Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Seder in Berlin
Monday, April 2, 2007

I'll be celebrating Passover this week with my in-laws in Boston. Whether you're observing the holiday, or not, you may be interested in this story about having a seder in Berlin. Here's an excerpt:

Our haggadah dates from 1945, when it was printed "for the members of the Armed Forces of the United States," as its cover proclaims, sponsored by something called the New York National Jewish Welfare Board. According to the flyleaf, it's one of 260,000 copies, printed (with increasing urgency) between 1943 and 1945. When our haggadah was crisp and new, Germany was falling, and Allies were liberating concentration camps, peopled with the dead and nearly dead. Bringing "freedom" to such places is almost bitterly laughable: even if your body survives, who would ever feel free of such memories?

We bought this haggadah during the year we lived in East Berlin, to celebrate our very first seder among Germans and Americans. An odd mission for me, a German-American ex-Catholic and for my husband Seth, an American Jew of remarkable laxness, both of us atheists. Our Jewish credentials are an unorthodox American mix: ten years living in New York, some Hebrew school, a growing if miscellaneous bookshelf of Jewish-American writers. And our plan in holding a seder in Germany, I realize now, was just as all-American: artlessly simple to start, mind-bogglingly ambitious to complete.

We wanted to start our own Jewish tradition: to teach our German friends something about Judaism that does not revolve around grainy documentary footage and the inescapable guilt of their grandparents. And most audaciously, to bring a little levity to this experiment: fewer bombs, more humor, even if it's clouded by the gallows. Modern Germans rub up against Jewish culture constantly as a culture of crisis, of national shame and of pervasive memorial. What really jarred me was how little contact they seemed to have with actual Jews. What about ongoing Jewish life, beyond its attempted annihilation in the past?

Labels: Judaism

Posted by B Feiler at 8:01 AM
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