“This Matzah that we eat for what reason?
Because the dough of our fathers did not have time to become leavened before
the King of kings, the Holy One,
blessed be He, REVEALED Himself
to them and redeemed them.”
* * *
There are times of the year that are so special they
are etched into our memory forever. Pesach is one of them. The pre-Pesach
cleaning, the burning of the chometz, and the smells coming out of the
kitchen. I would like to reminisce about the Passovers, especially the Seders,
in my life.
Growing Up in
Baltimore
I remember only the
last Pesach Seder we had in our home. We were living at the time on Milford Mill Road. I was probably not yet
in first grade. All I remember was that my mother, who was a perfectionist,
worked so hard to remove every possible atom of dirt and chometz that my father said he would never allow her to knock
herself out like that again. It was the last Seder we had at home.
The next Seder was
at our Aunt Sophie’s house, on Park Heights Avenue in Lower Park Heights,
across from the Agudas Achim shul. Aunt Sophie and Uncle Avrum ran a dry goods
store, and their home was in the back of the store. I remember the kitchen was
small, and that is where we had the Seder. I remember the old-fashioned cutlery
that she may have brought with her from Vienna. My aunt, uncle, and their son
Fred were on the last boat out of Europe before the war began. Of all her
family, my father was the only one to survive the war.
In those days,
Cantor Lipsicas used to go from class to class in the Talmudical Academy teaching
songs for the Seder and the Four Questions in Yiddish. When it was my turn at
the Seder, I chanted: “Fohter, ich vill freigen der fiyer kashioes
– Father, I
want to ask the four questions.”
My joy at being in
the limelight was short-lived. My father, in dead earnestness, snapped at me.
“It’s tateh, not fohter!” In his Galitzianer mind, TA was
wreaking havoc upon his son and turning him into a little Yekke.
The next bunch of
Seders were held in hotels. We went for a number of years to the Breakers Hotel
in Atlantic City. Dad loaded up the Chevy, and we drove on Route 40. (The
Jersey Turnpike had not yet been built.) We passed through little towns and traffic
circles, through farms and roadside stalls selling produce. The highlight was
when we came to a place with a big sign that read “Cowtown,” which my father
used as a pretext to make a joke about one of us being suitable to be the mayor
of that “town.” (I won’t say who!) It was a leisurely drive. I don’t remember
there being so many cars on the road as there are today. When we arrived at
Atlantic City, there was a large monument marking the end of Route 40.
The Breakers Hotel
was a large palatial building, built in the old grand style, with marble
stairways and elegant halls. We had the same waitress year after year. Her name
was Jackie, an African-American. She didn’t even ask my father what he wanted.
She just said, “Mr. Finkel, I already know what you want. I am bringing you
flanken.” My father would give her an amused smile.
I don’t remember
the Seders there, probably because they were communal Seders led by a chazan. The people in the hotel were
mostly old Jews from Europe. They loved the chazanim.
I felt like I was in little Odessa. Some of them could be quite nasty. During
Chol Hamoed, I was often the only young person in the hotel’s synagogue. Once,
during the davening in the morning, an old man motioned to me to come over to
him. He then nastily scolded me for kissing my tzitzis in the wrong way. I wanted to cry. Looking back, he
probably failed to keep his own children religious, and in his burning jealousy
and guilt, let out his feelings of failure upon me. I ran down the grand marble
steps of the hotel to the boardwalk and took a long, long walk until the pain
subsided.
I have vivid
memories of the Atlantic City boardwalk, the piers, and Ripley’s Believe It or
Not Museum. There was also a kosher ice cream parlor (which I went to one
summer), where they served ice cream in a huge bowl with the words “I bet you
can’t” painted on the bowl. I remember a classmate of mine known for his
gargantuan ability to consume ice cream, who finished that humongous bowl with
room to spare. (I bet he is reading this article!)
The Breakers’
demise was reported in the newspaper: “The Breakers, the oldest hotel in
Atlantic City and the last to offer salt?water baths in all the rooms, was
demolished in 1974. Wreckers brought the 79?year?old, 12?story hotel down in
seconds with three dynamite blasts.”
The Teen and College Years
By the time I
reached junior high school, we started going to Waldman’s Hotel in Miami Beach.
I was amazed at Miami’s palm trees and warm, subtropical weather. In Waldman’s,
there was no communal Seder. Each table had its own individual Seder. The
waiters were from New York. Their accents were distinctly Brooklynese. I
remember walking down Collins Avenue and visiting the Fontainebleau Hotel,
where I imagined that the old Italian matrons sitting there were the mothers of
dons in the Cosa Nostra mafia families. I also remember visiting the Monkey
Jungle, the Parrot Jungle, and one trip we made to the Everglades.
The teen guests
quickly bonded at Waldman’s Hotel. They became almost like family. There was
one guy named Danny. He didn’t come across as that bright, and I really didn’t
want to associate with him, but he was tenacious and I caved in. One day, we
went swimming at the beach. I swam over a sinkhole and got tugged into a
whirlpool. I was swallowing seawater and was terrified that I would never
escape. Suddenly, a hand appeared above me, and I grabbed it. Danny pulled me
out to safety. He literally saved my life. I thought to myself that G-d was
trying to show me not to judge people so much – to see the good in them and be
more tolerant.
Another memory was
of walking a half hour to a shul where we heard there was a great speaker. When
he got up to speak, we weren’t disappointed. His name was Rabbi Berel Wein.
That was 50 years ago. He was young, mesmerizing. He was also a rebbe in the
local Miami Jewish day school. Besides Jewish studies, he took his students to
basketball games. They saw that a rebbe could also be human. One of his
students was from a nonreligious home, and through Rabbi Wein he became
religious. He later became a friend of mine and a chavrusa in Yeshiva University.
In 1974, I was
taking my junior year off from Yeshiva University to study in ITRI yeshiva in
Israel. My parents decided to visit me and had their first Seder in Israel. The
Seder was held in a small hotel on King George Street called Tirat Bat Sheva.
It had a completely different feel than the previous hotels because it was in
Israel. It had Arab waiters and it was much smaller than Waldman’s or Breakers.
Other hotels we had the Seder at were the Jerusalem Plaza Hotel (now called the
Leonardo Plaza Hotel) and Kibbutz Ramat Rachel Hotel on the outskirts of
Jerusalem near Bethlehem.
On my Own in New York
In 1989, I moved
from Baltimore to New York. My parents continued to go to Israel because my
sister and her kids were living there. I chose to stay in New York for Pesach.
One of my worst Seders occurred when I was dating a woman who had emigrated
from Russia. She had an acquaintance who was looking for someone to lead the
Seder so he could “learn” how to do it properly. I volunteered. It turned out
that his real intention was to lead it himself and have me as a captive
audience. Besides being upset that he misled me, I found his Seder the most
boring one I ever attended. I made up my mind not to come back for the second
night but had no idea where I would go. Coming out of shul, an older, married
friend invited me to come to his Seder. He brought me into his home,
unannounced, and his wife took one look at the additional guest and gave a
frown. The house was full of children and grandchildren, a real balagan. My friend seated me next to
him, and in the midst of all the din, we had our own intimate, private Seder
where we were asking each other questions and thinking aloud what the answers
might be. What a joy! Within 24 hours I had experienced the worst and best Seders
of my life!
After a few years
in New York, I organized a Seder for two non-frum people I knew. One of them changed his mind at the last minute
and pulled out. It was a blow, but I decided to go ahead anyway with the Seder.
A rabbi of a tiny shul in the Upper West Side of Manhattan gave me the use of
his apartment above the shul. In the middle of the Seder, there was a knock on
the door downstairs. An Israeli man in his twenties was looking for a Seder. He
was warmly welcomed. We now had enough for a zimun! In my imagination, he was Elijah the prophet dropping in for
a visit.
An Otherworldly Seder
A few years later,
I was working for an umbrella organization for all the shuls and Jewish
organizations in Jackson Heights, Queens. Most of the people we serviced were
Russian Jews who had immigrated to the United States. Many had never been to a Seder
in their lives. I thought it might be a good idea to give them a chance to
experience one.
One nice lady,
Grace Fener, who was on the board of the Conservative synagogue in the neighborhood,
who was going away for Pesach, graciously volunteered her apartment. My friend
Leslie and I came and kashered the kitchen and brought over the food and
eating utensils. One of the Orthodox rabbis in the neighborhood asked me to
invite one of his congregants, a Mr. Goldschmidt, a German Jewish widower in
his nineties, to take part in the Seder. The plan was for his home attendant to
bring him to the Young Israel of Jackson Heights and we would take him to the
apartment and then she would pick him up at a certain time.
We also invited
two teens, Bella Abbasova and her friend Natalie, who were from the Asian
republics of the Former Soviet Union and who had never experienced a Seder. We
also invited the Feyders, Ashkenazi Jews from Leningrad (now called St.
Petersburg). Lena Feyder’s husband Marat was working Seder night, so she came
only with her daughter, Alina. (To this day, she sends me an e-card before
Pesach!) Lena’s father, a high-ranking officer in the Red Army, was a totally
assimilated Jew. He was given the rare opportunity to change the nationality on
his identity card from Jewish to Russian. He refused! That act of courage and
integrity was the ticket to Lena’s opportunity to exit Russia as a refugee!
Finally, we invited Kira Brodskaya, a bubbly Ashkenazi woman in her eighties
from the Ukraine. Five women and three men.
Everything was set
and ready. Leslie and I went to shul but Mr. Goldschmidt was nowhere to be
found. After davening, we decided to go to his apartment. At the entrance to his
building we spotted him with his home attendant. He looked like a hostage,
pleading with her to take him to the Seder. The home attendant saw us and
started yelling that she wasn’t going to take responsibility if something
happened to him. We told her that she promised to bring him and that now she
was reneging on that promise. We told her that she was bringing him great
emotional pain and that she was being overly cautious. In the end she relented.
Even before the Seder began, we witnessed Mr. Goldschmidt’s own yetziat Mitzrayim!
We were all now
seated and the Seder began! To make the Seder more understandable and
experiential, I supplemented the Haggadah with a book written by an old
classmate of mine. The name of the book was Sedra Scenes: Skits for Every
Torah Portion, by Stan Beiner. We role-played different parts of the
Haggadah using this book. We stood up, put matzah on our shoulders, and began
stepping in place, as if we were leaving Egypt ourselves. We also sang:
When
Israel was in Egypt’s land,
Let my people go!
Oppressed
so hard they could not stand,
Let my people go!
Go
down, Moses,
Way
down in Egypt’s land,
Tell
ol’ Pharaoh,
Let my people go!
Mr. Goldschmidt’s
eyes would no longer allow him to read. But that was no problem – he knew the
entire Haggadah by heart! What a
strange scene, seeing this man steeped in Jewish culture juxtaposed with people
who only knew that being Jewish meant being hated and discriminated against.
And how amazing to see these Russian Jews singing an old Negro spiritual! This Seder
was their Jewish kindergarten.
Why was this night
different from all other nights? Besides all the interesting facets of
this Seder, enumerated above, there was something almost inexplicably unique
about this Seder. I felt Hashem’s presence in that apartment. It was as if, on
this special night, a gate or door opened, and some PRESENCE from another
dimension entered. I felt a peace, joy and serenity, and love and warmth that I
never felt so intensely before. This apartment in Jackson Heights became a
miniature Mishkan (Tabernacle) where G-d’s presence could be felt.
That otherworldly
sensation was unforgettable, and I longed to re-experience it on every Pesach
that followed. I made more Seders in Jackson Heights, each time with more
people participating. By the third year, two-thirds of the dining room and
living room were full. I felt that “PRESENCE” both of those years (but not in
the fourth year).
A few weeks before
I was going to make the third Seder in Jackson Heights, a young Russian Jewish immigrant
living in Jackson Heights and attending Bais Yaakov high school in nearby Kew
Garden Hills approached my desk. Her name was Devorah Zernistky. She had been
befriended by Rabbi Label Rockove and his wife Esther while she was attending a
public elementary school, and she fell in love with Shabbos and Orthodox
Judaism. Over her parents’ strong objections, she decided to become observant.
She kept her own set of pots and dishes in her parent’s non-kosher home.
Now, despite all
her homework, chores at home, and her side jobs of babysitting and the like,
she offered to be of assistance to me. I was taken aback, but because of her
sincerity and willingness, I couldn’t say no. I asked her to help me set up for
the upcoming Seder. She helped shlep
chairs and also helped set up the table and other things. She was a big help,
always willing and cheerful. She asked me if she could bring her non-observant
parents to the Seder, and I was more than happy to comply.
The night of the Seder,
she was sitting with her parents at the other end of a long table. At one point
I heard her father scream at her. Startled, I looked up and saw her stunned and
blushing. The Seder continued without incident. When it was over, I walked over
to her and said, “Devorah, I heard your father yelling at you. I bet I know
what it was about.” She was amused and asked me what I thought it was. “I bet
you told your father that when he eats the matzah, he should consume at least a
k’zayis (an amount the volume of an olive), and he blew up at you.” She smiled and said, “How did you know?!”
“I know you better
than you realize,” I told her with a smile.
The following
(fourth) Seder in Jackson Heights was the largest I ever made there. The room
was packed. It brought mixed feelings. A drug addict (Jackson Heights was known
as the drug capitol of the U.S.) broke the glass of my car, and the interior
was soaked with rain over the two days of Yom Tov. An obnoxious teenager
humiliated me in front of all the guests with the baseless charge that I take
advantage of teens by “enslaving them” under the guise of community service. (I
got this teen a free trip to Israel to spend the summer on a special program.
He did not live up to his end of the bargain to do two weeks of community
service. And despite that, I invited him to the Seder and he insulted me. This
is what communism does: It teaches you to take advantage of the “system” and
give nothing of yourself in return. What a contrast with Devorah!)
One highlight of
the Seder was before we got to the Plague of the First Born, I asked the
participants what their last night in Russia was like. One after the other told
me stories of sitting in a bare apartment, their furniture sold, just leaving
them alone with their luggage – their hopes mixed with trepidation over what
kind of future waited for them in their new promised land. I asked them if they
could relate to their ancestors who knew that the next morning they would be
setting out for the desert enroute to their promised land.
Unfortunately, I
did not feel the PRESENCE at that Seder, nor for many Seders to come.
“…He Revealed Himself to Them…”
A year or two
before I made aliyah, in 2002, I
decided to make a small Seder in my tiny attic apartment in Flatbush. I was in
a bad mood. The negative emotions coupled with the endless pre-Pesach chores
weighed down on me heavily. I finished the last touches of preparation and
entered the shower in near exhaustion. I was upset with everybody and
everything. I resented my landlord, my apartment, my boss, my job, my
neighbors. I was unhappy with my life, unhappy with being single. I was full of
negativity and resentment.
I finished taking
the shower and wondered where I would gather the strength to make it to shul. I
could barely make it out of the shower. I felt so much fatigue.
And then something
very strange happened …
As I was drying
myself, I felt as if an invisible force coming from somewhere outside of me was
entering me. Like a bulldozer, it was pushing out all the negativity – the resentments,
self-pity, fear, frustration, bitterness, sadness, anger. Bewildered and
unaccustomed to being free of these emotions and thoughts, I tried to hold
on. They were like a familiar mantle, but the “force” wouldn’t let up and
continued to drive these feelings out. In the span of two minutes, I felt like
a different person. Instead of heaviness, I felt lightness; instead of anger, I
felt peace; instead of bitterness, I felt gratitude. Nothing in my life had
changed, but everything changed.
I walked to shul amazed
and invigorated, as if I had just come back totally refreshed from a vacation
in Hawaii. I marveled at this phenomenon. It was as if I had cleaned all the
external chometz, and G-d came to the rescue me and clear out all my internal
emotional and mental chometz. I was (at least temporarily) liberated
from my own, personal Mitzrayim. That joyous, calm feeling carried me
throughout the Seder, although it was a little marred because one of the guests
acted strange and without proper manners.
Its been over 20
years, and I haven’t merited or been gifted to experience the PRESENCE at the Seder.
It’s like waiting to see your best Friend but He doesn’t show up. What a
downer!
I am looking
forward to this coming Pesach, hoping that I will re-experience the PRESENCE at
the Seder again. I am expecting four single men to come.
Wishing all a
kosher Pesach, free from personal bondage and meriting to have the Seder with
the presence of the Shechina in our
midst.
