One of the many
injunctions in this week’s portion is that of Pessah Sheni – “second Passover” –
a “second chance” for anyone who was ritually impure on Passover to bring the
festival sacrifice and eat it four weeks later. At this time, though there would
be no festival and no prohibition of hametz (leaven) one could partake in this
delayed Passover sacrificial meal with matza and bitter herbs.
Although
the analogy is not completely apt, this strange combination of Passover, hametz
and matza sparked within me some significant childhood memories which may
contain important lessons regarding our attitude toward different kinds of
“religious” observances.
Throughout his life, my paternal grandfather,
Shmuel, was a communist. In Czarist Belorussia, he organized the workers in his
father’s factory to protest against their boss. In 1906 he escaped from Siberia
to New York and opened a woodworking business, which he handed over to the
workers as soon as it became profitable. He was a Yiddishist – an atheist who
wrote a regular column for the Freiheit (the New York Yiddish communist
newspaper) – and he truly believed that “religion was the opium of the
masses.”
When I was about three years old, he crafted for me a miniature
“stool and table” set as a special gift; it remains in our family until this
very day. He then asked me to try to place my fingers in the manner of the
kohanim during the priestly benediction; when I did it successfully, he kissed
me on the forehead and admonished me: “Remember, we are kohanim, Jewish
aristocracy. Always be a proud Jew.”
As he left the house, I
remember asking my mother what “Jew” and “aristocracy” meant.
Another
childhood memory is of a train ride we took together from Bedford-Stuyvesant,
where I lived, to Kings Highway, where he lived. Two elderly hassidim boarded
the train and sat directly opposite us; three neighborhood “toughs” began
taunting the hassidim and pulling at their beards.
My grandfather
interrupted his conversation with me and looked intently at the drama unfolding
in front of us. As soon as the train came to a stop, he lunged forward, grabbed
the three hoodlums, and literally threw them out of the compartment. Trembling
with fear, as the doors closed with the toughs outside, I asked my grandfather,
“Why did you protect them? You aren’t even religious.”
Nonchalantly, he
responded, “They are part of our Jewish family. And you must always protect the
underdog.
That’s what Judaism teaches.”
And now the point of my
reminiscences. In the Brooklyn of my childhood, there were two Passover Sedarim;
the first we celebrated at the home of my religious maternal grandmother, and
the second with my communist grandfather. On his dining room wall hung two
pictures, one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who he thought was bringing
communism to America) and the other of Joseph Stalin.
On the beautifully
set table were all the accouterments – matza, maror (bitter herbs), haroset, the
egg and the shank bone – but on the side were fresh rolls for family members who
preferred pumpernickel to the “bread of affliction.” We read from the Haggada
and my grandfather read passages from Marx, Engels and Shalom Aleichem about
communist idealism and our obligations to the poor. For an 11-year-old who
adored his intellectual and idealistic grandfather, there seemed to be no
contradiction between the different foods and the various and variegated
readings.
When I came upon the fascinating law of Pessah Sheni, the
“second chance” Passover sacrifice that features the roasted meat, the matza,
maror and haroset together with the hametz and without the usual festival
prohibitions, this was the closest thing I could imagine to my grandfather’s
Seder. An evening that featured the “peoplehood” and familial aspects of a
celebration which taught us to identify with the slave, the stranger, the
downtrodden, but without fealty to God who placed restrictions upon our diet and
our activities. My grandfather was “far away” from the traditional definitions
of observance; he was even “defiled by death” – the spiritual death of communism
that had captivated his intellectual world like an evil, seductive slave woman
(Rav A.Y. Kook, Iggarot R’eya 137).
Such a Seder has no staying power; to
the best of my knowledge, none of my Riskin cousins have Jewish spouses or
attend Passover Sedarim. By the end of his life, my grandfather himself
understood this. In our last discussion before his fatal heart attack, while
reclining on the bed of a Turkish bath, he told me of his great disillusionment
with communism after reading of Stalin’s anti-Semitic plots against Jewish
doctors and Yiddish writers of the Soviet Union.
“I gave up too much too
soon for a false god. I yearn for the Sabbaths of my parents’ home. I now
understand that all of communist idealism is expressed in the words of our
Prophets and experienced in the Passover Seder. You are following the
right path…”
The writer is the founder and chancellor of Ohr Torah Stone
Colleges and Graduate Programs, and chief rabbi of Efrat.
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