by Robert Post
Trying to clean her cabinets, my mother, then 96 years old, came across a box of old wire recordings. These were literally wires that spooled from coil to coil and that were used to record sound before advent of magnetic tape in the early 1950s.
When I converted the wires to digital sound, I discovered that they had recorded my grandfather, who was a frum immigrant from the pale who had always wanted to be a cantor. My grandfather wanted to recite prayers in his rich and moving baritone. I hadn’t heard his voice for sixty years.
In the wires was a recording of a Passover Seder that was (I’m guessing) more than seventy years old. I was tiny toddler then; my high voice can be heard squeaking on the tape, interpolated against my grandfather’s gorgeous chanting of the Haggadah in perfect Ashkenazi Hebrew. After the Seder was over, I remember, my grandfather would recline even further and recite from memories long poems in Yiddish. He spoke from a lost world. The conversation that swirled around him was splintered between English, Yiddish, and Russian.
The wires brought back a flood of buried memories. Somehow the Seder was always on the first night of the baseball season, and I can distinctly recall my cousin and I stealing away form the table to hear Vince Scully’s call of the first Dodger game of the Spring. It was a sacred time, meaning a time apart, endlessly repeated, that defined an entire form of life. I can remember the vivid, passionate debates about matters political and matters theological, my grandfather singing unperturbed in the background.
Most who participated in that Seder have now past into dust. Yet I carry that Seder, and the many who spoke on that wire, always within me. I am very different, but there are palpable elements of continuity. Today I may not keep kosher, but I do keep pesadic. It is not my grandfather’s line, but it a line that marks a kind of sacred.
Family Seders are important to me now, even though I can’t sing a note. Seders are a time for communal reflection; a time to celebrate spring and renewal; a time to ask how we have arrived at our present moment and how we should orient toward our future. During the Seder I read from the conclusion of Michael Walzer’s great book on Exodus and Revolution:
We still believe, or many of us do, what the Exodus first taught, or what it has commonly been taken to teach, about the meaning and possibility of politics and about its proper form:
--first, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt;
--second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land;
--and third, that ‘the way to the land is through the wilderness.’ There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.
To where shall we march next year? What shall we try to liberate, in ourselves, in our country, and in our world? To what Jerusalem shall we aim? The Seder has become for me a space to think hard about these questions.
The essence of Passover has always seemed to me to lie in the construction of time. The Haggadah asks us to imagine that we ourselves were slaves in Egypt. It asks us to create for ourselves a different past. Why this emphasis?
Every year at Seder I am reminded of this story told by Walter Benjamin in his magnificent essay on Kafka:
In a Hasidic village, so the story goes, Jews were sitting together in a shabby inn one Sabbath evening. They were all local people, with the exception of one person no one knew, a very poor, ragged man who was squatting in a dark corner at the back of the room. All sorts of things were discussed, and then it was suggested that everyone should tell what wish he would make if one were granted him. One man wanted money; another wished for a son-in-law; a third dreamed of anew carpenter’s bench; and so everyone spoke in turn. After they had finished, only the beggar in his dark corner was left. Reluctantly and hesitantly he answered the question. “I wish I were a powerful king reigning over a big country. Then, some night while I was asleep in my palace, an enemy would invade my country, and by dawn his horsemen would penetrate to my castle and meet with no resistance. Roused from my sleep, I wouldn’t have time even to dress and I would have to flee in my shirt. Rushing over hill and dale and through forests day and night, I would finally arrive safely right here at the bench in this corner. This is my wish.” The others exchanged uncomprehending glances. “And what good would this wish have done you?” someone asked. “I’d have a shirt,” was the answer.
The Haggadah asks us to change our past so that we can transform our present, however slightly. If we were slaves, we can come the more to appreciate freedom. We, who are sitting now in these chairs around this table, can come every more slightly to reorient our future to the importance of our freedom, and how we might use it. We would have a shirt.
Hearing that wire recording of a long-ago Seder did not invent a new past for me; but it did reanimate a long lost one, whose precious sounds will now reverberate through my future.
Robert Post is a Sterling Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus at Yale Law School.
He can be reached at: robert.post@yale.edu