Only Memory

My grandfather was a jeweler, a sculptor and a compulsive tinkerer. He once took apart a Model T Ford, piece by piece, and put it back together again, just so he could learn how it worked. His hands were marvels of dexterity, and the precise, graceful dance they performed at every seder was a wonder to me.

What I wondered was this: had the turning of pages, the pouring of salt water, and the breaking of the afikomen been performed by my grandfather’s grandfathers’ hands in the same way? Did they twist the parsley to break it, lift their wine glasses with all five fingers turned up, cup their grandson’s cheeks as they would hatchlings? And would my hands ever do the work his did?

To be a Jew, by which I mean to be a person, is to wonder such things. The Passover seder teaches us that to be a Jew is to be a stranger, to wander the wilderness like Moses and Abraham before him, to be at home everywhere and nowhere.

We tell the story of Passover to remind ourselves to love the stranger. No other commandment in the Torah — not even to love God — is mentioned as many times as the commandment to love the stranger as we do ourselves.

In Leviticus: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Because the stranger is you. Because you once walked where he walks. You know the heart of the stranger because your heart has been estranged.

It is especially bracing in this historical moment to consider how emphatically the Torah warns against hatred of the other. How insistently it reminds us of the damage it can do, to both hater and hated.

The Passover seder is a mnemonic device, an exercise of repetition designed to help us digest the memory of being demonized, until it becomes a part of the collective body. It is a call to vigilance against the fear once directed at us, and that we too often direct at ourselves and others, a warning not to lower our guard. The message of the Haggadah is: Don’t Forget to Remember.

It is as if the sages were saying: argument is useless in the face of this hatred, politics are inadequate. Only memory can reconcile us with the estranged, including the shunned, shamed or banished aspects of our own psyches which we allow to languish at our peril.

Only memory is quiet enough to whisper to anger. Only memory is embedded deeply enough to communicate with buried fear, suspicion, prejudice and the other plagues of a hardened heart.

And so the seder is a ceremony of welcome to strangers within and without, and to memory’s deepest echos. It places our grandfathers' hands on our cheeks and our daughter’s brows on our lips, impressing the weight of our stories, our history, on our souls.

It invites us to unbind each other and ourselves, to open our doors to the world, to believe in a Promised Land we may never reach but will urgently move our children toward.

It reminds us to fight the good fight against fear wherever it occurs, and for freedom wherever it is threatened. On this night, and every night.