‘Don’t Send My Boy to Harvard,’ The Dying Mother Said — Some Meditations on Passover

We Americans once observed the birth of George Washington and Abe Lincoln as individual holidays, celebrating (or created to celebrate) the particular virtues of each man. In 1968 the two holidays were amalgamated into Presidents’ Day.

This celebrates nothing at all. It is enjoyed as the government gift of a day off, suggesting no consideration of courage or struggle. Rather than celebrating human virtue in government, it celebrates government itself, a faceless and powerful entity from which Good Things may flow.

Prior to the amalgamation, at the very least, we Americans received the prompts: Feb 12: Slaves; Feb 22: Cherry Tree. Today, any possible reflection on the holiday by name must incite chagrin or rage in devotees of the party out of office.

The Jewish calendar is full of holidays. Its most numerous, the Sabbath, is considered, rabbinically, the most important. In it, we are Commanded by God to cease the work of the week, and spend the day in rest, enjoyment, and prayer. The rabbis say that, should all Jews observe one Sabbath the Messiah would arrive.

There are three pilgrimage festivals, Sukkot, Shavuot, and Pesach, on which the ancient Israeli Jews were commanded to go to Jerusalem to pray, sacrifice and observe the ceremonies particular to that day.

How odd, to the supposedly rational mind, is the suggestion that a holiday must be celebrated in its particular fashion? But we know that every wedding creates anxiety. The bride and her mother fight about invitations, protocol and dress; they fight with the father about the cost; everyone argues with the clergyman; and the bridegroom and ring bearer obsess about losing the ring. Try as one might, the ceremony’s awesomeness – whether consciously avowed or not – will out.

As it will on Christmas.

A denatured celebration of Jesus’ birth – popularized as St. Nicholas-ism, and indicted as the “mercantilization of Christmas” – is actually a reassertion, in the Rational Mind, of an otherwise unacceptable metaphysical imperative: stand in awe before a miracle. How else to explain the “cultural” Christian anxiety about what to give to whom, the inevitable last-minute recollection that one has forgotten Aunt Martha, the recriminations about who gave what inappropriate or insufficient gift last year; and the ethical debates about regifting?

This anxiety has nothing to do with the cost of toys, or the content of a gift list, it is an unavowable fear of the night and the disappearance of the sun – the acknowledgement of the ultimate Reality of Nature, which is to say God’s World: in this case, the Solstice.

During the shortest days of the year, our primitive ancestors prayed for Grace – not that the sun might return (they knew it would), but that their food and fuel might last til replanting, and that God note their anxiety, accept their sacrifices and prayers, and bring an early and productive Spring.

The Jews, my people, are stricken by an anxiety ratified by thousands of years of persecution. Since the Fall of the Temple in 77 C.E., we enjoyed full citizenship nowhere – condemned to a second-class existence, sometimes through reduced rights, sometimes as outright slavery, and, often, and again today, as permitted victims of savagery.

My baby boom generation of assimilated American Jews bantered about “Jewish Guilt.” But what could this have meant, other than a confession of some nameless complicity in some nameless crime? 

There was, of course, no “Jewish Crime,” let alone heritable “guilt.” (For what?) There, however, was an inevitable anxiety, based upon a legitimate fear of violence; and on the internal conflicts raised by the (finally moot) promises of complicity in hope of exemption (the Stockholm Syndrome).

A year prior to my birth, Germans were heaving Jewish babies into the furnace. The entire Ashkenazi civilization of my grandparents was destroyed, and Jews denied entrance, by the British, to a Palestine which the British had been charged by the League of Nations to preserve as a home for Jews.

Today’s Israelis, living under threat and at war since the State’s inception, are today further traumatized by Islamist barbarity, and, further, by the Western world’s assignment of blame to the bereaved victims.

My grandparents fled the pogroms of Poland. My parents, born right off the boat, wanted nothing other than to assimilate as Americans. They’d been traumatized by poverty, the Depression, the War and the Holocaust. (I grew up in the era of “restriction,” that is, the barring of Jews from various institutions and professions.)

The immigrants’ reaction was to keep the head down, and work harder. Which they did. But the anxiety, though disregarded, was not diminished, and it sought and found acceptable means of expression (see Freud). 

The Christians rationalized – that is, demystified – concern about their faith in Christ as the question of what to buy Uncle William. The Jews, both as an explanation of our mental state, and as a sop to the majoritarian Christian culture, magicked up “Jewish Guilt.”

This helpful accommodation allowed us to take actions reasonably designed for its relief. These came under the rubric of Good Works. Jews supported antisegregation, voting rights, our beloved ACLU, and later, Black Lives Matter, the “Two State” Solution, and so on. Well and good, but good works did nothing to allay Jewish anxiety – and could not, as it was not engendered by an absence of Good Works.

In chasing the chimera of individual peace, generations of Western Jews moved farther and farther to the Left. If Equal Rights for Black Americans was insufficient, we would champion reparations and affirmative action; if Equal Justice for minorities did not free us from “guilt,” we would endorse abolishment of the police and erasure of our borders. If Title Nine, and eradication of the Glass Ceiling did not address our “guilt,” we’d vote for those allowing men to compete in women’s sports. If reparations and acknowledgements, DEI and CRT, didn’t do the trick, we would demand that the State of Israel and its people (our people) cease to exist – ceding the Jewish homeland to savages, our universities to savagery, and, furthermore, sending our children to these dangerous and corrupt institutions with the admonition “Be safe.” 

“Be safe” means “hide, and I hope you aren’t killed.” Thus sending Jewish children to the schools is a performative act of child sacrifice. Why? Why would a rational parent support an institution that allowed (and so, not only endorsed but promoted) antisemitic thuggery?

The most obvious component of “Jewish Guilt” – the desire to assimilate – masks the underlying cause: the abandonment of God. Orthodox Jews greet the notion of inherited guilt with incomprehension.

Jewish holidays each have their particular natures and ramifications. 

Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement. Depending on his level of observance, the Jew may spend some or all of the day fasting, without water, and standing, with a prayer book. 

The holiday begins at sundown, with the celebration of Kol Nidre. The Jew stands, the cantor and the congregation pray or chant along with the magnificent music, and the Jew is instantly assaulted by weariness; the prayer book weighs 30 pounds, and his neck is bowed with fatigue. He has come to confess his sins before God, and to ask for forgiveness. His mind may dismiss the assertion, but his soul, and its extension, his body, remember.

See Sukkot: the Harvest Festival (adopted here as Thanksgiving). The Jew is commanded to Live in Booths for a Week – makeshift temporary structures, half-thatched, and open to the rain. A Jew who builds and inhabits the sukkah – whether for the entire week, or for one meal – experiences the unbidden thought: You know, this isn’t so bad. I’m here with my family and we have enough to eat. I’m appreciating my house, in a new way.” He’s instructed, while in the sukkah, to look back at his house, and should he do so, reflects, “how lucky am I …?” 

Passover is the Feast of Freedom. It celebrates the Exodus from Egypt. It is widely considered the oldest continuously celebrated holiday in the world.

How is it celebrated?

1) The Jewish household is to be cleansed of chametz, that is, any grain that might ferment. The Jew is instructed to abstain from bread, and any fermentable substance for eight days; he is to gather the family at a ritual meal, called the Seder (the Order), retell the story of the Exodus, explain the meaning of various ritual foods, and drink four ritual cups of wine. That’s it.

Over thousands of years, and through various different cultural traditions, the celebration has accrued various subsidiary observances and quirks, but the three commandments, above, are the only Halachic (religiously binding) requirements.

2) It is celebrated by feuding.

Nonreligious, assimilated, or apostate Jews invest their rationalized Passover with the same anxiety Christians devote to the mercantilization of Christmas. Jewish knowledge and identity has devolved into Liberalism and Good Works, and good works have proved ineffective as a placebo for terror, and the family feuding is an act of communal denial. 

Moses gave the Jewish slaves in Egypt the choice of the horror of slavery and the terror of freedom. Eighty percent chose to stay, rather than face the unknown. Although they saw what God had done to the Egyptians, they preferred not only to stay in slavery, but in subjugation to a ruler who, however badly he had treated them previously, now held them additionally guilty of membership in the Tribe and subjects of the God who’d devastated his country.

The Jews who fled Egypt fought with Moses from the moment of their Exodus, and, even before at the Red Sea, pleaded to be allowed to return. They turned on him, and so on the God who commanded him. Their resistance, apostasy, and treason are the leitmotif of the remainder of the Five Books.

At the Seder the assimilated Jews reenact the cognitive dissonance of those on the eve of the Exodus: they arrive late, argue about the direction of the ceremony, kvetch about the late-appearing food, the length of the Haggadah (the guidebook), and (especially of late) devolve into political rancor, and retire to their cars, to revile the fool swine (their family), who have desecrated everything they touched.

How many Seders were plagued this year by political vitriol? Each opposed member was as sure as that the sun rose, that he was correct, and his opponent, if not actually worthy of death, then of its psychological equivalent of familial excommunication. (Who has not heard, “and I will never speak to you again”?, and the attendant, “and, don’t ask me, Molly, you are a good soul, and I understand that you want peace; but in this instance, you’re wrong; and he/she [my brother, sister, cousin, aunt] is now nothing to me.”)

Jews have always been instructed to consider ourselves, at Passover, as if we were freed in the Exodus. I considered the admonition formal and pat, as I could not actually fantasize myself in sandals, fleeing in the night, with the unbaked bread. I might acknowledge it is a “good idea” (e.g. dismissible), but, beyond that, the suggestion left me flat.

Over the last two years I’ve come to understand this: not that we Jews are commanded to fantasize ourselves in a Sword and Sandals epic, but that, if we are at the Seder, that is, if we have made even the slightest gesture toward participation in a miracle, and whether we understand it as such or not, we will be touched, however lightly, by the Awe of God.

The Stockholm Syndrome is the animal instinct to barter submission for reprieve. Its recognition and rejection by Moses is the motivating factor of the Exodus.

A Jewish slave was being beaten by his taskmaster. Moses killed the taskmaster. The next morning, the deed was known, reported by the slave he saved. The moment Moses recognized it, he remembered that he, too, was a Jew, enjoying the perquisites of the palace, finally, only as its most petted slave.

A note to the Jews consigning their children to the Ivy League.

David Mamet

“DON’T SEND MY BOY TO HARVARD,” THE DYING MOTHER SAID – SOME MEDITATIONS ON PASSOVER

copyright © 2025 by D. Mamet