Spring Break, 2007, and we were sitting outside the co-op bakery's home in the Inner Sunset. Unlike yesterday in Oakland it was hot and sunny that day in San Francisco and we sat not in North Face down jackets and wool socks but in tank tops and flip flops, the sweet smell of shea butter sunblock mixing with the delicious aromas pouring through the shop's open windows. That morning we'd woken up and decided to, you know, host a seder (the marathon-style multi-hour dinner and community observation of Passover): the way you do at 10 a.m. on the morning of second night. We found ourselves with post-its and pens and highlighters and scissors and tape and scratch paper and about half a dozen different haggadot (books used as guides for participating in the seder), me doubtful we'd get it done but her convinced that in eight hours we could prepare a text, cook a meal, pull together two dozen people, set a table, provide art materials, and facilitate the individual and group experiences and reflections on liberation that are hallmarks of the holiday. Really?!
In the end we completely pulled it off: highlights included pulling huge chunks of mortar-bound brick out of the sea at Baker Beach, driving them home, dripping, in the back of the Subaru, then soaking them in bleach water and actually using them for the seder plate...boiling a half-dozen huge beets in the world's largest pot and then laughing as the blood-colored water poured out into the kibbutz-style kitchen and made everyone shriek...buying paper and clay and oil pastels at the art-supply store on Van Ness, then encouraging everyone to draw sculpt sketch share their insights as the meal went on...bundling up in borrowed button-fly jeans and cozy wool socks as the sun went down over the East Bay hills and we closed the big picture windows against the nighttime Marina fog, keeping everyone warm as we stayed until late in the night talking and singing.
The text we created, cut and pasted old school-style with scissors and glue stick, came from many sources but primarily from a book called A Night to Remember: The Haggadah of Contemporary Voices. On my way to Arizmendi yesterday I had tucked it into my bag, just to flip through while enjoying one last pre-Passover pastry, and among the post-its and matzah ball soup stains I found again one of my favorite quotes, not just in this book but about the holiday:
When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren't told or books weren't written, humans would live like the beasts, only for the day.
Reb Zebulun said, "Today we live, but by tomorrow today will be a story. The whole world, all human life, is one long story." Children are as puzzled by passing time as grownups. What happens to a day once it is gone? Where are all our yesterdays with their joys and sorrows? Literature helps us remember the past, with its many moods. To the storyteller yesterday is still here as are the years and the decades gone by.
In stories time does not vanish. Neither do people and animals. For the writer and his readers, all creatures go on living forever. What happened long ago is still present.
--Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel laureate, from Zlateh the Goat
I have found no better explanation than this one of why I tell stories. We used to ask each other impossible questions, like "What job would you have had if you lived a hundred years ago?" Had I been born one century earlier, I know I would still have been a teacher just like I am in the modern day. But as our rhetorical meanderings continued and we wondered what our lives would have been like not a century but a millenium ago, my answer changed. Teaching and learning looked different then, but community looked the same and so did shared experience, so did collective wisdom. A thousand years ago I would have been the one people came to with secrets and stories, the one with the agonizingly accurate memory, the one who shares the lessons from generation to generation.
Singer was right--time does not vanish. It is the telling of stories that allows time travel, that creates the possibility of living on forever. As you tell your stories, of Passover or Easter or the equinox or last year's Spring Break or whatever it may be, I wish for you the chance to feel yourself as part of not just the stories told before you but the stories your loved ones will continue to tell as time goes on.
Chag Sameach--a wonderful holiday to you :)
No comments:
Post a Comment