, “When we stage something, we have a view to maximize the negative space between the actors.”
Uri said, “I was reading a Haggadah by a French rabbi, Ouaknin. He sees the play of the afikomen on the seder night as way of acting out the question of the presence or absence of God in history. Confrontation with this question is an essential task of the Jew.”
Judy’s daughter Emanuella, said, “I like that. The childishness of hiding the afikomen reminds us of our own childishness in sometimes thinking of God as absent in history. But God will always let himself be found.”
“Eef we look,” her Israeli husband, Oded, said. “We must to look.”
Wendy wanted to add to the conversation but she wasn’t sure how. She was impressed with
Uri for this insight. “What would Freud say?” she said, just to say something, inane though it might be.
This was an opening for Oren to talk about his work, (In)Query. “You know, it is such a privilege, Judy to be here, having a seder with my painting. I think the spool and thread”—he pointed and all looked at the canvas—“zat is zee grandson’s game, fort-da, the coming and going, like the Jews and our afikoman, and the . . . life cycle. This is the first Pesach my mother has been dead, and I thought what will I do, what will the holiday be? It would be too painful to go to my aunt, or my brother, without my mother. When you invited us I was so pleased. To be with my Freud again . . . I think, em Vendy?” and at her nod, said, “Freud would say, with your friend, confront the question; truth can only be got at if the question is, em, confronting. How did he do hees analysis? He asked the questions. That is the power of the seder, our willing to continue to ask. I hope I convey the fragmentary state we are all in as we make the queries, it ees . . . em . . . destabilizing? yes, but we must to begin somewhere. And that is the genius of Freud; he vas villing to ask.”
Uri squeezed Wendy’s hand and said, “Wendy’s dissertation is all about asking. She is questioning baalei teshuvah about the process of their return. Questions hint at a lack, and she tries to find where that is. People don’t always like her questions.”
“Fascinating. Tell us about it,” said Judy, her best hostess gaze on Wendy.
Wendy wanted to shoot a look at Uri that would tell him, Why did you do this to me? But she was proud that he cared enough about her work to bring it up in this gathering. “I am looking for faultlines in the new identities that people take on. I want to see how, even though on the outside they may appear to be totally observant Orthodox Jews, fissures exist in their belief systems. The various facets of their personality may not be completely integrated.”
Oded, the religious Israeli, looked at her suspiciously. “You don’t like baalei teshuvah? It ees forbidden to remind a baal teshuvah of his life before his return. You don’t want to throw his sins in his face. It can cause his death.” Wendy looked at him, surprised. “The story of Rav Yohanan and Reish Lakish, you know it?” he continued.
Wendy nodded. He continued, “Em, Rav Yohanan met this poshea, how you say?”
Judy translated, “Sinner.”
“Ok, yes, seen-er, and he convince him, do teshuvah. One day, in the beit midrash, they talk weapons and Rav Yohanan say to his study partner, ‘A thief knows his tools. You know when the weapons are done.’ Reish Lakish, now a rabbi, say, “What good have you done me? There with thieves I was called master and here with rabbis I am called master.” Rav Yohanan became ill, and Reish Lakish also fall ill, em”—when he hesitated, his wife, Emanuella, interjected, “Fatally.”
Oded continued, “So, yes, the sister of Rav Yohanan, Reish Lakish’s wife, ask him to pray, to think of her the widow, the children, the orphans; he don’t listen. Reish Lakish dies and Rav Yohanan goes bee-serk, until the rabbis pray for him, for his death.”
“How tragic. What an awful story,” one of the guests added.
“Zees are the consequences of reminding the repentant one of his former life.”
“I’m not trying to create tragedy,” Wendy said in her defense. “I just want to see how people tell their stories, how the narrative unfolds.”
Ernst, the older neighbor with the bad knee, said, “At the seder itself, we are narrating the collective unconscious of am Yisrael, how we tell our tale. Do we begin with shevach or gnai?” Uri translated in a whisper for Wendy, noticed by Judy alone, “Praise or degradation,” as Ernst continued, “What is the way we wish to see our past? So, young lady, how do individuals tell their tales?”
“It depends,” Wendy responded. “Some do begin with degradation, drugs or alcohol, and move to ecstatic religion. And some begin with this desire to do more, draw closer, be more religious. Tales are told both ways.”
Charles returned to the table, his sequestering of the afikomen complete, rubbing his hands. “Call those kids back and let’s continue. This is the bread of affliction . . .” he read.
A moment later, Netanel, at six, the oldest grandson, returned. With a broad gap-tooth smile where his top middle teeth were missing, he said, “Saba, can I ask yet?”
His grandpa smiled indulgently and turned back to the group. “And now, the Mah Nishtanah. I bring you,” he said, waving his arms in the manner of a stage impressario, “Netanel Maoz.”
After a perfect rendition and many ohs, ahs, and claps, a prize was produced, an illustrated Mishnah Pesachim, laws of Passover. Netanel, looking as though he would never be more pleased with himself than at this moment, went to sit next to his mother. His youngest sibling, not to be outdone, climbed into her mother’s lap and started tugging at Emanuella’s necklace and then earrings, to her annoyance. Judy shot her daughter a look, as if to say, remove the child, but the daughter ignored her mother and let the almost-three-year-old keep yanking at her.
Charles held up a Haggadah for those assembled to see. “This is a visual depiction of the need to ask.”
The Yemin Moshe neighbor, Janine, said, “I can’t tell what that is,” screwing up her face in confusion.
As the book passed to each participant in turn, Wendy could see that the page contained four lines of text, the four questions. Each line contained a paper, cut with a word describing that question and a depiction of the side of a face in silhouette. A child’s profile faced a father’s, a wife faced a husband, a person alone faced himself, and two scholars faced each other. Though the book tottered gently over the wine glasses as it was being passed, a few quick saves ensured no spills, until the three-year-old almost upended one and was taken by her mother to another room.
Uri asked, “Charles, why do you think the questioning is so central to the enacting of the seder that someone must ask himself? How does one even ask oneself? It seems so ahhdd,” which Wendy realized after a minute was a British way of saying “odd.” Wendy was glad Uri asked this since it was on her mind also.
Charles replied, “The silhouettes are based on a passage from the Talmud in Pesachim, which makes clear questioning isn’t just for kids—scholars need to ask each other too. It is a technique, a prompt if you will, to move the seder, propel it forward. Unless there is a question, the story can’t be told.” Charles nodded to the maid holding a bottle of wine behind him to refill his cup, and gestured with his chin towards the table’s other empties that needed similar attention.
“If I may,” Yehuda Dahan interjected, “the question pushes one to tell the story properly, even to oneself. If there are no questions, the story won’t change. Indian philosophy has a concept of satyagraha, truth attachment. Those who are truth embodiers create small changes in society. If we want a true society, we must all be truth pursuers.”
Tanya, the post-high school student from New York, said, “But can’t we do that within halachic concepts? We don’t need Indian philosophy,” she said, screwing up her face as she spoke the words.
Wendy hadn’t spoken to Tanya yet, but had a feeling she could peg her. She was from the Upper East Side; Wendy guessed that she attended the Zemer School, a hybrid of East Side prep school and Modern Orthodox co-ed yeshiva. The school was presided over by three generations of a family of rabbis who, when asked about Judaism in America, had responded that in America, New York was the only city sufficiently Jewish; in New York City theirs was the only synagogue to get things right, and of the families at their synagogue, only they themselves were properly observant. Their attitude set the tone for their congregants: total insularity. Wendy had known a few kids from this school at Columbia and always found them incorrigibly smug, unable to understand there were alternate ways to approach Judaism or the world. It was a world where all outside it was pushed away.
“Why can’t we use things from other cultures to help understand our own? The rabbis of the Gemara knew Greek philosophy and science. Why can’t we ?” Oren defended his
partner, Yehuda.
Tanya retorted, “We don’t need other things. Torah is enough. Hafakh bah, hafakh bah di koola bah.”
Judy, a good hostess, translated, “Turn it over, and turn it over for all is in it. The Chapters of the Fathers.” Wendy didn’t know whether she was the only one who needed translation. She didn’t notice that Uri gave Judy a big smile for that note of inclusiveness, touched that Judy was trying to translate for Wendy. What would happen next in this conversation—oddly disordered in what was supposed to be such an orderly ritual, seder itself meaning “order”—she knew from Atarah’s class that week.
“We need the paradigm shifters. That is why I painted Freud. He was willing to shift the level of conversation in the culture through asking his questions,” Oren said.
Oded added, “But that is our tradition; we learn from shakla ve’tarya, the em . . .”
Emanuella translated, “Give and take. Like the story you mentioned before, Oded, about Rav Yohanan and Reish Lakish. When Reish Lakish died, Rav Yohanan was upset not to have a colleague who would come and challenge his ideas, raise objections to things that he said. That’s why we want Oren’s Freud to watch over our seders.” She smiled at the artist and he nodded his thanks back.
Judy said, “Every culture needs artists who will look beyond already constructed categories, to move things ahead to another level.”
Oren put his hands behind his head, linked them, and leaned back. “You know, this In(Query) is in a series with some other pieces. One of them, The Beautiful of Jerusalem, shows Rabbi Yohanan, the same rabbi whose beauty is described as being like a silver cup filled with red pomegranate seeds, rimmed with roses. There is another story about him going to visit a sick rabbi and exposing his arm for light in the dank room. The sick man started to weep and explained that his weeping was because of the beauty of the arm, that it was mortal and would one day become rot, decomposing. My painting is in still life tradition of Western art, depicting beautiful objects along with decay. In the middle of the painting Reish Lakish is leaping toward the exposed beautiful light-filled arm of Rabbi Yohanan. The periphery is surrounded by timepieces and peonies, the fattest, most luscious roses that are beginning to fade around the edges. Then I have insects, a silver goblet, and pomegranate seeds. I wanted to visually explore what decay means, to us as humans, not just to objects as in the still life tradition. If we don’t have the moving ahead of questions, the necessary ones, all will deteriorate, nothing will change. The moment of Reish Lakish’s risk, his leap towards the other, is the fulcrum around which everything else occurs.”
Questioning Return Page 33