Now we are here - Pesach

                                                      A prosperous Viennese family celebrates Passover . 

When my grandfather’s father died in South Africa in 1936, he left £850 to the great Yeshivot of his homeland in Lithuania.  His generosity was not unusual.   Before their destruction in the Shoah, students in the palaces of learning in Lomza and Telshe were fed and clothed by wealthy South Africans like him.  In their newly adopted homeland at the bottom of Africa, wealthy Jews supported local Jewish orphanages, old-aged homes and day-schools, but the bulk of their generosity went northwards, to the Eastern Europe of their youth. 

Instead of building new yeshivot in South Africa, they supported the old ones back home.   I have no idea why.   Maybe Talmud study was seen as a relic of the dark days of tsarist oppression that had no place in sunny South Africa.  So at school in South Africa, we learned Hebrew.  At home, we celebrated festivals.  At shul, girls sat upstairs and looked at boys downstairs.   In my day, no-one learned Talmud.  I was too young for its approach and subject matter anyway.   The Talmud is not for children, boys or girls.  Its pages are dripping with blood and semen, and I have read, among other things, of farting prostitutes and ejaculating rabbis.  We truly come from a long line of carnal and argumentative people. 

It’s a book for grownups who understand that life doesn’t always go your way, no matter how good you are and how hard you try.   No one is coming to save you. By the time of the writing of the Talmud, God had left the building, leaving us in charge.  It’s a tradition with no guarantees and no promises, and nobody is perfect, least of all Jewish wise-men in Babylon in late antiquity.  It seldom has answers, instead it has great concepts that don’t exist in English, but they should.

Here are five Talmudic terms that extend my experience of the world:  

The basic unit in the Talmud is a makhlóket. The English word is argument but that doesn’t capture the idea that a conflict can actually bind you to another person.   Taikoo means enough already with the contradictions and the arguments. Stop. Enough is enough. Leave it.

There is a wonderful legal category in the Talmud called Tar Omet or The right to be angry.  You don’t have the right to sue or seek recompense, but you have a God-given right to be angry.  That is all.  You don’t get money in recompense or an apology. You just get the right to be angry. The right to anger is a great thing to have.  Anger is a sign that reality isn’t how you want it to be.  You have a right to shake your fist at the sky. You have the right to shout as loud as you like, for as long as you like.  But then you have to suck it up and move on.  Hang on to anger and resentment and it will blind you from seeing new possibilities.  But it starts with recognizing that you have Tar Omet.

Nistapacha Sudhu means your field got washed away. It’s a figure of speech referring to the fact that sometimes stuff happens and it’s no one’s fault.   Sometimes bad things just happen. Sorry mate, bad luck.  Your field got washed away, bummer.   In our long history, there have been many instances of our fields being washed away, and I believe we are fully entitled to have Tar Omet, but we are here now safe and sound for the moment, in London, before Pesach 2017.

Hashta Hacha means now we are here.  I know this phrase because twice a year, at my parents Seder table in South Africa, we would drink four glasses of sweet, red, homemade wine and we would sing a strange song in Aramaic called Ha Lachma Aniya. Hashta Hacha is one of the lines in that song.  That song also contains the first line of Talmud I ever learned although I didn’t know it at the time: ‘Let all who are hungry come and eat’.  

“This is the bread of poverty that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt

All who are hungry come and eat,

All who need come share Pesach

This year we are here

next year in the land of Israel

This year we are slaves

next year we are free people”

This is a strange song for a hundred reasons.  Least of all, it was only as an adult that I discovered that it is entirely possible to enjoy a feast without the accompanying guilt.   When I grew up, I discovered that not all cultures start their celebrations with an ancient song written in Aramaic about letting all who are hungry come and tuck in.  From what I’ve read, Christians don’t offer some enticing bread of affliction to their starving guests either.  The Poor at a Christmas meal would receive roast dinner.   According to Ha Lachma, the Jews will offer you a dry cracker.  It was a particularly strange song to sing in South Africa when I grew up.  There were so many hungry in South Africa back then, but it wasn’t us anymore.  We had lots to eat and lived in big houses with swimming pools.  Guilt and its handmaiden, self-righteousness, sat with us at the table when we sang ‘Ha Lachma’ in Cape Town, South Africa.  But it wasn’t always like that for my ancestors.   ‘Ha Lachma’ has been sung by generations of Jews at their Pesach Seders in good times and in bad, from Babylon to North Africa, to Venice to France to Germany to Eastern Europe.  We carry this set of instructions with us as we go.  This is our story.  This is what we must do. This is where we are going.

I think of my great grandfather as a boy at his parents’ Seder-table in a tiny town in Lithuania, land of repressive legislation, the Chmielnicki massacres and grinding poverty.  ‘Now we are slaves’ he sang.  ‘Next year we will be free’.  The following year, aged 14, he freed himself from the bonds of the Pale of Settlement and got on a boat with his older brother and went to South Africa.  He did well in the land of milk and honey, but as we know from our long history, your money can go up as well as down and past performance is no guarantee of future success.    

I have no idea where my children will say Hasha Hachta, if they will stay in London or immigrate, if they will be rich or poor, slaves or free people or if they’ll have Seders of their own where they teach their own children to sing Ha Lachma or if they’ll feel connected at all to this long and rich textual history that is so precious to me.  I can only hope, and as I’ve learned from the Talmud - Taikoo