By Rabbi Elana Zaiman, Special to JTNews
When I was around 12 years old, I wrote a letter to my grandfather, my father’s father, a rabbi, and my only grandparent born outside of the United States. I asked him question upon question about his life: Where in Russia did you grow up? What year did you leave? How old were you? How many brothers and sisters did you have?
“Anything Grandpa,” I pleaded. “Tell me anything you remember.”
I wanted to hear his story because I wanted to understand him better. I wanted to hear his story because I understood that, in part, his story was my story.
For several weeks, I eagerly awaited a response. Finally, a letter arrived. Not quite the response for which I had hoped. First, my grandfather was much too brief. The letter was composed of only two paragraphs. Second, he did not answer any of my questions.
Instead he wrote in his sermonic fashion: “I am unable to present you with an accurate picture of my past, because, in so doing, I would not be true to my life as it actually happened; rather I would be telling you about how I wanted my life to have been.”
That would have been fine with me, I remember thinking. I wanted to hear his story. I wanted to hear how he remembered his story. As to the truth of the factual details of his story, that mattered to me less.
It’s important to pass on family stories from one generation to the next, because if we do not pass on our stories, then they are lost. And if they are lost, a piece of our identity is lost with them. Our identity is incomplete.
In the Haggadah we read, “vehigadetah levincha” — “And you should tell your child.” Here we speak about a specific story, the Passover story. The story most Jews tell at least once a year. Our story. How we began as a band of slaves, and ended up the Jewish people.
We are commanded to tell the Passover story to our children because it is our story. We are commanded to tell the Passover story to our children because it is their story. We are commanded to tell the Passover story to our children year after year so it will not be forgotten.
What if we do not have children? Are we still required to tell the story? The answer is yes. In the Mekilta, a Midrashic work on the book of Exodus, we read: “When one does not have a child, one is obligated to tell the story to oneself.”
The Passover story is so important to our sense of selves as Jews, we are required to tell it even when children are not present.
The Haggadah highlights this when it says, “Even if all of us are scholars, all of us sages, all of us elders, all of us learned in Torah, it is still our duty to tell the story of the exodus from Egypt. And whoever tells the exodus story over and over again deserves praise.” In this statement the Haggadah indicates that knowing the story, in and of itself, is not enough. Knowing the story does not exempt us from telling it.
Telling the story, by the way, should not be solely an intellectual exercise. Telling the story should be an emotional experience, a process we live through over and over again, because we are never the same at one moment as we were a moment before, or as we will be a moment later. That is why we are told to tell the same story year after year: To enable the Passover story to become a part of our very being.
The Haggadah tells us this straight out. “In every generation, each person is required to see him/herself as if he/she came out of Egypt.” We are commanded to make the Passover story part of our very being. We are commanded to see ourselves as active participants in this drama of redemption. Only by reading ourselves into our story, our history, will we be able to live our story in the present, and pass over our story into the future. Our ancestors’ story is their story. But their story is our story too. And our children’s story. And their children’s story.
I wonder how my grandfather would have responded to my inquiry if I had said, “vehigadetah levincha,” — “and you should tell your child.” Would he have understood why it was so important for me to know his story? Would he have understood that in his decision not to pass on his story, a piece of his story would be forever lost, and therefore a piece of my identity would be lost too?
Vehigadetah levincha! Let us tell our children the Passover story. Because it is our story. Because it is their story. Because it will someday be their children’s story.