Illustration by the immensely gifted Laurie Sandell.
In the spring of 1985, our family began its Passover seder at five in the evening—as usual. And as usual, we raced through less than a quarter of the Haggadah before the complaints started. Alright, enough already. When are we gonna eat! But one thing was different. My dad was no longer leading the seder. I was.
It had been a year and five months since my dad died. During that time my life had changed considerably. I’d moved to the East Coast with my band, Sussman Lawrence. I’d signed a major label recording deal with Island Records. And most significantly, I’d become more Jewishly observant. To some, that last change may have seemed out of character. I was, after all, a man who more than occasionally performed onstage in a shower curtain. But they would have been wrong. I had only now, begun to be in character. At the crossroads of my dad’s death and a long dreamed-of recording career, I was fast en route to something I didn’t quite understand. Looking back, that something was the first steps toward my personal liberation.
Even as a small child, I intuited that everything; the moonlit sky, the crabapple tree in our postage stamp-sized backyard, and the fingers on my own hands were manifestations of God. Much later, at a Passover seder at age sixteen, I took issue with what my scientifically inclined, soon-to-be brother-in-law said as the family discussion turned toward the Ten Plagues:
They weren’t miracles at all. For instance, there’s a scientific explanation for the prevalence of the frogs. Due to excessive rains, the Nile basin was flooded that particular spring, which created a propitious environment for an unusually fecund reproductive period for amphibians of all kinds. The whole so-called plague was nothing more than an aberrant weather event.
Even today, I’m at a loss to explain the vehemence with which I shouted at him. “What the hell are you talking about! What explains the space in which this all took place? What explains the reality of time? How did rain come to be? How is it that frogs have the ability to reproduce in the first place! Of course it was a miracle. Everything is miracle. Our sitting around this table tonight is a miracle!”
How did my family react, you ask? First, they laughed. They thought I was joking. When I persisted, they laughed at me. Then came the concerned expressions, which seemed to imply: We may need to consider a psychiatric intervention for Peter.
Leading that seder a year and a half after my dad died was painful. The lack of seriousness was infuriating. I grew angrier with each passing minute. The seder concluded early than expected, and after my mom had gone to bed, I began a seder of my own. I sat alone at the head of the table, stumbling through each of the prayers and rituals, trying my best to find meaning in them. It was long past midnight when I finished. After clearing the dishes, I took a walk around my old neighborhood in Saint Louis Park, Minnesota— a far cry from my new neighborhood in Hell’s Kitchen, New York.
It was late spring then, almost summer. The crickets were chirping madly somewhere out in the darkness. The lights were out in most of the houses, except for one. In the childhood home of one of my oldest and closest friends, I saw his mother vacuuming her living room, where a seder had taken place. Being filled with the arrogance of the newly indoctrinated, my first thought was, doesn’t she know you’re not supposed to use electricity on Jewish holidays? But as I watched her from the street, I was overtaken by a series of questions that were far more relevant.
How is that in this household —a family that isn’t outwardly religious in the least —they are still eating matzo, still drinking four cups of wine, still reciting the ancient words of the Haggadah, and still recalling an event that took place thirty-three hundred years ago? By what miracle is the Jewish people, my people, still so stubbornly connected to their sacred past —generation after generation after generation?
As I write this today, I think that the answer might be that the miracles, the ones which took place so many eons ago, never ceased. I believe that the story we tell doesn’t belong to the past. Especially now it seems, it belongs to a vital and miracle-filled present.
Among the most quintessential human qualities is our ability to recall the past. Not only our own, but the pasts of those who have come before us. Not only do we “remember” as an act of faith, we also draw upon memory to create our present-day reality. This ability to remember speaks of the very nature of freedom. It is the ultimate escape from bondage. It is the soaring and triumphal release from the tyranny of our own fears, from the shame of our self-imposed limitations, and from the scars imposed upon us by a millennia of foreign cultures, all of which have demanded our obeisance—oftentimes through the most horrible acts of violence —and that we remain as slaves, kneeling in renunciation of our essential selves.
The story we tell of our freedom from Egypt is the story of a people oppressed by falsehoods, by wickedness, by ego, despotism and unending jealousy. But it has always been an intimately personal liberation, perhaps even more than a national one, which rests at the very heart of the Passover story. It is a message we have delivered to ourselves, to our children, and to the world for thousands of years. There is no truer story than this one.
Freedom is much more than simply throwing off one’s chains. It requires that we embrace, in the most thoughtful and courageous manner, an ideal that is stronger than all human limitations, higher than all human wisdom, and more lofty than what is imaginable. Unlike the leavened bread we eat at all other times of the year —matzo, the symbol of redemption—is flat, without ego, without pretense. It is the simplest food, made only of flour and water. It is both actual and metaphoric; both holy and mundane. In that regard, it is like every human being; a duality, a composite of seeming opposites.
We are commanded by God to eat matzo during the holiday of Passover, not only to intellectualize humility, but also to physically ingest it. And as we do, we seek to become humility itself —not the sort that leaves us weak, that leaves us wanting. But a humility which creates space for a fleeting cognizance, an infinitesimal glimpse of the Creative Force behind everything we see around us, and the infinite worlds we will never reach. The space we create (and by necessity recreate) makes room for creativity, for hope, for strength, for endurance, for boundless love, and for a burgeoning awareness of God, the constant Creator.
May you and your family be blessed with health, with joy, with success in all your righteous endeavors — and with true and lasting peace.
Peter
I think I will read this at my family's seder tonight. My family has grown and evolved so that my daughter Liz and her husband Aaron have begun the tradition of the first seder in their home, a meaningful passing of the torch to the next generation and ones yet to come. Chag pesach sameach, Peter.
"There is no truer story than this one."
Have a blessed Passover.