Between Gods: A Memoir (22 page)

The microphone squeals in protest, and a loud peal of feedback echoes through the room.

She frowns and fiddles with the wires. “Can you hear me now?” she shouts. We nod unhappily.

Satisfied, the rabbi begins in earnest. “You will SEE …” she says. “You will SEE …”

There’s a long pause, as though we are about to see the face of Adonai himself, before she completes the sentence: “You will see some FOOD items on your table.”

We look down dutifully. I notice for the first time that each table has been furnished with a Seder plate, featuring a limp sprig of parsley, an egg, an orange and several paper muffin cups filled with suspicious-looking goopy substances.

“Who can TELL me … WHO can tell me the MEANING …” the rabbi says, throwing her arms wide as though to indicate the scope of the heavens.

The meaning of what? Of life? Of death?

“WHO can tell me the meaning of the EGG?”

Total silence. I brace myself for a long and painful night, as though for a visit to the dentist.

“Nobody?” she asks, incredulous. She tries again.

“What about—” She pauses, her eyes closed, her face tilted to the heavens. “What about the green vegetable? What is the BEST green vegetable to have on your Seder plate?”

I recall how our last class with Harriet focused entirely on the fact that there is no best anything, no one correct way. All Seders are based on custom and geography. Harriet managed three straight hours reiterating this point in different ways.

At a far table someone’s hand goes up. “Horseradish?”

We hear little Krista gurgle.

“No!” the rabbi shouts, triumphant. “WHO knows why not?”

Nobody knows why not, but someone else suggests that romaine lettuce might be the best. “Yes,” the rabbi proclaims. “And do you know WHY?”

She does not wait for an answer but carefully elucidates the merits of romaine: it is
sweet
at first, with a bitter aftertaste, and reminds us that the Egyptians did take the Jews in at first; that the story wasn’t all bad, only the ending.

We slowly and painfully work our way through the other items on the Seder plate. The orange is to welcome women and “lesbian folk.” The pink cup is Miriam’s cup, to go along with Elijah’s, and it is filled with water as opposed to wine, for a reason that is never made clear. The exercise requires several hours. In all her endless pontificating, the rabbi says one thing that really strikes me: “For those of you on the verge of marriage and children, now is the time to learn. Now is the time to get good and COMFORTABLE, so you can give your children a sense of wonder and awe, a sense that THIS is what we DO.”

After the interminable lecture, we split into groups for the “participatory” component of the evening. One group will be talking about designing your own seder. Another group will be doing a “craft”: colouring a piece of fabric for a matzah cover using fat markers suitable for five-year-olds. Degan and I choose to attend the music session. Maybe we can take back a song for Music Night with the writers. We are ushered into a room where orange plastic chairs are arranged in a circle around a bongo drum. “Singing and dancing in Hebrew!” I whisper.

Degan shuffles his feet.

Our workshop leader enters: Rabbi Glickman. “Shalom!” she says brightly.

Krista lets out a loud squeal in reply. Tom and Diane pretend to shush her, but their faces betray delight in their daughter’s precociousness. Two Jews and a Jew-to-be. A perfect family.

We make our way through a book of songs, one for every part of the seder: Sanctifying the Name of God. Washing the Hands. Eating the Green Vegetable.

The customary song “Dayeinu”—meaning “it would have been enough”—is a long list of things God did for the Jews.

We shake the maracas Rabbi Goldstein has distributed and belt out the words in a rough approximation of Hebrew that I imagine would be incomprehensible to a native speaker. After the long lecture, it’s a blissful kind of release; people stand, and dance self-consciously, and then begin to dance in earnest. Degan shimmies toward me, his earlier mood lifted by the music, his head and shoulders tipped back. “I forgot to tell you something,” he says under the din of the singing.

“What?”

“At work last week someone told me I’m a snobby
WASP
on the outside, but inside I have a warm Jewish soul.”

At the end of the evening, when we’re getting our coats, Rabbi Glickman approaches us.

“How are the wedding plans going?”

I hesitate. “We’re trying to decide if we should get married under a
chuppah
,” I say.

She nods. “What kind of wedding are you having?”

I describe what we’ve been discussing for the ceremony.

She says, “It sounds strange. To have a Unitarian wedding when you’re on the way to becoming Jewish.

I look at Degan. Are we on the way to becoming Jewish?

“Not Unitarian,” I say. “Interfaith.”

“Interfaith how?”

“We’re not sure yet.” I decide to appeal to her authority. “What Jewish elements should we include?”

“You could get married under a
chuppah
,” she says right away, and then pauses. “You
could
get married under a
chuppah
. You
could
break a glass. But I don’t know if I would.”

“Why not?”

“You’re not Jewish. What kind of message does it send?”

“That I’m half Jewish?” I’m unable to keep the irritation from my voice. “We’re paying tribute to the multiplicity of our religious backgrounds.”

Rabbi Glickman straightens her spine, squares her shoulders, as though about to deliver a soliloquy. “Another option would be to get married now and have a Jewish wedding later. When you’re actually Jewish.”

I’m silent, but inside me a voice shouts:
No—this might be our only chance
.

sixteen

P
ESACH IS UPON US
. The greatest of all Jewish holidays, and the most celebrated. After scheming and shame-filled emails and thinly disguised begging, we’ve managed to get ourselves invited to two separate tables: Jordan’s parents in Kitchener for the first night and Shayna’s parents in Peterborough for the second.

In the car on the way to my hometown Degan and I talk again about the
chuppah
. “I don’t think we should have one,” I say.

I expect him to put up a fight, but this time he just shrugs. “Okay.”

“I thought you were attached?”

He looks at me over his newspaper. “There are other things that are more important to me.”

It’s hard to tell whether I feel disappointment tinged with relief, or the opposite.

We leave the car at Mum and Dad’s and walk the few blocks through the leafy neighbourhood to Jordan’s parents’ house. When Jordan and I were teenagers, we dubbed this area “the laundry district” because of the warm smell of soap and steam escaping in the darkness as we carried on our nightly escapades. Jordan and his wife, Ilana, are at the door to meet us, with their two beautiful curly-headed babies and Jordan’s mother, who I called “Dr. Ross” when we were teenagers. I don’t know what to call her now as an adult.

“Chag Sameach,” Jordan says. He’s tall, with the same droopy eyelids, although his sandy hair is now receding—the child I once knew, then the teenager, now rendered in an adult form. He grins at me and kisses my cheek. “Whoever thought I’d be welcoming
you
at my seder table?” he says.

Seeing the inside of the house after fifteen years is like seeing the contents of an earlier life. In grade eleven we founded The Spaghetti Group, five of us meeting for intrigue at the home of whoever’s parents were gone—which was almost always Jordan’s. As I pass through the rooms, I catch glimpses of our teenage ghosts splayed out in front of the fireplace with bottles of wine. I have to be introduced to Jordan’s grown siblings, even though I went to elementary school with them, too. I don’t recognize them in their adult iterations. An aunt and uncle from Toronto arrive with a bag of wrapped boxes.

“Passover gifts?” I ask.

Jordan laughs. “It’s our daughter’s birthday.”

“You have to be careful with us,” Degan says, “or twenty years from now our kids will be getting presents on Pesach.”

Passover tells the story of the enslavement of the Hebrews, and Pharaoh’s decision to kill the firstborn sons of Jewish slaves. Baby Moses is set adrift in a basket, discovered by Pharaoh’s
daughter and raised as a prince of Egypt. I am struck by this second tale of concealed identity: in Purim, Esther’s Judaism is hidden from her husband, the king. In the Passover story, Moses is raised unaware that he’s a Jew.

The Ross Seder is warm, and chaotic in a way that reminds me of
shul
: people coming and going, listening or not listening to the leader as they see fit. I feel a childlike thrill at seeing the seder plates adorned with egg and
maror
, the bitter herbs, just as we have learned. On my behalf, Degan gags down the gefilte fish, a traditional Ashkenazi dish of ground fish formed into balls. We follow along with the proceedings as best we can, and are gratified when the crowd bursts into a rousing rendition of “Dayeinu,” the song that we learned at our Passover workshop. After dinner, Jordan and Ilana walk Degan and me back home through the wide dusky streets. The smell of laundry drifts up from someone’s vent: Jordan smiles at me and I know what he’s thinking.

The next morning Degan and I sleep late at my parents’ house and come upstairs to bacon and eggs. We excuse our way around the pork (not kosher) and the toast (leavened) and sit down with my parents to talk about the wedding. We have decided on a full weekend event, so our friends can stay over at the retreat centre and make a holiday out of it. We discuss logistics—who will staff the bar, how the older guests will navigate the path through the woods to the tent. I give my parents an update on what we are thinking with regard to a ceremony. They are relieved to hear we have abandoned the idea of a
chuppah
.

I look over at Mum: I can see there’s something she wants to say. “What?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she says, picking a stray crumb from an empty muffin tin on the counter. “Just. Well. I was thinking that maybe I’d walk you down the aisle alongside your father.”

I look over at her stylish new haircut, the pearl studs in her ears. She is going elegantly grey. “Really?” I can’t keep the shock from my voice.

“Why not?” she asks, a little indignant.

I’m surprised that Mum, traditional in almost every way, would consider such a thing, and even more surprised at myself. I’m a feminist. I will not be—and wouldn’t consider—taking Degan’s name. I know that “giving away the bride” was a historical passing of property from one man to another. And yet, in the face of Mum’s offer, I only want my dad. All my life I’ve dreamed that on my wedding day, I would walk down the aisle on his arm.

Degan packs up to go back to Toronto. He was able to take one night off work for Passover, but two would be pushing it. I kiss him goodbye and then sit down with Dad to do my taxes. “I’ve only got an hour,” I tell him as he loads up the program on the computer. The screen flashes off and on, then off again.

“You’re going to Peterborough?”

“To my friend Shayna’s parents’. For the second night of Passover.”

“By yourself?”

“Degan has to work.”

“I could come with you, instead,” Dad offers.

I look over at his face, the deep lines on his forehead. First synagogue, now this. “You’d be
welcome
to come,” I say. “I love it that you want to come.”

The simple fact of his interest breaks my heart. It’s really too last minute for him to join me this year, but my mind leaps
immediately to next year. Where could I take him? Who would have enough space at their table not just for Degan and me but Dad, too? I feel lost trying to make him comfortable with something so unfamiliar, to give him a Jewish home I never had. And beneath the sadness is that bubbling anger: it was
his
job to give
me
that home.

When I arrive at Shayna’s parents’ place in Peterborough, a big suburban two-storey that backs onto the Otonabee River, she runs out to meet me in a T-shirt and shorts, her face flushed. “Hello, gorgeous,” she says, kissing me on both cheeks.

Her family has been at the park playing soccer.

“Chag Sameach?” I try.

She gives me the thumbs-up. Inside, she introduces me around. Her sister, even taller than Shayna, is at the kitchen sink washing parsley, which I deduce will be the
karpas
, the green vegetable to dip in saltwater representing tears, on the Seder plate. Shayna’s mother is laying out dozens of Haggadot, the book that tells the Passover story, in the living room. Shayna riffles through them looking for one with transliterations, the cryptic Hebrew rendered into an approximation of English, so I can follow along.

It is tradition in her family to take a photo in the living room before the seder starts. I stand awkwardly at the edge of the group of family and friends, but Shayna wraps an arm around my shoulders, pulls me in. Then her parents go to their places at either end of the table. Her father welcomes us all. He has a bushy beard and a bald spot that is covered by his
kippah
. “Twenty years ago,” he says, “there would have been heated conversations about whether non-Jews would be welcome at the seder table. Now there are two of you, and we include you without even a thought.”

I look around discreetly, trying to locate my partner in crime.

The Marshak Seder is a little more cohesive than the Rosses’ was—more fluent Hebrew speakers, more gusto with the songs—and the two littlest children chant the Four Questions with pride. Shayna’s niece is about to become a Bat Mitzvah, and has been studying Torah with her bubbie, her grandmother, in the lead up. Now she tells the story of Moses and Miriam in such detail that I am rapt. She is chubby, with braces on her teeth, a strapless sundress, new breasts. On the cusp of womanhood. Her father is a convert.