Drive-Through Passover

We Jews are all born of wanderers, with shoes

under our pillows and a memory of blood that is ours

raining down. We honor only those Jews who changed

tonight, those who chose the desert over bondage…

-Marge Piercy, “Maggid”

I don’t suffer from FOMO. Leave me alone. Leave me out. I relish the kind of quiet the breeze by the lake makes when it moves between the windchimes, a pleasing cacophony. The chimes hang from a branch on a mossy oak that stands between me and the lake. I see at lake’s edge a hammock someone left out. All winter it’s twisted back and forth on its ends of frayed rope.

Below it a pile of dead leaves flutter. Some flip and flit across flattened grass, while others stick together. This April I’ve felt sickened and full of dread at the mass of exoduses around the world, while my own country has detained, deported, and imprisoned refugees, even citizens. No longer is here a safe harbor. Isn’t our collective hope for mercy hanging by a frayed rope? And whom should we blame for these plagues? I run into myself at every turn, spinning myself deeper and deeper into a cocoon.

But my daughters have asked for a Passover gathering this year, picking a Thursday night when they can come from three different states, each with a daughter of her own, and one with her husband. They offer to cook, to bring supplies, which they don’t in fact do. Except for the haroset. I suspected as much, because they live busy lives, have many tugs on their attention, and long highways to travel.

Still, they want to come and will show up; and I do, I do feel grateful, alongside a resistance to expose my sadness and reserve. What plagues me wants solitude over joy, and I will feel shamed in the face of their enthusiasm.

Outside my windows the wind carries everything away. Even after fierce forces—hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, or earthquakes—the weather doesn’t care about its impacts. There are moments when I‘d have preferred a thick layer of cynicism or numbness, as the weather is numb, than the exquisite sensitivity that abrades me in every contact with anything and everyone outside my cocoon. Should I worry that the myelin sheath on my brain has thinned with age? When I read the apocalyptic news, a sad story, a stray act of violence, or hear about cruelties, I can’t unread or unhear them. They replay in the background while I’m cooking or taking a walk or talking to someone in their hour of therapy with me. It might not be fair to anyone for me to occupy a helping role when I am running out of skin.

These images and stories no longer speed along my neural highways to their metabolic destinations. Where are those lifesaving glymphatic hours of non-REM sleep when such detritus sheds? Instead, ruminative trains of thought grow more stubborn; idiosyncratic in their schedule of stops and starts. Later, at Passover, I sit next to my granddaughter, little Aria. She inspects a piece of matzoh, breaks it, tests it against her lips and I remember the picture of a Palestinian girl, sitting in rubble, lost, and hungry. I remember it in black and white, the picture, from a news story online, but it might have been too much to retain a colored memory.

*

I’ve read that the lineage of Mitochondrial Eve, an African woman in the dusty past of one hundred thousand or more years ago, though not the oldest of women in our evolutionary past, links everyone alive today in relation, along her matrilineal line from daughter to daughter to daughter.

I smiled reading about Mitochondrial Eve and felt touched again by the sorrow of my own mother’s death; how she enjoyed reminding me, on occasions such as Passover, and particularly on my birthday, and then reiterating to my oldest daughter on her birthday, how each us were first born daughters to first born daughters to first born daughters to first born daughters, at long length down our shared history. The power of first born daughters required acknowledgement, came with responsibilities and opportunities not to be shirked or wasted. Keep your hands strong, your heart full and your mind engaged. When times are tough bear witness and remember everything is grist for the mill. Waste nothing.

*

The courage to walk out of the pain that is known

into the pain that cannot be imagined,

mapless, walking into the wilderness, going

barefoot with a canteen into the desert;

stuffed in the stinking hold of a rotting ship

sailing off the map into dragons’ mouths. . .

-Marge Piercy, “Maggid”

Immigration is hard, particularly as a refugee. It takes a near impossible amount of grit to walk so many miles with nothing but what you carry, to cross rocky waters in crowded and un-seaworthy vessels, while keeping your children alive.

I once listened to a Peter Attia podcast in which he said researchers had found an unexpectedly high number of immigrants with bipolar disorder. He said that it made sense to him, because how could you make that kind of death-defying trek without at least a slightly grandiose sense of possibility? Enough mania to believe you could make it so far from home and start again in a new tongue, a new city, and find your way to employment and opportunity? These are the escape artists. They possess tremendous ambition, these people willing to hide, stumble and get up again, climb, grasp, run for their lives and the lives of their children.

*

Coincident with the heart-breaking news, day after day in April—a scourge of executive orders to make the non-white, non-male, non-wealthy populace bleed—it is poetry month. Daily, I wait for Knopf to send me their poem-of-the-day, even though each one breaks my heart too, but differently. I weep reading every single one, the kind of weeping that holds love inside it, and gratitude for its knowingness, like when, at the bottom of a well is the thing you thought you’d lost—that charm, that lucky penny, that talisman of goodness and beauty, shimmering when sun illuminates the dark waters.

Every email, every text from a news source bludgeoned me with the same heading: Breaking News. Breaking News. Breaking News. And it brought me to my knees. It brought me low. But then, I would read a poem:

What being part of a country felt like, in the park,

With the entire breakwater full of boats,

With ferryboats blaring music offshore,

Everyone acting as though it made them happy

To be part of the country, even those I later learned

Were hippies, including my aunts and uncles,

Whose code seemed to include, toward children,

Kindness, what it felt like being part of a country

Was to be quite specifically targeted for love,

As though a letter from a stranger had arrived

Delivering the best, the most unexpected, news.

-Dan Chiasson, from “Bicentennial”

We sit at the Passover table and I break the middle matzoh into two halves. One, the afikomen, I wrap in a cloth napkin to hide. At the end of our meal the nine-year-olds, Minna and Lili, look all around the house for it. I’ve hidden it between two books, because in books you can find some version of everything you’ve ever thought or felt or experienced to date. Lili, Minna, and little Aria, our next generation of women, may deliver, along with the hidden half of the matzoh, the wholeness our consciousness requires to fix civil brokenness, and mend our divided world.

Minna is the oldest daughter of my oldest daughter and reaches the bookshelf a moment before Lili, but the two cousins find it together, as they tell it, because of a sacred trust that credit can be shared; that there’s enough for all—for the Jews, and for peoples across the planet, in Gaza, in Sudan, in Venezuela, Nigeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Syria; I could name more places. I can name all women everywhere, in every color—the broken halves of the progenitive whole never fully visible or sculpted in high relief within the gestalt.

To the extent that freedom for all is out of reach tonight, as we eat this meal, Passover points ahead, telling the young ones to orchestrate a choir for all voices that will sing out, will sing out loud, that the time has come.

The girls receive a few dollars in compensation for their find and eat the afikomen as if it’s more than an unleavened cracker; it’s the promise of their future.

*

The Trump administration told Harvard University that it had ‘lost the privilege’ of enrolling foreign students. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said this decision was based on the administration’s “determination to enforce the law and root out the evils of anti-Americanism and antisemitism in society and campuses,” while Trump hosted a night for cryptocurrency investors whose coins are literally named things like “F*CK THE JEWS.”

*

Finally May has come. The cucumber, summer squash and tomato seeds that Lili and Minna helped me plant in little dirt pots the day after Passover, before we painted Easter eggs and baked cookies, have sprouted. I’ve just planted them in the raised bed that my husband, Stephen, built out of sawn logs—so like my mother, he wastes nothing. I smile because, new to me, cultivating an outside garden offers a minor antidote for moral injury.

Several bluebirds with their burnt orange throats and sky blue backs have arrived too, and one visited on the window sill of my study and made me feel alive. I took some photos. Even through the screen with its somewhat obscuring effect on the images, it bought me another opportunity to feel what I felt when I saw the bird at first. And then to feel again what I felt when I looked at the bird and caught her image, as if I’d gotten away with something special; something special like a second chance. And then I looked up the bird in my bird book, to make sure I know who she was.

Voila, an Eastern Bluebird. Some migrate as far as two thousand miles, and some stay put all winter long. They come and go, between Canada and the United States and Mexico, flying with blissful ignorance across the abstract borders countries have drawn in the sky, like Escher’s tessellations, endlessly reiterating false claims to a planet that owns itself.

When the bluebird flew away it left me remembering Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Bluebird. Blackbird. They have the third property of ‘bird’ in common; an infinite regression argument? A poetic gamble that a bluebird generates a blackbird in my mind which is then tied by the third object of the poem?

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

Like April’s poems, May’s bluebirds and the striving plants, cleave my sorrow in half with wing and leaf. My mind circles in a liminal space, as do dawn and dusk with their textured, colored light. And dark loam occupies my hands and leaves a residue under my clipped fingernails when I wash up.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

Apparently, I’ve returned to missing my children and my grandchildren again. Despite the pestilent umbrella of a government in want of sanity, we have much to celebrate. It’s Lili’s tenth birthday soon so I buy a mermaid’s palette of crepe paper streamers and balloons. And remind myself that evolution favors our attentions to threat over joy, so it’s not my fault I’ve been under the weather (as they say) that doesn’t care, and also, that it requires a dedicated practice—like a black belt in the Zen of noticing and tasting joy, and some abstention from the new—to offset the weight of bedcovers every morning. There’s a math to it all, like a sacred geometry where the shapes and ratios of harmony show up everywhere in what and who lives, and in what exists in different ways. Some say that geometry operates in both time and space, and that no shape is isolated, but rather interconnected in a larger field, perhaps infinite, that resonates and repeats itself at different scales.

Analogously, or maybe just by association, I think of the psychologist, John Gottman, who calculated that for couples to stay together, they must produce a ratio of five pleasant interactions to every negative one. I wonder if the current threats to humanity must be vanquished by five delights or more for each witness who lives outside the epicenter of disaster. To that end I watch the birds, I text my children and grandchildren, I tend the garden, I dance to eighties music which, somehow, seems the danciest. And for the fifth, I keep tweaking my homemade bread recipe to get more loft with those pleasing bubbles of air beneath a chewy crust.

*

A circle, like a blackbird circle, finds itself at any given point, in an infinite number of points, while I am trying hard to join myself; to find the starting point. Because I’m still crying too often, even after the month of poems has ended. I’m grieving. My dead brother’s birthday comes around the third week in May, and unlike some years when I remember it after it’s gone by, I’ve instead remembered that it was coming and woke up in it.

What is grief if not a parting in the Red Sea between slavery and freedom, when you can only run and hope for solid land on the other side? Yet any parting is a rending of the whole, the halves no longer connected, the fabric of life torn, the matzoh broken.

Someone has said it much better than I have. Samantha Bergeson, for IndieWire, says, “What is grief if not living in the liminal space between mourning and coping, of life and death itself?”

*

May brings this news, too, from CNN:

“The Department of Justice is investigating the murder of two Israeli Embassy staff members as both an act of terrorism and a hate crime. The couple, Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, were gunned down outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC.”

*

That my ancestors, alternatively ghettoized or diasporic, and persecuted for more centuries than any other peoples, make a homeland in Israel should feel relieving; that Israelis defend their right to exist unquestioned. But the heightened aggression and destruction of the Palestinian people is unconscionable; the situation for them dire, un-survivable.

This is what I think about a lot these days: The ratio of my smallness to my shame is staggering. It would be an understatement to say I live in a constant state of disharmony. I can sit at my table with nutritious food and plant my garden with an overarching net to protect against pests. I have windowsills made of bluebirds and grass under my feet. I can sign up for marches and resist the tyrants. I can practice the wisdom of the senses; breathe deeply, hoping to achieve that optimal ratio of shorter inbreath to longer exhale, that will yield the parasympathetic calm I crave.

But here they are, the images and stories of all those persons who don’t own their bodies and who’ve been shocked out of their daily existence. It seems senseless to analyze. Human behavior has reasons, not causes; the ratio of what’s probable to predictable slides back and forth like beads on an abacus in a young child’s hands.

*

Don’t try to talk me out of my shame. I embrace it. Shame is a social construct, and part of the contract we must make with each other. The other part is love. Any religion will tell you that. Every child of Mitochondrial Eve feels it.

If I have shunned instead of loved you, or you have shunned instead of loved me, then both of us be shamed. Shame is a glue as much as love. Those bond us, thick and baked into our shared condition, necessitated by evolution. Shame is the plague and the reminder, the bookmark in an ongoing history of plunder and conquest, of greed and injustice, of intolerance to difference, of arrogance and ignorance; of fear.

As a psychotherapist, I’ve spent years helping to reduce the borrowed shame of trauma survivors--those persons who’ve suffered rape, incest, or violence, or come from criminal families, or discriminatory communities, or who, traumatized and enraged themselves have committed acts of violence. I will not win popularity by saying I believe it necessary to retain some shame, even when we’ve not deserved it as an individual or an innocent. Because we cannot disengage ourselves from our cultures of violence and injustice unless we embody the shame of it. When we disidentify with the shame, we look away from suffering, our own and that of the others.

At Passover the Haggadah tells us to combine the bitter herb and the sweet haroset because there is no exodus from evil into social justice without the pain of shame urging us on to witness, to decry, and to feel more shame, as did the Jews escaping Egypt when their Egyptian brothers and sisters felt the weight of God’s plagues. We do not rejoice at the suffering of others for our own sake. We are tied to all suffering. It is an unshakable contract.

*

I wake up early the Monday after Mother’s Day, to see dawn filling the sky with an intense rosy hue, whipped with lavender and a slim sliver of the lightest gold. I take a picture. I close my eyes and try to see it again, like an after image, and to swim in the feeling of witnessing what might be a once-in-a-lifetime sky. When I open my eyes again the sky has muted above the lake, a sheen of peach hovering over the water. Goodbye, I say, maybe out loud. Maybe not. I can’t remember. But now, coming up with this memory, a sadness swells below my ribs. I am in the mood for an ode to the sweetness of goodbyes; goodbye to the drive-through Passover with my children. Goodbye to the morning that will not stay still. I go to my computer and pull up April’s poem by Sharon Olds, and it seems fitting, maybe by association, because with age everything seems more and more connected:

But you,

my friends, my chosen and chosen-by ones,

I see you as built-in aspects of the earth,

like elements, like members of the periodic

table. I know, we’re mortal—the open

door is there. But for weeks and weeks I have

forgotten that I’m going to lose

every one of you, until

the ones who are left lose me…

-Sharon Olds, “Ode to My Living Friends”

I want those weeks and weeks of forgetting, by the lake or weeding in the garden, or blowing up the balloons for Lili’s birthday party, when I will forget the exodus of all who’ve been made strangers; who’ve been shunned, threatened, hunted and who are running for their lives.

Ah, here, there’s a local Women’s March in June and I sign up for it.

-Lisa Friedlander

Lisa Friedlander is a psychotherapist and essayist. She likes weird and quirky connections between ideas and people, events and memories, circumstances and images. Her work has appeared in Shark Reef, The Forge, Pink Panther, Solstice Lit Mag, IO Lit jnl, Wild Roof, Epiphany and others. She lives in NH.