Existential Chutzpah: Lessons in Liberation from the Passover Seder

Shabtai Director, Toby Hecht on Passover's universal message of liberation and life

It appeared, in no uncertain terms, that for the 20th century there was only one acceptable outcome for The Jew: becoming the great equalizer for the aristocrat, the academic, the bourgeois, the irate layman, the impoverished, the church, and the ignorant fool. It was as if disposing of this fringe minority would ease all of their personal woes, shortcomings, and discontent.

This wouldn’t be the first attempt to murder Jews en masse, but it would be the first defined, even civilized, genocide that the world had ever seen. The immediate repercussions bled deep into historical consciousness, reconciling the unrelenting persecution of Jewish people from its primitive iterations with the culmination in its most brutal form by Germany, the paragon of progress. And while splintering into individual expression of tragedy and trauma, the collective memory of the Holocaust today is cohesive, unifying trauma with redemption for the survivors and world Jewry. The Jewish nation is founded on its collective memory of the Exodus, its liberation from slavery in Egypt thousands of years ago, commemorated every year on Passover.  

The highlight of Pesach is the Seder, a fully immersive experience simulating the Jewish exodus from Egypt and one of the most celebrated holidays on the Jewish calendar. Perhaps it is the liberation that has many trading in religious apathy for an evening dedicated to text based narrative ripe with ritual and symbolism. A collection of Biblical and Talmudic verses are told over many courses, and they remind us that our suffering and persecution will end. We sing and our cups run over. We toast life and give gratitude to Hashem for redeeming us from over 200 years of bondage. A commitment of continuity is heralded by a cry at the end of the night, "Next year in Jerusalem!"  So, I doubt it was a coincidence that my great-grandfather, Alter Mordechai, was once arrested in the middle of the night—the night before Pesach—by the Hungarian police. 

Sara Baila, my great-grandmother, wracking her brain, thought that perhaps the reason was because her husband had taken more than their allotted ration. So, terrified that the additional flour was the culprit, Sara had the bags brought up from the storage room and everyone with two hands available was busy grabbing small sacks, filling them with flour from the main large sack, and then frantically hiding them in different spots all over the house.

Now, what you may not immediately understand about this story is that according to Jewish law, and thereby in observant households, flour is strictly forbidden to use over the course of the Pesach holiday because of the potential mixing of flour with liquid, which would render it chametz (leavened bread), which is forbidden on Pesach. You aren’t even supposed to have flour in the home, let alone in the main parts of the house.

I hear my Babby Miriam now, laughing in wonder as she is telling me in her Hungarian accent that it “vas the night before Pesach, and there vas flour, EV-REE-VHERE! I mean, all over the floors, on top of the table, all over our clothes…!”  

She laughs and laughs while I, a young girl, get the chills, frightened at the thought of being my grandmother in her home the night her father is taken. This was their life—random arrests at the whim of an antisemitic government. She always told the most terrifying stories with a sense of humor.

In the end, her father had been taken because a rubber belt from the lumber track where workers rolled logs was allegedly missing, and the Hungarian police thought he had stolen it from the business. This was quite the charge, since he owned the company and could have taken it home for repair. He knew it was a false charge; he didn't take the belt. But they found a way to confiscate his business anyway, which he had inherited from his grandfather, because he was a Jew.

Fast forward to April 1944 in Borsa.

Babby’s family is roughly woken up in the early hours of the morning after Pesach ended. They were rounded up by the local Hungarian police, known as the fasiszta. The officers wielding bayonets shouted that they had thirty minutes to be ready to leave. The men threatened that all valuables must be declared and put in a pile in the center of the main room. As commanded, all jewelry and money were hastily dropped in the center of the room, and with no time to pack, the family ran around stuffing necessities into pillow cases—no more than 30 pounds of belongings permitted. Nervous and shaking, my grandmother’s family trembled while waiting quietly in fear of their fellow countrymen—a jealous lot of cowards and bullies masquerading as people of importance.

One officer surveyed the loot and spotted a forgotten gold necklace peeking out from under Faigele’s shirt. He slapped Alter Mordechai, my grandmother’s father, hard across the face for such belligerence and yanked the gold chain from the neck of my Babby’s younger sister. What was my great-grandfather thinking about at that moment? Was he thinking about his brother-in-law, Mendel Basch in America, who had written to him pleading him to get papers for the family to leave?

“How bad could it be?” Alter Mordechai, wrote to his brother-in-law, unconvinced, “As hard as starting a new life somewhere else?” 

Sarah Baila, Babby’s mother, had not even rolled out the first dough for bread she had prepared the night before when Pesach ended. How ironic, as Pesach is a celebration of freedom, the unleavened bread the symbol of departing in haste from Egypt and slavery. Her dough was left behind as they were hastened towards uncertainty and death.

My Babby wasn’t at the house this time. She had left home before Purim for Satu Mare (188km from Borsa) to help her cousin Ettu recover from a miscarriage and give a hand to her husband, Lipa, minding their five children. But the Germans under Eichmann's leadership occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944, and events rapidly turned for the worse. Between Purim and Pesach, my Babby Miriam corresponded with her father about whether or not she should return home. It was a let’s wait and see moment, and it was that hesitation that likely saved Babby’s life. She never saw her parents or three of her younger siblings again.  

***

Young as I was, it was normal to have conversations with these details. In the life of Jewish children like me, they were stories—stories from my family’s life, my grandfather's life, my grandmother’s life—not historical points or abstract anecdotes for a history class about the horrors of the early 1940's. Raising my own children has given me a more nuanced perspective on the lives of my grandparents and their youth that was violently stolen from them. The grotesque and single-minded determination to make every nook and cranny of Europe, and then the rest of the world judenrein is something I grapple with every day.

Perhaps that is why what stands out so starkly in my mind is the mathematically organized fashion in which millions of Jewish people were murdered. The equation was about exterminating the idea of the Jew: erasure defined by its essential expression. Jew hatred is ancient, and has taken the form of dodging fists, stones, pitchforks, and homemade weapons. Violent attacks were often sanctioned by local governments. There are long lists of the usual restrictions or expulsions imposed throughout the ages, repackaged are recycled with different nuances. And still the Wandering Jew has persisted through an exhausting maze where almost every route is a dead end.

Despite the new 20th century filled with innovation and development, the sophisticated European elite confidently masqueraded their uncouth manners and barbarism as enlightened and noble causes. Respected ivory towers gave new meaning and latitude to political theory, philosophy and history. Hard working lawyers, doctors and scientists altruistically bent on progress stripped themselves of any code of ethics. Local authorities and many religious institutions willingly participated. 

In recent years, research has surfaced regarding the long-lasting trauma of the Holocaust. It is intergenerational. There are, studies suggest, genetic implications. Has the DNA been tampered with, irrevocably? Will the numbers ‘44 in any context send dread down the spine of my grandchildren as they do mine? Will making plans more than two weeks ahead give my great-grandchildren anxiety too? Will my grandchildren play the games I played; will they imagine trucks turning the corner are coming to round them up?  When they are mothers, will they, too, think about who will hide and protect their children if they are taken?

I can’t exactly place the time because it's at least my thirtieth time hearing this post-war Pesach story. We are definitely in her kitchen. Babby is standing on her good leg while she slowly moves around the dairy counter. She is preparing a dough for her homemade pasta and the machine is already in motion. We’ve been talking about this and that, my kids are around but busy, so I have a few precious moments alone with her, like I did when I was young.  

“Vell, vhat do you vant to know,” she asks me, leaning against the counter. Her hair is under a beret, and her long, dark flowered skirt is covered by her ever-present apron and skims her prosthetic leg while the right leg is straight as a rod bearing most of her weight. Her prosthetic leg is agony for her. She had horrible phantom pain from the amputation and was in constant pain, but it never stopped her from moving and doing.

“Well Babs, tell me about what happened in your cousin Lipa’s house, you know with the Rav and his son...”—the same Lipa, married to Ettu, who were the last family members Babby saw before it all went to hell.

“Vell, it’s erev Pesach,” Babby begins, “vee vere getting ready for Pesach. You know there was Lipa, and Shimon, and the Rachover Rav, who was hovering and watching every move I made in the kitchen.”

The Rachover Rav, I knew from earlier tellings, was very strict with what he would eat on Passover. No goose fat, only chicken fat to cook with because of the inhumane way the geese were kept, in his opinion. She tells this story of her first post-war Sedar bringing to it an imagery of life in slow motion, like a hazy or vague afterlife theme. Babby keeps going on and on, and all I can think of at that moment is how bizarre it all sounds, and I feel ill, as her face becomes animated remembering the past.

To me, it is so crushing and heartbreaking to hear how Pesach happened that year. There are random people there, all survivors of a former life, now gone forever. They are either showing up to Lipa’s open home or Lipa is bringing them to his home, collecting them like souvenirs of Displaced Person camps, hospitals, and G-d knows where else. The Rav and his son were there, and where was the rest of their family? Dead. Murdered. Cousins whose wives, husbands or children vanished into smoke, never to be seen or even heard of again. Young men and women suddenly orphaned and all alone. Meanwhile, they were trying so hard to put normalcy back into their lives on that Pesach, embracing the story of liberation, even with the tally of dead yet unknown.

I have a hard time fathoming how that was possible. It’s like pieces of a puzzle that are trying to come together, only they don’t fit anymore. Their lives would never be normal again, but they are not focused on that. Instead, they are steadfast, too busy preparing for the holiday in the home where little children once sang Ma Nishtana.

How many ways was this night different from all other nights? Who can begin to count.

There is a touch of mystery, filled with whimsical and muted colors and sound as Babby recounts the holiday. The thought that there could be anything vibrant left to life after something so horrifying is difficult for me to grasp. But there it was! As mismatched as it sounds, there was a house full of people, many warm meetings for the first time, like a typical holiday. Clanging pots in the kitchen, table settings, and everyone chattering while working to prepare the meal—how surreal it must have been.

I remember Babby told me that the Rav’s son was also there, bristling with anger at the world. He couldn’t keep it in, it was busting out of every part of his body. He decided to eat in a non-kosher cafe in full view so that when his father walked by later, he would see him. The Rav said nothing. He lovingly waited for him to come home Friday night to make the blessing over wine in order to sanctify the holy Shabbos. He stood quietly by and let his son work out his pain and anger.

So that Passover began yet another slow and treacherous journey—this time, to liberate the mind and heal the heart from the often-torturous images that would continue to plague the survivors until the end of their lives. Such is the conundrum of the Jew that has so confounded his observer; the bystander and the prosecutor, the hater—from where comes this desire to carry on? From where comes the chutzpah to defy the gallows, the auto da fé, the gas chambers and crematoria? This choice to celebrate life and renewal inflamed the gun toting, gas bearing, jackboot wearing German. Jude! Why won’t you die? We have been trying to murder you for thousands of years and yet you are still here?

***

There is a story recorded in the memoirs of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzhak Schneerson, whose writings and talks represent the most prolific and accurate recording of the history of Hasidus from the time of its founder, the Baal Shem Tov.

The story describes the wheat harvest for shmurah matzah in the 19th century for the fourth and fifth ChaBaD Rebbes of Lubavitch, a small village in the Smolensk Oblast region. Shmurah means guarded because, according to Jewish law and tradition, the wheat used for Passover matzah cannot come in contact with liquid. In this account, the wheat was from the estate of the hasid Reb Zalman Cherbiner, or Zalman from Cherbin. After choosing the best crop of wheat, Reb Zalman collected extra hands from the study hall in Lubavitch, young men called zitzers (sitters) because they sat and studied all day. There were three qualifications necessary to begin reaping, a clear day, sunshine and three dry days prior to the harvest. Rabbi Yosef Yitzhak recounts going with his father, the fifth Rebbe, to join in the reaping and threshing done with festive joy and intention as Reb Zalman, limber as a young man, flitted around in excitement. Song drifted across the field as women and children looked on nearby, dressed in their finest. The last gathering of the day was followed by the evening service and a celebratory meal in the orchard.

The story seems simple, but like most ChaBaD Hasidic stories, it speaks to the core of ecstatic devotion and practice through a contemplative and rational approach to G-d, creation and the purpose of mankind. This philosophy is elemental in being able to activate the redemptive qualities in the darkest moments and thus explains the tenacity of Jewish will to survive. The joy in the wheat fields preparing for the matzah is an essential component to the Passover story. 

The Zohar, the ancient book of Jewish mysticism, refers to matzah as the “bread of faith,” for the Jewish people departed Egypt in haste and hence had to rely solely on G-d to provide sustenance for their journey. As such, the matzah itself represents the self-nullification the Jewish people expressed in trusting G-d to provide, propelling them through the splitting of the Red Sea towards the fulfillment of the exodus: Sinai. Indeed, it was the acceptance and commitment to Torah (Divine wisdom) and Mitzvos (Divine will) that certified nationhood and guaranteed its continuity.  

As we prepare to host the annual Seder at Shabtai, a Global Jewish Leadership Society based at Yale University, I think about how we bring together a confluence of students and faculty, rabbis, writers, dreamers, and religious renegades because as humans, we all need this story. At Shabtai seders we have often discussed the Hebrew word meitzer (limitation), which is similar to the word Mitzraim (Egypt). For the Jewish people, leaving Egypt was literally breaking free from the shackles of slavery. Yet, we read a passage in the Haggadah, “In every generation a person is obligated to regard himself as if he had come out of Egypt.”

How can one personally live the exodus experience? By breaking free of our self-perceived limitations, the barriers that restrict our ability to move forward, make change, push aside fear or doubt, and instead embrace the potential of every day with clarity and purpose. Rabbi Yosef Yitzhak teaches on this subject that the result of breaking our inner meitzar is that “the intellect in the brain shines into the heart bringing about positive character traits that are tangibly manifest.” Matzah remains the spiritual force that stimulates the will and desire to nurture that belief for the entire year. This is a universal message, for we are all G-dly beings and possesses a divine spark, and it is incumbent upon each of us to transform this ideal into our reality.

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Toby Hecht is the Director of Shabtai, a Global Jewish Leadership Society, a public speaker, and a writer. This essay is from her current book project.