A Place at the Table
WHEN ADAR begins, joy comes in... or so the saying goes.
Not for me. When Adar begins anxiety sets in, and it has nothing to do with the frost clinging to the inside of the freezer or the Cheerios mysteriously accumulating inside the stove. It’s the annual problem of finding a place – two places, really, one for each night – for Pesah.
Nearly a decade ago, I converted to Judaism. During 11 months of the year, this is a non-issue within my New York City Upper West Side Jewish community. Converts are as common as Blackberries in most liberal synagogues these days, and my plight isn’t very different from that of several friends who adopted more observant lifestyles as adults. Most of the time, being a convert just means being a Jew, and it’s easy to blend in.
As a single woman I have no Jewish family, but on most holidays that’s not a hardship. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur I daven where I please, mindful of my good fortune in enjoying a congenial service. I am luckier, I feel, than a friend who spent years trying to elude the annoying high holiday choir at her mother’s synagogue. On Shavuot and Sukkot, I happily join old friends for a few days of festive reunion. Shavuot, when Jews commemorate the giving of the Torah and read the Book of Ruth, is the holiday most commonly associated with conversion, and in many respects it is the perfect holiday for converts: maximum time in shul, maximum emphasis on community, minimal time at home, minimal need for family. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are splendid for the same reasons. During much of the year, a patchedtogether family of friends functions just as well as a family of blood.
Pesah is different. Of all the Jewish holidays, it is the most home-centered. The home-based ritual of the seder takes center stage; the synagogue services, in contrast, often are poorly attended.
Of course, it’s possible to sign up for a synagogue seder, and I’ve been to a few, but even the good ones feel artificial. Pesah is a holiday that everyone celebrates; it’s a holiday when relatives who see little of each other during the rest of the year gather together. Every year, as I watch my Jewish- by-birth friends flit off to seders with parents, grandparents, or distant relatives with whom they would scarcely dream of spending Shavuot or Yom Kippur, I am reminded of the one thing that is still missing from my Jewish life: a Jewish family.
It’s not that family seders are intrinsically better than institutional seders. In 10 years, I’ve been to seders in at least 10 different homes. I’ve seen seders fraught with unspoken tension when only one or two family members wanted the seder and the rest were not-too-graciously accommodating them. I’ve seen resolutely casual seders at which discussion of Great-Aunt Millie’s hip replacement took precedence over the story of the Exodus, and seders so large that I never met half the people at the table. I’ve seen family seders that were too family-oriented. At one, a clever 9-year-old wrote a spoof haggadah lamenting how we were all slaves to Isaac – Isaac being his 18-monthold brother.
What makes a family seder special is not the rituals, or the food, or the quality of the discussion. It’s the sense of automatic belonging, of not having to ask. Pesah celebrates the creation of a people through the experience of emancipation and Exodus. The story is rife with family and household allusions – the babies slain and not slain, the bloodsmeared doorposts, the limp bread not rising on the hearth – as is the haggadah, with its imagery of four children asking their questions. In another time, in another place, just about every Jew would be at a family seder, and though hospitality surely was a mitzvah, there was less need for it. Few Jews lacked a Jewish family. The traditional rituals of Pesah hospitality – ma’ot chittim (the gift of funds to help the needy buy food), the injunction to “let all who are hungry, come and eat” – focus on quenching physical hunger, not loneliness. Family seders may be jolly, learned, disputatious, mournful, or rambunctious, marvelous or bleak, but they are inclusive. Anxious parents and grandparents tick off the guest list weeks ahead of time, checking that everyone has a place, corralling offspring of 30 and 40. No one has to ask if she may come.
On the other hand... what makes a convert’s Pesah difficult is not the quality of the seders she attends but the perennial uncertainty about where and with whom she will spend it. How long to wait for an invitation, whom to ask, when to ask, whether to compromise about traveling on a holiday, whether to settle for a synagogue seder. In truth, I never have been homeless on either night. The community always has come through, often splendidly; I have been the lucky recipient of a vast banquet of hospitality. But much of it was extended at the last minute, and there has been no continuity from one year to the next. Rarely do I know where I will be even a week before the holiday. More than once, the annual scramble has taken on a comic dimension when I panicked, scared up too many lastminute invitations, and then had to extricate myself from one or another kindly offer.
Perhaps the task will get easier with time. In recent years more of my friends have married and started families and more of them launched their own seders. Someday, of course, I too will have my own seder, and it surely will benefit from these years of Pesah wandering. But in the meantime I, like many converts, am a victim of my own success. In the year before I converted and the year immediately after, acquaintances knew I had few resources, and they were eager to perform a mitzvah by hosting me. But in 10 years I have assimilated so successfully that many of my fellow congregants don’t realize I am a convert, and that I might need a Pesah invitation.
Every year without fail, as soon as Purim is past rabbis begin to preach about finding spiritual meaning in scrubbing the kitchen floor and laypeople consult one another about such esoterica as what sorts of cat treats are suitable for the holiday. Seldom, in this welter of cleaning and cooking, do rabbis preach about finding spiritual meaning in the insecurity of not knowing where you will be for the seder. Seldom do people consult one another about the nuances of inviting yourself to someone else’s seder and whether it’s wiser to ask a close friend who probably will feel obliged to find room for you, or to avoid asking that close friend for the same reason. After all, finding a place at the seder table is supposed to be the easy part – but that’s just not true for converts. If the conversion process is something like the Exodus, then the recurring spiritual homelessness might be the price we pay for freedom.
Darcy R. Fryer is a teacher and historian. She lives in New York City.
