Never Done: Prepared a seder in under two hours
I think I would be missing a huge opportunity if I did not write about my experience of otherness while in Berlin -- especially from the perspective of my being a Jew. As I've written before, one of the key elements of Mussar practice is to explore the burden of others when evaluating our own ethical actions. I find it easy to think that through in terms of how my actions affect specific people (not always to easy to act correctly, but easy to think through) and harder sometimes to grasp the ways my actions affect, say, a nation of people. A nation of people like, for example, Germans. Actions like, for example, reacting with fear (moving away on the subway platform, crossing the street) when I encounter a group of young, drunk German men. Not that that's such a strange reaction for me to have to any drunk men, but we all know that what we feel inside projects externally, and I look into the faces of these guys and I think to myself, I am not like them. They are not my people.
How different is this from how I felt during the years I endured living in Hoboken -- another town filled with drunk white guys? It's different. While I crossed the street to avoid those guys too, I didn't feel like they were representing their entire nation (or even their state.) At a core level, they didn't make me feel like the other, even though I didn't feel the same as them. Hard to explain, and I expect nationalism plays into it some, but I also think that the experience of being a Jew in Germany, for the first time, with our particular history of otherness, is unavoidably at play.
In an attempt to break down the barrier, I decided to drink a beer on the S-Bahn, like so many Germans do. I didn't need to pretend I was one of them, but just to see what it would feel like to do what they do. So I bought a beer at a kiosk in the S-Bahn station, and the vendor asked me if I wanted it open, and I said yes. So there I was with my open beer in the station, and we walked over to our next train, and I took some sips and said the Shehekhianu. I knew I wouldn't really have the same experience that they have because I just don't drink that much; it only takes a few sips to make me tipsy, and I don't like getting drunk. But in some ways, just carrying the open beer through the station -- and up and out onto the street -- was the heart of the experience for me, and I do think it helped me break down the barrier I was hoping it might. Later, when I was heading home alone to throw together a seder (more on that in a minute) I had to wait 10 minutes for a transfer, and I stood near four guys who were already several beers in to their post-work wind-down. And while I didn't love the checked-out look in their red eyes, and I still wonder what it means that there is so much public drinking in this nation which has faced so much national trauma -- while I still wonder all that, I also felt just a tiny bit less of the other by virtue of having a shared experience.
I wish I had enough time to do this all justice, but I am running out here. Janina, Kathleen, and I found out that the first night seder we were planning to go to in the evening was really a second night seder, so at the last minute, we decided to make our own. At the next last minute, Kathleen and I decided she would hang out for a couple hours, and I would go back to pull the seder together. I'm going to gloss over this, but basically, I got to a grocery store at 5:30, and filled my basket with the essentials: bitter herbs, a parsnip (to represent the shankbone), wine, grape juice, and horseradish (which was hard to find without knowing its name in German!) I already had some apples, nuts, and dates for the kharoyses, a little bit of oat matse I had brought with me from home, and some eggs to hard boil. Then I got stuff for a meal -- salad and fish. I was home at the apartment by 6, and had the eggs on the stove by 6:05. I had an entire seder plate and meal prepared by 6:45, when I realized we should have some potatoes. So I went back out, bought some potatoes, and got them going too. Long story short, as I made this seder appear out of thin air, I realized, I know how to do this. It all came as second nature, and in Germany no less. I didn't have a hagode, but I figured we could tell the story ourselves. I just wasn't worried about it.
When Janina arrived, she brought the perfect additions: a box of matse, some cinnamon and ginger (that made the kharoyses taste much better, parsley (we replaced the spinach I had used, more juice, and an entire smoked chicken. Also, she brought two Yiddish hagodes. There's much to say about all this that I would write if I had more time (and I might go in and revise this post later, so check back if you're interested) but for me the most significant part was that I knew so well how to make this happen, and as I stood alone in Christian's kitchen grating apples and chopping nuts, I felt connected to Jews worldwide, and grateful for the chance to be connected in that way. And then we sat together at our little table, me and two gentiles who love Jewish culture, and we created our own awkward, impromptu Yiddish, English, sort of musical, sort of political seder. Omeyn.
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