The Yada Yada Prayer Group Gets Rolling

by Neta Jackson

  Except it wasn’t—which I discovered when I got home and looked at the calendar. Spring vacation began next Friday—which “just happened” to be Good Friday. Mm-hm. The Chicago school system’s way of accommodating a religious holiday without risking a lawsuit.

  Okay. So how to sell my family? Denny was out; he’d be at the JDC Thursday night—with the car. Maybe Chanda could pick us up in her monster SUV. But getting a ride was the easy part. Convincing Amanda and Josh to come with me, when I didn’t have a clue what to expect, was the bigger challenge. But I had one ace up my sleeve.

  I called Delores. “Are you, um, coming to the Garfields’ for that Seder thing on Thursday with the kids?”

  “No, I am sorry, mi amiga. I work three to ten this week. But Edesa said she would bring the niños. José will help her.”

  Bingo! I hung up, smiling. That’s what I wanted to know. My kids would come.

  I tried to keep my students on task that week, but it was a losing battle. They could smell spring vacation in the air. But the idea of sharing holiday traditions, as we’d done at Yada Yada Sunday night, might keep their interest. Was I pushing the line between church and state too far? Shouldn’t be, if I included other faiths. I did a search online but came up zero for any Muslim holy days during the month of April. But I asked Caleb Levy to come prepared to tell us about the Jewish Passover, and asked for other volunteers to describe how they celebrated the Christian “holy days” of Good Friday and Easter. That sparked a sea of waving of hands—the usual litany about yellow marshmallow chicks, Easter egg hunts, and the Easter bunny.

  Mercedes LaLuz waved her hand. “My mama says there’s no such thing as the Easter bunny. Easter is when Jésus Christo got raised from the dead.”

  Lamar Jones snorted. “Another fairy tale.”

  “Just a minute, Lamar.” I chose my words carefully. “For some people, Easter is a way to celebrate that spring is coming. But Christians believe something very important happened many years ago at this time of year. Jesus Christ, whom Christians believe is the Son of God, was killed by His enemies, buried, and rose from the dead—and that’s why they celebrate.” How am I doing, God?

  But before I got in too deep, I steered a corner. “The Jewish faith also celebrates Passover at this time of year. Caleb, can you tell us what ‘Passover’ means?”

  Caleb walked to the front of the room, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. I tried to keep a straight face. This kid was destined to be a college professor. “Well. Thousands of years ago, the Jewish people were slaves in Egypt.” The class got quiet. “God chose Moses to lead the people out of slavery. But King Pharaoh didn’t want to let them go. So God sent all kinds of terrible plagues—frogs and lice and flies and the Nile River turned to blood.”

  “Blood! Eww.”

  Caleb looked triumphant. “But Pharaoh still wouldn’t let the slaves go free. So God got mad and sent the Angel of Death to kill the oldest son in every house. But Moses told the Jews that if they splashed the blood of a lamb on the door of their houses, the Angel of Death would pass over that house and nobody would die. That scared King Pharaoh so much he finally let the Israelite people go. That’s why Jewish families celebrate Passover, to remember how God rescued them from slavery.”

  Caleb dipped his head like a little bow and sat down. For a moment, the class stared open-mouthed. Then they started to clap.

  “Wow!” Bowie Garcia shouted. “They oughta make that into a video game!”

  I KICKED MYSELF LATER. Why didn’t I point out that there is a connection between the Christian celebration of Good Friday and the Jewish celebration of Passover? “Jesus was a Jew, and He and His disciples were celebrating the Passover meal in Jerusalem the same night He was captured and killed by His enemies.” Would have been educational, that’s for sure.

  Funny thing was, I never thought much about that connection. Most of the Christians I knew didn’t either. After all, that last Passover meal had become “The Lord’s Supper” or “Communion”—what we celebrated once a month in the church I grew up in by eating a broken cracker and a plastic thimble of grape juice or wine to represent the broken body and blood of Jesus. I certainly didn’t connect it much with the Jewish Passover. But Ruth had said the connection was built in from the beginning . . .

  I found myself looking forward to celebrating Seder with Yada Yada.

  Of course, Ruth managed to rope all of us into the preparations. “Jodi,” she’d barked into the phone early that week with no preamble. “You want you should make potato kugel or matzo ball soup? Never mind. Yo-Yo can pick up some kugel from the Bagel Bakery. Make the soup. Just follow the recipe on the back of the box of matzo meal. Cook a chicken first; you need chicken broth.”

  Two minutes later, the phone rang again. “Add carrots, celery, and some of the chicken. Just make sure you have plenty of broth to cook the matzo balls. And tell the other Yada Yada sisters to pray for Ben.”

  Pray what for Ben? Didn’t he want us to come? And how many was I cooking for, anyway? I only had one large soup pot, so I decided one pot would have to do. So Wednesday night found me boiling a large stewing hen with carrots and celery. When I got home from school on Thursday, I mixed matzo meal with egg and a bit of broth and dropped the balls into the boiling broth. By the time Chanda tooted her horn out front, I had a pot of hot matzo ball soup—I hoped. What did I know?

  Josh and Carl Hickman were catching a ride from work with Peter Douglass and Avis, so Amanda and I and the soup pot climbed into the Yukon Denali along with Chanda’s three kids, Rochelle and Conny, and Florida and her two youngest. Eleven passengers. Still two over the nine-passenger limit for this huge SUV.

  “You need a bigger car,” I umphed, squeezing in between Dia George and Carla Hickman, and setting the soup pot, wrapped in a heavy bath towel, on the floor.

  Chanda, in the driver’s seat, grinned into the rearview mirror. “Mi know dat. Driving dis baby is fun. Mi should be a city bus driver!”

  When we pulled up in front of the Garfields’ home, the house already looked jam-packed through the front window. Inside, a string of card tables and collapsible portable tables snaked from the dining room, through the front hallway, and into the living room, covered with white plastic tablecloths, and set with colorful paper plates, matching paper napkins, and clear plastic tumblers. Tall white candles, small bouquets of flowers, and bottles of wine and sparkling grape juice on each table added a festive touch. Laughter and curiosity filled the small, brick bungalow.

  With a touch of guilt, I realized I hadn’t called anybody to “pray for Ben,” as Ruth had asked. But he seemed comfortable enough to me, teasing the kids and showing off the twins, each one sporting a new tooth and matching crawlers. Only Isaac’s raspberry-colored facial birthmark told them apart.

  “Sit! Sit!” Ruth beamed when everyone had arrived. She set a china plate displaying several food items on the table in front of two chairs in the middle of the long line of mismatched tables as Ben, wearing his traditional yarmulke, joined her.

  We all found places to sit. Counting kids and adults, there must’ve been thirty of us! I glanced around. Josh was holding baby Havah, a sight that unsettled me a little bit since he and Edesa were sitting together with the Enriquez kids clustered around them. They looked like a family with a passel of kids. Sheesh, Jodi! Don’t go there.

  As parents shushed children, Ruth solemnly lit all the candles, murmuring a Jewish blessing. Then Ben Garfield cleared his throat. “Welcome to our Passover meal. It’s not often we share this meal with Gentiles. In fact, in my case, never.” That got a laugh. “This meal is called a Seder, which means ‘order’—but hardly applies to the raucous Jewish family I grew up in.” Another laugh. We were starting to relax.

  Ben picked up a set of pages stapled together. “You can follow along the simple Seder service beside your plate. But you’re getting off easy. Two nights ago, we celebrated the first night of Passover with my relatives, using the traditi
onal Haggadah. Thirty-two pages it is—in Hebrew! Sixty-four when they include the English translation.”

  Now groans mixed with the giggles. Ruth poked him to get on with it.

  “All right, all right.” Ben cleared his throat again, reading from his Seder service. “ ‘We celebrate the Passover in obedience to God’s command in the Torah’—that’s the Old Testament, to you goyim. ‘In days to come, when your children ask you, What does this mean? say to them, With a mighty hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.’ ”

  “Hallelujah!” Florida said. “Guess that gives your people an’ my people somethin’ in common—’cept our people was freed less’n a hundred fifty years ago. We still tryin’ to put it all behind us.”

  Ben scowled. Ruth smoothed over the interruption. “To remember is good, so we can thank God for His deliverance.” She nudged her husband.

  Ben cleared his throat again. To his credit, he did a neat summary of the story up to the point where the Egyptian Pharoah refused Moses’ demand to let the Jewish slaves go. “For this next part,” he said, “everybody needs to have a little wine or grape juice in their glass—but don’t drink it.”

  Bottles were tipped, filling the plastic glasses half an inch. Now Ben told the story of the ten plagues. “When I call out one of the plagues, dip your finger in your wine, and flick it onto your plate while you repeat it. Ready?” He dipped his own finger. “Blood!”

  Fingers dipped all around the table, flicking wine or grape juice onto the paper plates. “Blood!” we echoed.

  “Frogs!” Flick, flick. “Lice!” . . . “Flies!” . . . The kids were really getting into it now. “Boils!” Flick, flick . . . “Hail!” . . . “Locusts!” The shouts were getting louder. “Darkness!” . . . “Death of the firstborn!”

  The tables suddenly got quiet. It didn’t seem fun anymore.

  “Finally,” Ben said solemnly, “Pharoah let the Jewish people go.”

  Ben continued leading us through the shortened Seder service. We all turned our pages. “Who’s the youngest child here? Not counting Havah and Isaac. They can’t read. Dia, sweetheart? You want to ask that question on the next page?”

  Seven-year-old Dia squinted at the paper. “Too many hard words.”

  “I’ll do it!” Ten-year-old Michael Smith, sitting beside Nony, waved his hand wildly. “Here? Okay. ‘Why is this night different from all other nights? On all other nights we eat all kinds of bread, but tonight we only eat matzo.” He looked up. “What’s matzo?” His mother pointed to the matzo crackers on the table. “Oh. Okay. ‘On all other nights we eat many kinds of vegetables and herbs, but tonight we only eat bitter herbs.’ ” He made a face. “ ‘On all other nights, we don’t dip one food into another, but tonight we dip the parsley in salt water, and we dip the bitter herbs in . . . in . . .’ What’s that word?”

  “Charoset,” prompted Ruth. The “ch” was guttural. She beamed at Nonyameko. “A boytshikl he is, Nony. You should be proud.”

  Dia pouted. “I wanted to read. I just didn’t know them big words.”

  Ben opened his mouth but Ruth took over. “Questions are asked at every Seder—it’s tradition. So . . . feel free! But first we give answers to Michael’s questions.” She picked up the china plate in front of her and pointed to the three matzo crackers. “Matzo reminds us that when the Jews left Egypt, they had no time to bake bread with yeast.”

  “Tastes like cardboard . . . just my opinion,” Ben cracked behind his hand.

  Ruth ignored him, continuing to explain the items on the plate. The sprig of parsley dipped in salt water, “a reminder of tears shed during slavery.” The choroset, a mixture of chopped apples, nuts, and wine, “a reminder of the clay used to make bricks for Pharoah’s buildings, which was eaten with bitter herbs”—she pointed to a mound of ground horseradish—“because our days in Egypt were bitter.”

  “What’s that bone for?” Yo-Yo pointed at the plate.

  Ben picked it up. “A lamb bone—”

  “I know that part!” Carla interrupted. “Caleb Levy told us at school. God was going to kill all the firstborn boys in every family, but He secretly told the slave people to kill a lamb and smear its blood all over the doors of their house. When the Angel of Death saw the blood, it was s’posed to pass over that house. Pass over, get it?”

  Ben grinned. “Very good, bubeleh. Now, let’s do the afikomen—”

  “Wait, wait. Back up a minute,” Becky said. “I’ve been reading my Bible, like ya tol’ me to, Avis, and that John the Baptist guy called Jesus ‘the Lamb of God.’ ” She turned to Ben. “So was that blood-of-the-lamb thing, ya know, some kind of prophecy about Jesus or something?”

  Nods and murmurs went around the tables.

  Ben colored. “Uh, well, now . . .” He glared at Ruth helplessly. And suddenly I realized why Ruth had wanted us to pray for Ben—that he would see the truth behind the Seder meal he had celebrated every year of his sixty-odd years of life.

  Oh God! I’m sorry I didn’t pray, sorry I forgot to ask others to pray. But I’m praying now . . .

  Ruth whispered to Ben, and handed him the three matzo crackers from the plate. “All right,” he growled. “Let’s move on so we can eat. The middle matzo we break”—which he proceeded to do—“and wrap it in a special cloth, and hide it.” He wrapped the broken piece of matzo in a cloth napkin. “This is called the afikomen. Now . . .” His voice took on its former bounce. “All the children close your eyes. Tight. No peeking!”

  Laughing, all the adults sitting near children made sure they didn’t peek, while Ben snuck around the two rooms pretending to hide the napkin here, then there. I never did see where he finally hid it.

  “After the meal,” Ruth said brightly, “the children may hunt for the afikomen. The one who finds it can hold it for ransom until Ben forks over some money.”

  Yo-Yo butted in. “Wait. We can ask questions, right? So, like, do the three matzos represent that Trinity thing—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit? Ben just broke the middle one—is that what Jesus was doing when He broke the bread at Passover and said, ‘This is My body, broken for you’?”

  José grinned. “Whoa. And then broken matzo gets buried . . .”

  “I know, I know!” Cedric Hickman waved his hand. “An’ when we find it, Mister Garfield has to pay a ransom, ’cause Jesus paid the ransom for our sins! ’Cept Mister Garfield ain’t God, but I guess that’s okay.”

  We couldn’t help it; we broke up with laughter. Even shy Carl Hickman had to chuckle. Ruth beamed. “Are these children smart, or what?” But Ben looked flustered, as if he was losing control of the situation.

  Ruth said, “Now eat! Eat!” as if it was an order. My matzo ball soup came out hot from the kitchen, along with sturdy paper bowls. Then roasted chicken, potato kugel, and cooked carrots swimming in butter and dill. We laughed, ate, made faces at the gefilte fish, and passed the babies from lap to lap.

  All except Ben. Ben had turned quiet.

  37

  Next year in Jerusalem’?” Denny raised a curious eyebrow as I told him how the Seder service had ended, with the traditional cry of displaced Jews all over the world. “And how many glasses of wine did you say you had? Four?” He was clearly enjoying goading me.

  We were sitting at the dining room table, while Denny finished the plate of chicken and potato kugel I’d brought home and heated up for him. I rolled my eyes. “The wine was mostly symbolic. Little sips. Seriously, Denny. I wish you could’ve been there. It was . . . I can’t explain it. It helped me understand Jesus the Messiah, the fulfillment of prophecy, in a new way. But Ben got pretty uncomfortable with some of the questions Becky and Yo-Yo asked. Hope he’s not mad.”

  “Hm. Sorry I missed it.” He got up and tossed the paper plate in the trash. “Sorry I missed your matzo ball soup too. Oh, before I forget. The principal at the JDC school would like to meet with you personally—tomorrow if possible. They’re hoping to pull off this
play in the next couple of weeks.” He grinned at me. “You’re on, Jodi.”

  I stared at him. It wasn’t as if I was surprised. Avis said she’d gotten a call from the JDC, wanting a reference. My background check had checked out—second time this year. But hearing Denny say, “You’re on, Jodi,” made my mouth go dry.

  “Uh, sure, I could go tomorrow. It’s Good Friday, no school—oh. You know that. Can I get there by el? Where am I supposed to go? What’s the principal’s name again? Do I need to take anything with me? Or . . . anything I shouldn’t take with me? Do they want me to actually start tomor—”

  Denny reached out and put his fingers on my mouth to stop my prattling. “Hey, hey. Tell you what. I’ll go with you tomorrow, okay? We’ll go by el to map out the way; maybe some days you can take the car. We’ll figure it out. You’re going to do great, Jodi.” He pulled me out of my chair into an embrace. “I’m proud of you.”

  I let myself relax against Denny’s chest as his arms held me close. I wasn’t sure about “great.” But if Denny went with me tomorrow and helped me figure out where to go, that was definitely great.

  NO SCHOOL. The wonders of a Friday without the usual Baxter hurry-scurry made me feel delicious when I woke up. I no longer had to get up before everyone else to let Willie Wonka outside, either . . . though I’d give anything to feel his nose snuffling my hand once more, even if I did have to get up early, even on holidays. But today, I could go back to sleep . . .

  Then I remembered. I was going to the juvenile detention center today. Today, of all days, I definitely needed some prayer time!

  Coffee cup, Bible, and afghan in hand, I curled up in the recliner near the front windows. At times like these, I really did miss Wonka. His brand of loyalty meant I was never really alone in the house; he was always faithfully underfoot. Early mornings had been our special times—me in the recliner, Wonka splayed out on the floor under the footrest.