‘The Holidays’
Keeping Families Together When They Fall Apart
My local fish market, owned by a generous-spirited, good-hearted Italian, started making gefilte fish for Rosh Hashanah several years back.
Having grown up in a household where it was a Passover-only staple — homemade and delicious as it gets — only recently did I learn that for many Jews around the world, serving gefilte fish is a given for both the Jewish New Year and Passover, not to mention Shabbat. My own husband likes to keep jarred gefilte fish around any time of year.
Google gefilte fish and you’ll find there’s a lot to be learned about this very Jewish delight — from its origins to the variety of recipes. Before my mother died, I swore I would learn to make it exactly the way she did, but I never got around to it and then it became too late, moving me to write about all that was lost to me when she passed.
What it boils down to for me is coming to grips with assumptions that go unquestioned — this is just the way it is — and even a touch of irony that one particular dish (okay, matzoh, too) was all it took to distinguish Rosh Hashanah from Passover in an upbringing that seemed more watered down and homogenized as the years wore on.
I grew up in a tradition I’ve come to see as not so much observant as culturally and sentimentally Jewish. Assumptions were a part of it. Life rituals — births, Bar/Bat Mitzvahs and weddings — were always celebrated within the dictates of Jewish custom. Likewise for burials and the seven-day shiva period of mourning after someone died. Yahrtzeit memorial candles would be lit each year to mark the anniversary of a parent’s death.
Gefilte fish aside, the last traditional Passover seder I recall is the one my grandfather presided over before his passing (I was eight at the time). Any attempted seder after that disintegrated into family feuds. At which point Rosh Hashanah and Passover became food-fests indistinguishable from one another except for gefilte fish for Passover, bite-size pieces of flounder breaded and broiled for Rosh Hashanah. If cleanliness is next to godliness, no chicken wing ever made it into the oven or soup pot with even the tiniest feather intact.
That’s not to say all was lost.
And once those lazy hazy days of summer, with the noticeable shift in light, give way to the coming nostalgia of autumn, I’m hit with an inescapable alert: the holidays are around the corner.
To hear the intonation of that phrase — ‘the holidays’ — the way I do, you have to be Jewish. You have to picture a mother taking off from work days ahead of ‘the holidays’ to shop and then cook voluminous amounts of food for the large, loud family that would gather in our small, Brooklyn apartment. To grasp what she meant when she said, the holidays are late this year, or the holidays are early, requires an understanding of days measured by the lunar calendar in a secular world ruled by the sun.
The Jewish calendar is in fact marked by four different new year celebrations — one for trees, one for the tithing of cattle, the springtime new year (Passover) we associate with freedom from slavery and the beginning of a Jewish identity. But the ten-day period of repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur gets pride of place as the Jewish New Year marking the beginning of the world. Days of Awe, indeed.
Once I moved away from the fold, married, and became a mother, the assumptions I grew up with seemed less manifest. There was no synagogue around every corner, no grandparents an easy drive away, which meant I could not readily count on what I took for granted to guide me in raising a Jewish child. The moment of truth hit with force the day my daughter, six or so at the time, asked if we could get a Christmas tree. Chanukah, despite her father sending her on treasure hunts throughout the house for her gifts each day, was fun, sure, but her friends had Christmas trees brightening their living rooms.
It was a signal, time to look into Hebrew School, get ready for whatever it took to one day reach the ceremonial coming of age known as Bat Mitzah. All to strengthen a sense of Jewish identity that my husband and I alone could not readily give her. The Conservative congregation we joined had a requirement that students show up for Shabbat services on average every other week in the two years prior to Bar/Bat Mitzvah dates. Sure, we could have dropped her off for services, picked her when they were over, something other parents did. But what message would that be giving her? It didn’t matter that she would choose to sit away from us with other Bar/Mitzvah trainees in a row of their own, fidgety and whispering. It was a Saturday morning set apart from weekday routine, spiritual maybe, but certainly infusing us with the spirit and meaning of Shabbat.
The day our daughter became a Bat Mitzvah was one of the best days of my life. My husband, familiar with Shabbat services from going with his father during his boyhood days, read from Torah. My daughter was as poised as a twelve-year-old could be in reciting her Haftorah. And I did the best I could to make meaning of it all, in composing a D’var Torah for the day.
By then, my daughter had a wonderful mix of friends, Jewish and otherwise, who looked forward to my annual Chanukah latke-fest.
Families fall apart. Parents die. Rituals get diluted. You don’t have to be a Jewish mother to know that there are strategies more powerful than guilt to keep families together at holiday time. You don’t have to be too sentimental to long for something that seems further removed with each passing generation.
So come September comes the weeping for what’s gone and with it the reminder of how I’ve made the holidays my own, a mix of family and friends who know they can count on a good Jewish-style brisket, maybe some roasted salmon for Rosh Hashanah and brisket again, with gefilte fish (albeit jarred) for Passover.
