On Negotiating Meaning With Tradition: My Pesach Nightmare

When I was a girl, I’d often have a nightmare in which I was somewhere with religiously diverse friends — when I was younger, usually Guides, and school friends as I got older. There’d be food. Someone would offer me a plate, and I’d accept unthinkingly.

And then, somewhere after I’d swallowed the last bite, I’d remember: it was Pesach, Passover, the Jewish holiday where we eat a special diet for eight days. No grains, no flour, no legumes — only traditionally accepted foods specially prepared.

I’d feel sick and horrified. Like I broke something that couldn’t be put back together.

Actually, I half lied. I did have this dream when I was little. But, though it occurs less often, I still sometimes get it now. In fact, I had a version of it just this weekend.

On the face of it, if you didn’t know me or how I feel about my practice of Judaism, you’d think I must feel very strongly about kashrut and obeying Jewish law. I guess that’s one interpretation: that no matter my conscious thoughts on the matter, I actually do believe that G-d wants me not to eat bread for eight days and my share in the World To Come depends on it.

There’s also something to be said for the discomfort I’ve never been able to shake about breaking rules, any rules, no matter how nonsensical or what power backs them up.

But I don’t actually care about keeping kosher for Pesach, not enough to get sick over. Many of my relatives don’t. Some of my Jewish friends don’t. I’d still happily eat at their houses over the holiday. (And I have.)

Sure, I buy kosher for Pesach food. Some of it, anyway: cheese and chips and other pre-processed goods. It’s meaningful to me for a few reasons, none of which depends on my non-existent theism. But my grandparents on my father’s side would never have eaten at my house on Passover.

I don’t switch to another set of dishes that are used only for Pesadic food. Heck, even normally, I don’t have two sets of dishes, one for meat and one for milk to avoid cross-contamination; although I normally ignore the prohibition against mixing meat and milk, I do stay mindful of it on Pesach.

I don’t even eat kosher meat; it’s super expensive, requires an extra shopping trip, and just isn’t meaningful to me. I buy regular chicken, beef, and lamb.

I don’t go through the intense re-cleaning of the oven/sterilizing of the sink, fridge, and counters/re-papering of the cupboards and drawers that my mom used to do in order to host seders at our family home.

(By the way, the upshot of this is, because I eat differently on Pesach, many who aren’t Jewish assume that I’m super religious, because I’m the most observant Jew they know. Oh, sweet summer child. No way. This stuff that comes across as so intensely Jewish? That’s just because we live in a society that isn’t Jewish. Without wishing to rank Jews who do more or less than me — everybody should be free to do Judaism differently without having their Jewishness called into question — it’s safe to say that I’m minimally observant.)

Anyway. So although neither of us should need evidence that it isn’t just the contravening of Jewish law that bothers me about this dream, we both have it. What is it then?

Well, even though the setting of the dream often changes, some details never do. It’s always chol ha moed: basically, long Jewish holidays* have important yom tovs at the start and finish, during which you’re not supposed to work and on which you usually have the most important ceremonies or observances, like seders or havdalah. The days in between are regular working days but still part of the holiday. There might be special synagogue services, and you still have to observe the special holiday rules. That’s chol ha moed.

It’s easy to keep Pesach on yom tov, on the seders, surrounded by family and community. It was easy to keep all of Pesach when I went to Jewish day school, because everyone around me did. We had our spring break over the holiday instead of the regular Canadian March Break so we could spend it at home with our families (and so the school wouldn’t have to go through the exhausting process of Pesach-koshering its facilities). My non-Jewish school-year life, mostly through Guides, swimming lessons, etc., was easy to manage in 2-hour chunks.

But after eighth grade, when I went to public high school, the proportions flipped. Most of my experience became multicultural — an awesome thing, by the way, and one that I’m super grateful for — and Jewish observance became part of my private, family life instead of my public life.

Instead of having to make extra effort to eat chametz, non-kosher-for-Pesach food, suddenly I could come across it just going through my normal routine with my friends. I had to — and still have to — be vigilant if I want to observe Pesach, even my own lackadaisical way.

In my dream, part of the horror comes from the realization that even though observing Pesach and being Jewish are important to me, I’ve forgotten them long enough to stop doing them. The realization that today is important to me, even though it’s not important to those around me, sinks in only after I’ve taken the step too far, done the thing that, in dream logic, means I’ve lost the person I was.

In waking life, I don’t believe religion, culture, or observance are all-or-nothing: you can eat pork but still find great meaning in being shomer shabbus. If a Muslim woman wears a hijaab but decides that, for her, not drinking alcohol is not spiritually meaningful, who am I to say that she’s not observant or doing her religion “right”? If a Christian embraces the teachings of Christianity but rejects the literal content of the Bible, why should I exclude them from a group I have no right to judge?

But in my dream, one wrong step permanently excludes me from the heritage that means so much to me.

In Hebrew school, teachers often stressed the dangers of “assimilation”: losing our traditions and culture not because, as in historical cases of persecution, we were forced to, but because the siren call of being “normal,” of having the grass-is-greener lives of our friends and neighbours, was too much to resist. They described it as a slippery slope: today you eat a cheeseburger, tomorrow you don’t care so much about celebrating Pesach with your family, next year you’re as good as Christian.

Though I think the bogeyman representations of assimilation are fear-mongering fantasies, as I get older, spend more of my time outside the Jewish community than in it, I understand what they were trying to impart.

It’s easy to go with the flow, once you pick up your feet. The water just pushes you along, and it doesn’t seem like that big a deal to grab some lunch at McDonald’s (I have to eat something during this busy day) or work on the High Holidays (I don’t want to be unfair to my coworkers or students).

Doing something for a good reason — of course I will eat this homemade pie a well-meaning acquaintance unwittingly made with lard rather than embarrass him in front of everyone for something he didn’t have any reason to know — leads to doing something for a not-so-good reason — well, I ate my coworker’s pie, so I might as well buy this bacon cheeseburger, because, you know, I want to. It’s more effort to decide when and where to make a stand: to plant, unmoving, and force the water to flow around you.

The effort of holding yourself motionless against the current is a big one. It’s much easier to take an all-or-nothing view of religion: well, I ate that cheeseburger, so I can’t really justify taking off Yom Kippur, no matter what my feelings are telling me. It lets you leave the decision-making to someone else, maybe society, maybe the rabbis who codified the law centuries ago, or maybe the individuals responsible for writing the Torah.

It’s harder still to dip a toe in here, decide what’s worth enough to me to let the world flow by, what’s all right to move with. It puts the onus back on my shoulders, gives me the task of deciding what meaningful looks like. Forces me to root out and articulate my feelings to myself and others or feel bad if I can’t put them into words just yet.

Negotiation of meaning is pressure from both sides. Sometimes that pressure is painful: why are you making things difficult for the rest of us? Why can’t you be the same? Why don’t you care about your heritage? Why do you do that but not this?

And it does feel that one wrong step will send you plummeting off your carefully balanced path.

But it won’t. That’s just a nightmare. It isn’t real.

In real life, you aren’t falling. You just stumble. And you get to define the path, step by step. Because despite what everyone would like, only you can decide what’s meaningful to you, and you don’t need to justify every detail unless you want to.

Chag sameach.

* Without wanting to go into too much detail, this applies only to major Jewish holidays designated in the Torah, like Pesach and Sukkot. Chanukah doesn’t have a chol ha moed, because it’s not a chag, a Torah-designated holiday. Like I’ve suggested before, it’s pretty much our St. Patrick’s Day: much more important if you are very religious, but superficially fun and well known enough that most people still want to celebrate it even if they’re otherwise not so observant.