Elul Day 15

Dear Elul Writers,

In the French writer, Anne Berest’s, remarkable and soul-stirring novelized memoir, The Postcard, the main character, Anne, attends her first Passover seder. She has, for most of her life, known that she is Jewish. Yet, it is a biographical fact that remains nebulous and never-fully-understood; more like a strange remnant of her lineage than an ethnic or religious identity. So, she finds herself, in her late-thirties or early-forties at a seder hosted by her new boyfriend. Some of her fellow guests welcome her warmly as a Pesach neophyte, while others treat her with not a small amount of suspicion. If the seder is at moments bumpy (aren’t they all), the experience, on the whole, proves utterly transformative to Anne.

I allowed myself to be soothed by the responses, by the bittersweet beauty of the tale of the Hebrew people’s liberation. The Pesach wine made me feel joyful, giddy–and like I’d lived this scene before, like I already knew every part of the ritual we were enacting. Everything seemed familiar: passing the matzohs around, dipping the bitter herbs in salted water, letting a drop of wine fall from my fingertip onto my plate, resting my elbow on the table. The copper platters holding the symbolic Pesach dishes were familiar, too, as if I’d seen them a million times before. My ears already seemed to know the Hebrew chants. It was as if time had stopped. I felt a sense of wonder, a deep, warm happiness that came from somewhere far away. The ceremony transported me back in time. I could feel hands sliding into my own, inhabiting them.

There is a telling of this type of experience that could feel trite–a person feeling connected to rituals and practices that they had never before encountered. Yet, in Berest’s tale nothing feels superficial. Family history and memory are not linear; they are more like a pair of knitting needles that poke through layers of narrative folded over each other. They both connect and pierce. Reading her description of the seder night I was moved; in no small part, because I have heard so many people talk about connecting to the past through ritual. Maybe it is cliche, but it also feels true to life.

Prompt

Is it possible that cheshbon hanefesh, engaging in the task of bettering ourselves, could be a site for connecting to those who came before us? Are we standing, temporally at least, in the very place that our great-grandparents stood? Like us, did they spend some part of this season considering all that they hoped for in the year to come? Were they hard on themselves? Were they ultimately forgiving? We come from a long line of people who sought to be the best people they could be. Elul may be just the place to bump into the generations who came before us, walking the well-worn paths of self-assessment. How could the presence of generations past deepen your Elul practice?

Take care,
Jordan