In a few weeks, Jews around the world will sit down at elaborately decorated dinner tables, muster smiles as they chew herbs dipped in bitter saltwater and hard-boiled eggs, and stumble along through the Haggadah. The Jewish holiday of Pesach, or Passover, is a yearly reminder of the limited range of Jewish cooking, but also of one of the strongest themes of Jewish experience: exile.
The Hebrew word “Seder” translates to “Order” in English. For those who are unfamiliar with the ritual-laden meal, a proper Seder consists of 14 steps, the completion of which lasts nearly four hours: the blessing of the wine, washing of hands, the dipping of the bitter herbs, the breaking of the middle matzah, the retelling of the Passover story, the second washing of hands, the blessing of the matzah, the blessing of the maror, the eating of a sandwich made from matzah and maror, eating dinner, finding the afikomen (think: a Jewish Easter egg hunt), saying the blessing over dinner, the singing of songs (a personal favorite), and the conclusion of the Seder, when everybody says “next year in Jerusalem.”
The meaning of this closing phrase is heavily debated. Taken literally, it is a Zionist anthem, a call for the return of the Jewish people to their historic homeland in contemporary Israel. More abstractly, it is a mantra of hope, redemption, or utopian ideals, as exemplified by ancient Jerusalem.
Jewish people are no strangers to tragedy. The pogroms of the Middle Ages, the Spanish Inquisition, the European Holocaust are but a few notorious episodes in the long laundry list of Jewish plight. Walking around WashU— known by many for its outsized and affluent Jewish community — it can be easy to forget that many students schlepping around the perimeter of Mudd Field are only two generations removed from the shtetl Jews who survived the gas chambers of Auschwitz in 1945 or the Persian Jews who fled imminent persecution during the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
What does it mean to be an American Jew, or a Diasporic Jew? I have toyed with this question a lot and I don’t have a clear answer, nor do I think I ever will. Philip Roth — a quintessential figure in the Jewish literary canon and the American canon writ large — wrote about the subject for decades and, as far as I can tell, does not seem to have a succinct explanation.
Jewish people are no strangers to tragedy.
In The Counterlife, published in 1989, Roth’s autobiographical character Nathan Zuckerman, while at a Shabbat dinner at a West Bank settlement, remarks on the lady of the house as she sings the Sabbath prayers. He says her eyes shined “with love for a life free…of all the Jewish ‘abnormalities,’ those peculiarities of self-dvision whose traces remained imprinted in just about every engaging Jew I knew.” Among these “abnormalities,” Roth lists a slew of not-so-positive character traits: cringing, diplomacy, alienation, self-satire, nervousness, and social assimilation, to name a few.
Is being Jewish in a post-Holocaust America really just a life of dismal insecurity? After millenia of trauma, it would make sense that apprehension and nervousness is baked into Jewish DNA. After all, I am only writing this from the comfort of my couch in St. Louis because my Polish ancestors smelled danger and hopped on a boat to the United States. Being nervous is not just a Jewish stereotype; it is a Jewish genotype, a naturally selected trait that has enabled Jewish survival.
I will refrain from reducing Roth to this one quote — his analysis is far profound. He has hundreds of pages written across decades that add to the crescendo of opinion about the Jewish-American experience. From my own 22 years as a Jewish-American, I find that there is one word that best encapsulates Jewish-American life: idiosyncrasy.
Take the opulent Bar/Bat Mitzvah as a prime example: the prepubescent 13-year-old boy whose voice cracks as he sings the soprano notes in the Avot V’imahot; the grandiose decorations, themed around a clichéd pun of the young man’s first name, like “Charlie in the Chocolate Factory”; the traditional circular shuffle to “Hava Nagila” and the hoisting of the young boy on a chair to the beat of 2000s pop hits. The kitsch of it all. Only in America is this the standard for this centuries’ old religious rite.
The Seder itself is another epitome of Jewish idiosyncrasy. When I think of my family’s Seder, I think of my miscellaneous cousins, most of whom I see once a year for this occasion, crammed together around the table, which is adorned with the amateurish Seder plate I made at Hebrew school when I was 10. I think of the matzah bits that manage to get everywhere, despite my best efforts. I think of the search for the afikomen — the hidden matzah — and the bitterness I felt when I lost to that distant cousin whose name I can’t remember. The singing of the “Dayenu.” The bashfulness on the youngest child’s face as they read the Four Questions. And, of course, the brisket: our reward for waiting.
When you think about it, labeling the Passover meal “order” is a bit oxymoronic: each step is imbued with so much symbolism and each aspect of the meal is tainted by generations of tradition. “Disorder” seems more apt. Much of Jewish history, however, is a lesson in dealing with disorder: waiting, existing, enduring, finding meaning in the mundane and making tradition out of it. In a meal dedicated to the celebration of the Jewish exodus from slavery to their historic homeland in Israel, it seems only fitting to find meaning out of disorder. That skill, much like the Seder meal, is a fundamental aspect of Jewish-American life and the Jewish experience as a whole.
Celia Rattner ‘25 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at crattner@wustl.edu.