Greetings, friends. (LXII)

Greetings, friends. I wish a chag pesach sameach, a joyous Passover, to all of you who celebrate. Last night Besha and I did a seder at her house, just the two of us, her first.

We used Mom’s antique copy of Arthur Szyk’s beautifully illuminated haggadah for the proceedings, a thing I don’t think my mother herself ever did, although she did photocopy large sections of it to use in rolling her own haggadot, particularly the ones she made to use in authentic 18th Century replica Passover seders.

Because of course my mom re-enacted authentic 18th century Passover Seders, with dinner cooked over the walk-in brick hearth in her dining room. Because of course she had an 18th Century style walk-in brick hearth in her dining room. This is my mother we’re talking about.

In a scrapbook of hers, I found a newspaper clipping (which is sadly still in New Hampshire) where a friend of hers is quoted as saying that my mother Sharon practically lived in the 18th Century. My mother is quoted in the same article as having said (something like) “That era represented the culmination of roughly 10,000 years of pre-industrial civilization, and they were quite good at it.”

But I digress. We Jews of the Diaspora get two Passover Seders every year, and, when she was in her prime, my mother insisted on having a contemporary seder one night and an 18th century seder the other, usually the second night. It is quite possible that if she could have talked people into attending more than one replica seder a year, my mother might well have done two such back-to-back.

Anyway, the 18th century sederim were always conducted in full authentic costume, because of course they were, with authentic replica diningware. Naturally, my mother was not about to sully this carefully curated, authentically candle-lit, family ritual scene with copies of the Maxwell House haggadah or, God forbid, the Haggadah for the New American Family.

No sirree, but since Mom (I assume) could not lay hands on an antique 18th Century haggadah, she used what she regarded as the next best thing, which was Szyk, who actually worked in the first half of the 20th Century, but as you can see went in for a very medieval, illuminated style for his work. Of course the Szyk haggadot are antique objets d’art themselves these days, not rare, but also not inexpensive. So Mom photocopied the relevant bits, added in the family Passover songbook, and then stitched the pages together by hand, using manila folders for binding, with Szyk’s title page pasted on the cover.

Samizdat haggadot were kind of Mom’s thing. She took a very interpretative approach to Judaism generally, and, given that Passover was her favorite holiday, she really dove into a highly exegetical approach to the festival be’kol ram, as we say, with full voice. Her seders were always long, meandering affairs, with a lot of storytelling and asides. She was always bringing new things into the experience. No two were the same.

She also loved having guests for Passover, especially people who were new to the whole thing. This is the bread of affliction, the text says. All who are hungry, come and eat. All who are in need come and partake in the Passover meal.

I think it all started when my mother was a child, and her mother, who did not read Hebrew, wanted transliterations for all of her favorite Passover songs. Grandma Lenore had a gorgeous singing voice, which my mother did not inherit, and for that matter neither did I, but somehow Adah did.

So Mom, aged maybe 12(?), typed up English transliterations of all of the popular Passover hymns for her mother’s benefit, which were then replicated by photostat and, later, photocopy, and which my mother edited into, or handed out with, every single haggadah at every seder she hosted, for the entire rest of her life.

It didn’t end there. My mother wrestled her entire life with her relationship to the faith she was born into, one which was absolutely and thoroughly patriarchal until right about the time she because practicing it herself. In fact, my mother, in 1960 or 1961, was part of a group of the very first girls made bat mitzvah in her synagogue congregation’s entire history. Because of course, in 1960, a young Jewish woman was barely allowed on the bimah, much less entitled to her own bat mitzvah ceremony.

But Mom came of age in the 1960s, and she was ferociously intelligent, so of course she was a feminist, and of course she spent her life trying to reconcile that and her Judaism. All of us who are born Jewish, and then raised as liberal humanists, are all in contact with this struggle to one extent or another, but my mother was really at the leading edge of it, as far as modern Jewish women are concerned.

One of the nice things about Pesach is that it lends itself to an interpretative approach. The content of the haggadah is traditional, rather than strictly liturgical, so, as long as a haggadah contains the retelling of the Exodus and the other central concepts of the festival celebration, everything else is, pardon the expression, b’seder, in good order. So Mom’s contemporary haggadah, which was different from her “replica” haggadah, and which she printed in rolling editions over the years, grew to include symbols of feminist and queer inclusion, like the orange on the seder plate, Miriam’s cup, and suchlike.

It also burgeoned over time with her topical song parodies, which started earlier in Mom’s life with things like a liberal translation of Dayenu set to the melody of “Bye Bye Blackbird”, or the parable of the Four Sons, but sung to the tune of “Oh My Darling Clementine”:

Now this father had no daughters,
But his sons, they numbered four,
One was wise, and one was wicked,
One was simple and a bore.

Et cetera. Later these grew to include show tunes and other such things I was unfamiliar with. I have said before that I think parody is the one great vice of the Burnston family. But Mom absolutely loved it. Even though she could barely carry a tune on a matzah plate, she always sang be’kol ram.

Of course, because she was my mother, she also once made a matzah cover in elaborate needlepoint made to look like a sheet of matzah, and a separate cover for the afikoman out of a patchwork of various textile prints chosen to represent the Ten Plagues. She was very proud of these things.

Obviously, there was a lot for my mother to love about Passover, more so than any other Jewish holiday. She got to cook her favorite dishes, she got to sing not only the cherished hymns of her childhood but also her clever topical parodies, she got to bring together her friends and family, and about half the time she got to do it in 18th Century period costume. And I think the essential message, the celebration of freedom and self-determination, with gratitude, also really spoke to her… as it does to me.

There was one more piece, though, one personal connection to Passover that my mother experienced that I think was unique to her.

In the traditional haggadah text, it says, “From one generation to the next, it is incumbent on each person to regard themselves as if they personally had emerged from Egypt.”

My mother took this quite literally. She swore that she had a first-hand sense memory of the Exodus itself. She would speak, wide-eyed, of witnessing it as a Hebrew child of the Bronze Age, experiencing the nameless fear and anxiety of the adults, the hasty packing, the chaos and the dust of the flight, the exhilaration of the escape from bondage.

How she came by this belief I will never know. I think she regarded it as a past-life memory, even though mainstream Judaism does not have a concept of reincarnation. Maybe she just had a very active imagination as a child, and a vision of the experience stuck with her. Either way, she was convinced that she had been there. So the experience of Passover was one that was very personal to her.

Anyway, it is strange to celebrate Passover in my mother’s absence. Although I have hosted my own Passover seders at various points in my adult life, or at any rate, not traveled every single spring to New Hampshire, it is different somehow. Not to be able to call her up and wish her a chag sameach, and be treated to an earful about who came to her seder, and what food they brought, and how everything went.

A song of ascents.
When the Lord returned the captives to Zion,
It was as if we were in a dream.
Then our mouths filled with laughter,
And our tongues gave joyous song.
Then they said among the nations:
”The Lord has done great things for them.”
The Lord has done great things for us,
And filled us with gladness.
Restore our fortunes, O Lord,
Like desert streams in the springtime.
Those who sow in tears shall reap with songs of joy.
Those who go forth in tears, bearing seed,
Shall return in joy, bearing the fruits of the harvest.

Last night was the first time since she passed away that I realized I really missed my mother. I do not think that I will ever celebrate Passover again in this lifetime without missing her.

If you’re reading this, don’t forget to call your mother, or your nearest available maternal figure. More tomorrow, or at any rate, soon.