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Leaning Sideways

I learned something new at our seder this year, and it had nothing to do with the story of the Exodus.\n\nI was ready for a seder full of questions. I had done my homework, gone to classes, read essays and books. I prepared questions that I would ask the kids, questions that would encourage them to ask their own questions. Like my friend Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller impressed on us at one of our Torah salons, a seder is like a mini-Beit Midrash, a table of learning, debating and understanding.\n
[additional-authors]
April 16, 2009

I learned something new at our seder this year, and it had nothing to do with the story of the Exodus.

I was ready for a seder full of questions. I had done my homework, gone to classes, read essays and books. I prepared questions that I would ask the kids, questions that would encourage them to ask their own questions. Like my friend Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller impressed on us at one of our Torah salons, a seder is like a mini-Beit Midrash, a table of learning, debating and understanding.

Armed with my questions and shivering in the cold of Montreal, I walked after synagogue services to my sister Judy’s house for the first seder. The place was loud and festive. The kids were playing and reconnecting with their cousins. Grown-ups were catching up on the past year. And my mother was in my sister’s kitchen acting as if it were her own. It was a scene right out of Woody Allen’s “Radio Days” — everyone competing to see who could speak the fastest.

I looked at the joyful chaos around me and wondered if I’d be able to introduce some learning into the evening. How would I cut through the festive mood to kick off a discussion on the deeper meaning of slavery? How would I ask sober questions on whether there is holiness in the wicked son?

As our noisy group took their seats at the table, Rabbi Sherre Hirsch’s recent book came to mind: “We Plan, God Laughs.” It was clear that God was now laughing at my plan for a neat and orderly seder with lots of meaningful discussion. How could I compete with all this happiness?

We went through the haggadah, did all the dipping and the rituals and even threw in some explanations and discussions with the kids, but let’s face it, the theme of our seder was family joy, not ancestral angst.

Little did I know, however, that once we had completed the rituals and begun the meal, an unexpected Passover lesson would await me.

It came not from Moses or Pharaoh, but from my 94-year-old uncle, Tonton Michel.

My uncle has been attached to our family since he was a kid in Morocco, though technically, we’re not related. He’s been married to the same woman, Annette, for 68 years. They’ve never had children. They have no relatives in Montreal. But they’re so close to our family that we’ve always called them uncle and aunt.

They’ve been fixtures at our seder and holiday tables since the mid-1960s, when we all moved to Montreal. Although I have probably seen them hundreds of times, I don’t recall ever having a real conversation with them. We never did anything more than small talk or exchange expressions of affection.

But this year was different, because my sister decided that Tonton Michel would sit next to me.

With the festive noise of our seder showing no signs of abating, I decided it was a good night to finally get to know my uncle.

So I leaned sideways to ask a few questions, and spent the next hour listening to his stories.

I learned that growing up in Morocco, one of his closest friends was a Muslim man who had a partly Jewish name, and who was probably a descendant of the Marranos several centuries earlier. I also learned that Jews in Morocco were clever businessmen.

Of the many stories that he shared, his favorite was that of an old Jewish merchant in Casablanca who made sandals using discarded tires. When a customer complained that the same sandals sold for a lot less somewhere else, the Jewish merchant explained that his sandals were worth more because he used Michelins.

My uncle reminisced about seders 80 years ago in his Jewish neighborhood of Casablanca — what his mother cooked and who would come over, how he met his future wife, and how he loved the night of Mimouna (held the night after Passover ends) when Arab neighbors would help the Jews prepare the traditional sweet tables.

While he had fond memories of many of his Arab neighbors, he recalled how certain Arab expressions betrayed a demeaning view of Jews, and how things started becoming more hairy for Jews after the Six-Day War. Moving to Montreal made him feel safer, but you could tell he still misses the old country.

My uncle kept pouring out stories and I kept leaning over to ask him questions — none of them following any Passover script. Instead of the Pharaoh, we talked about the king of Morocco. There were no questions about the deeper meaning of slavery or the symbolism of matzah. Nothing about the personal significance of our people’s master story.

The only story that held my attention was that of my 94-year-old uncle. The questions were not historical, but personal. It wasn’t “tell me about our ancestors,” but rather, “tell me about you.”

After 40 years of spending time with Tonton Michel, I finally heard his story.

I broke the rules of the seder: I leaned sideways not to eat matzah but to listen to my uncle. But, as I reflected later, our collective master story is really an accumulation of millions of personal stories like the one I just heard.

It also dawned on me that of all the questions we can ask at Passover, of all the questions we can ask of our children, neighbors and those we have forgotten, perhaps the most powerful one is the simplest of all: What’s your story?

It’s a question we need to share especially with the old and vulnerable, those members of our community who can so easily become, in the words of Rabbi Ed Feinstein, “socially invisible.”

When I saw the look on my uncle’s face after he had told me his own story, it was like seeing a man come back to life.

I didn’t just learn about personal liberation, I witnessed it.

David Suissa, an advertising executive, is founder of OLAM magazine, Meals4Israel.com and Ads4Israel.com. He can be reached at dsuissa@olam.org.

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