Volume 34
Fall-Winter
2008 |
 |
I was privileged to meet anthropologist
Barbara Myerhoff on two occasions
prior to her untimely death at the age of
fifty in 1985. The first was when my wife,
Amanda, and I invited both Myerhoff and
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett to a consultants’
meeting at our Washington, D.C.,
apartment for a project called the Grand
Generation. I can vividly recall Myerhoff’s
remarkable beauty and her humor—and I
fondly recollect these two brilliant women
bragging to one another about the bargains
they had gotten on various items of clothing
they were wearing at the time.
I met Barbara Myerhoff again at a second
meeting after I had moved to New York.
She was already an iconic figure, having
completed Number Our Days and a film by the
same title, which won an Academy Award in
1976. I remember asking her if success had
changed her. She said, you know, it’s at the
point now where I walk into the restroom
at the university, and students follow me
in and keep talking right through the stall.
Today, as her students, we’re still doing that:
continuing the conversation across death. I
also remember her telling me that people in
academe put so much emphasis on writing
and not enough on talking—and talking is
so important.
Myerhoff’s astonishing talk, “Ritual and
Storytelling: A Passover Tale,” published
here in an abbreviated version, captures
the rhythm of her words and her vivid
and distinctive train of thought, bringing
the reader into the classroom of one of
the discipline’s finest lecturers. As an anthropologist
with a poet’s gift for language, she utilizes the tools of ethnography—a
remarkable ethnographic eye—to explore
the familiar: a Passover seder. In adapting
the piece for magazine publication, I had
to cut Myerhoff’s essay in half; I urge all of
you who enjoy this abridged version to buy
the book from which it is excerpted, Stories
as Equipment for Living: Last Talks and Tales
of Barbara Myerhoff, where you may read it
in its entirety.
Some months after Myerhoff’s death in
January 1985, we held an event in her honor.
It was City Lore’s first public event, and
Myerhoff’s ideas of “re-membering” and
her vision of the way culture is transmitted
set forth in this essay informs our work,
always.
I would like to talk to you about a ritual
that is built around storytelling. It is what
we would call a meta-story—that is, a story
about telling the story, about passing on to
the progeny the experience of the ancestors,
and it’s a familiar one to many of you. I like
working with familiar materials because
there are almost always elements whose specialness
and profundity we have overlooked,
and I think that looking at familiar materials retrieves them and gives them to us with a
freshness that makes them more intense and
more effective. The ritual I’m going to talk
about is Passover....
The work I’m going to describe comes
out of a longer study of yiddishkeit called
the “Transmission of an Endangered Tradition.”
A number of us at the University
of Southern California studied the transmission
of yiddishkeit through various means—ritual, story, performance, and folk
art. We videotaped many events and then
proceeded, over the course of two years, to
look at them and look at them and look at
them. This, then, is what I’m going to tell
you: the story of a Passover seder that we
videotaped. It’s a four-hour–long tape that
we looked at again and again to try to figure
out what was going on there. What makes
this so important is that this is, indeed, the study of the transmission of culture....We
look at their world as a set of meanings, a
web of understandings, that they somehow
have to animate. And this, then, becomes
our task: to see them seeing themselves.
Now as we looked at this ritual—this
storytelling ritual, this performance of a
story—trying to figure out what was going
on and how to tell other people what was
going on, what quickly became apparent to
us was that we were struggling to tell two
stories at the same time. One is the chronological
story of the ritual which has a certain
set of procedures, of fixed events that have
to occur in a given order, and the other is
the story of the family that is performing
the ritual. And every family performs it
differently, and every year it is performed
differently, although one of the great myths
about ritual is that it is always the same. This
is the essence of ritual. It is the story that
says: This is always the same.
But of course it isn’t. Common sense—
which ritual banishes, and which it is supposed
to banish in order to induce belief—
tells us that, if we look at it immediately,
every ritual has to be different. There are
different performers, it’s a different world,
a different year. And yet we accept the claim
to perpetuity that ritual makes. Because it is
rhythmic, because it is repetitive, because it
uses a special vocabulary, all ritual takes ordinary
things and makes them extraordinary.
The means it uses are everywhere the same.
Whether it’s an African initiation ceremony
in Botswana or a Jewish storytelling session
in Los Angeles, ritual sets the ordinary apart
by its use of language, gesture, costume,
posture—sensuous things. And those sensuous
things are very persuasive and invite us
to suspend disbelief, exactly as we do in a
theater....
Now let me briefly say what Passover
is. This is a formal holiday celebrated each
spring by Jews since the time of the dispersion
from Palestine, after the destruction
of the Temple. They are admonished to assemble
to retell the story of their deliverance
from Egypt and from slavery. This is the
heart of the story: the release from affliction,
the release from oppression. This leads to a
reaffirmation of the wandering through the
desert where, at the end of forty-nine days,
they receive the Covenant on Mount Sinai,
and the Torah is given, and the Jews come
into being as a constituted entity. The Bible
requires that this account of exodus and
freedom be repeated. The parents tell it to
the children every year when the children are
told to ask, “Why do we assemble?” They
are asking: What’s special about Passover, in
addition to that historical or mythical event,
so that this is the only formal holiday of this
seriousness that takes place in the home,
instead of the synagogue? Friends are there,
family members are there, personal ties give
the whole thing its context. It takes place
among one’s primary group, so that sacred
beliefs are again put in touch with the ordinary
people of one’s life, and those ordinary
people take on an extra dimension. They
become the characters in the great drama
itself. And this revitalizes family relations.
It doesn’t always make them harmonious or
even affectionate, but it certainly intensifies
them....
Let me tell you about the text. It is called
the Haggadah, which means, literally, “the
telling.” There are many versions of this
book. Now people write their own to suit
their present circumstances. Different
families have their own version, and they
don’t like the others. Within families, there
are often arguments about which version to
use. If the critical one got lost, this is a big
problem. But no matter what the version,
there is always some written text called the
Haggadah, which will always be followed.
And that is what you call, in anthropology,
part of the Great Tradition. This is the allegedly
permanent, official, written record
of how the story is to be told, with stage
directions: Now you drink a glass of wine.
Now you hide a piece of matzoh.
Then there is the oral tradition that goes
alongside this. “Well, this is the part we
leave out.” “That’s where Aunt Sadie put
in this other part.” “Aren’t you going to do
this one?” “No, we don’t have time for that.
Let’s do this one instead.” Often the agreements
that come out of these differences get
penciled in. And so a family’s history can be
read in and through its Haggadah. We have a
group of people who are doing this together
year in and year out. The participants are
always changing somewhat. Someone has
died, someone has been born, someone is
out of town, someone brings a guest. But
there is some stable group of people who
are always present year after year, and they,
in effect, become the elders who guard the
tradition.
So their family story over the years, their
oral stories, their particular histories go along
with this Great Tradition. The Little Tradition
of local people on the ground, alive in
time, goes along with the Great Story, and
they intermingle, contradict one another,
and jog along more or less side by side,
hopefully ending at the same time. So these
two stories, then, are simultaneously told: the
Great Story, which is in the Haggadah and
which is written down, the written tradition
and history of how the people came out of
Egypt and received the Covenant, and the
individual family story. And these become
inseparable, because you cannot understand
the one without the other. You are reading
both stories at the same time. The seder is
contrapuntal.
The other thing that makes this a special
event, a particular kind of ritual, is that the
children must be present. The whole point
of it is for one of the children—allegedly, the
youngest son—to ask the leader, “Wherefore
is this night different from all other nights?”
This is the first of the Four Questions,
which the child asks at the beginning of the
seder. This is a marvelous piece because it
permits the child to say, “Why are we doing
this? What’s this ritual for? Why do we lean
tonight? Why do we eat bitters? Why do we
eat of unleavened bread?” All these questions
are saying: What’s all the specialness
for? And this is a set-up. You can almost hear
the voice of the Great Tradition say: Ah, I
thought you’d never ask. It’s what makes the
whole thing happen....
Children are obviously very symbolic.
They represent many things: the future,
innocence; above all, they are symbols of
perpetuity. So the children have to be present
throughout the seder. Ideally, they should be awake, but because the seder goes on a long
time, it’s not guaranteed. So various devices
are put in to make sure the children are awake
throughout. There are songs, there are riddles,
and there are all sorts of opportunities and
invitations for misbehavior. It is understood
that the children will get drunk because everyone
present has to drink four cups of wine.
The children usually tipple throughout the
evening. They spill and they drink, and they
spill and they drink. There is an opportunity,
which I will describe later, when they are
actually encouraged and allowed to spill. This
is quite a thrill. And then there is an actual
ransom of a piece of matzoh.
Now matzoh, which is unleavened bread,
is the symbolic food that is eaten during
the eight days of Passover. There is a very
important piece of matzoh called the afikoman,
which is understood as dessert, and it is
broken. The ceremony cannot be completed
until its two halves are reassembled. So it
has become the custom for the leader to
break this piece of matzoh and put it in a
conspicuous place where a child will see it
and steal it and hide it. And the child holds
it for a ransom. After dinner, when there is
more ceremony to do—by then it is usually
very late, and everyone is very tired and
impatient—the seder cannot be completed,
and the Messiah will never come, unless the
afikoman is recovered. But the child does not
give it back until the leader pays for it, and
the payment varies with the times and the
economic community. It can be a bicycle, and
it can be a quarter—it all depends on what
you can get away with....
All this brings us to a particular Passover,
the four-hour one we taped. It was a fourgenerational
ceremony. It took place in the
home of an old couple—East European,
Yiddishists, not Orthodox people. Arnold
was then ninety-two, Bella was eighty-nine.
He was something of a poet and a writer, a
philosopher. She in old age had become an
artist, and a rather serious one. Their daughter,
who is my closest friend and my age, was
then in her middle forties. Deena is a feminist,
a poet herself, divorced. Her two sons, Marc
and Greg, were twenty and nineteen at the
time. A non-Jewish girlfriend of one of the
boys was present. They were both religiously
ignorant, with the same nostalgia, yearning
back to the tradition but feeling they did not
really possess it—really lost as to their own
way, but full of desire for something Jewish
that was their own. I was present with my
husband and my two sons, who were then
six and nine. There were a bunch of older
people who dropped in during the course of
the evening, Yiddishists, all of them, who had
carried on a long conversation, day in and day
out, with the old couple....
So there we were, all assembled. Now for
many a year—I have been going to these seders
for many a year—Arnold has been flirting
with some essence: he has begun the seder
by saying, “This will be my last seder.” And
that is difficult to receive on many levels. It
has to be treated with respect and also with a
measure of skepticism. He announced it this
year as he had in the past....
Arnold was very aware that his grandsons
didn’t know anything Jewishly, and he wanted
this tradition passed on. So after saying the
opening prayers, he introduced his older
grandson and said, “My grandson Marc will
lead the seder.” Greg had been given a chance
to lead the seder a couple of years before. So
Marc was expecting this, and he said under
his breath as he came into the house, “If he
tells me to lead it and breaks in and interrupts
it and takes it over, I want you to know I’m
leaving.” He said this to his mother as we
all went in. So we were all very tense. This
combination of intentions does not make
for a relaxed evening, but seders are never
relaxed.
It was a sacrifice for the old man to give up
leading the seder because it was something he
loved to do, but he was doing this to assure
that his grandsons would be prepared to carry
it on. What happened during the course of
the evening was that the boy slowly changed
into a man. You could see it happening before
your eyes—this is the wonder of working
with videotape—and it became a rite of
passage for him. It was the bar mitzvah that,
in a sense, he had never had. He began the
seder as an ignorant, unsure boy, and by the
end of the evening he was commanding the
situation with a good deal of authority.
It so happened that by the end of the
evening, he was rather drunk as well. So the
videotape has this wonderful mixture of
authority and slippage. When his grandfather
put him in charge of the seder, he began to
take a lot of wine because he was very nervous,
and his grandfather turned to him and
said, “You can’t do that, you’re supposed to
have four cups.” The grandson said, “Look,
these are my sacred cups, and then over here
I have my other cup. I’m drinking from that
one, and I do the required four cups at the
right time.” And the grandfather said, “That’s
an interesting idea. Do you think I could do
that too?” And so an innovation was made
that you knew was going to get passed down,
and that generations from now in this family
they would tell the story of how this came
about....
I said before that anthropologists and
others have not studied the transmission
of culture systematically. We have a rather
mechanical view—we get it from the secular
world—that education is something like a bag
of potatoes in a relay race. One generation
hauls it forward, and the children pick it up
and continue with it, as if it were a mechanical
thing that you thrust onto the youth, and they
take it and continue it. But this is simplistic
and erroneous.
What happens when we view the transmission
of tradition in the context of this
Passover seder? Mind you, we are dealing here
with family and with sacred materials. Again,
I say “sacred” meaning a form of authority
that does not come from God; I mean what
carries authority because it goes to the heart
of what makes you a human being, it’s what
you carry with you all your life. And that isn’t
something you take dutifully and receive, and
then you say “hank you” and go on. Anyone
who is a parent knows this. That is not the
way you teach your child to be a mentsh or the
way you teach your children to do what you
do or teach them what you believe in. Not at
all, on the contrary. Common sense tells us
that socialization—which is the teaching of
sacred things—is ambivalent, it is a struggle.
And the problem is how to get the children to
receive what you have to teach in some form
that you consider valid and recognizable, and to take that version and make it their own.
That is the struggle of the parent or the one
who is passing it on.
The struggle from the children’s point of
view is how to take that stuff and make it
have something to do with their lives, how
to adapt it, how to make it useful, how to
make it speak to the world around them. If
either of these tasks fails, the whole thing
fails. If the children take the traditions and
change them, bowdlerize them, alter them
too profoundly, so that the older people say,
“I don’t understand what’s going on. I don’t
recognize this, it has nothing to do with us,”
then from the parents’ point of view this
has been a failure, they don’t care any more.
If, on the other hand, the children have had
something imposed on them that doesn’t
speak to them, that is not vital to their lives,
then it’s a mechanical act of obedience, and
it’s useless.
So that means there is a built-in tension, a
built-in antagonism between the generations
about the sacred word that has to be passed
on. So there has to be some negotiation. Both
parties have to give something up, and both
parties have to agree in the end that they
recognize what it is that has been given and
received. This is a very different model from
the mechanical one that goes “here it is” and
“thanks.” This, again, is a dialectic. And that
is why Passover is such a useful thing to study
as an example of socialization. The children
come in and say, “What is going on here?”
And working that out, then, becomes what
the evening is for.
The first fight that took place was a fight
about language. This issue is probably a very
common one, the issue of what language
to have the ceremony in, anyway. “Is this in
Hebrew or in English?” The older people, of
course, want to do it in Hebrew, which is the
sacred language, the language of their sacred
youth, and the children don’t understand
Hebrew, so there is a struggle. On the videotape,
we hear the grandson who is leading the
seder saying, “I have to do this in a language I
understand.” And Greg, the younger brother,
who turns out to be more of a traditionalist,
saying, “But I don’t like the sound of it in
English, it doesn’t sound like what even I
remember when I was a kid. Even if I don’t
understand it, I still want to recognize the
sounds.” And the old man saying, “What kind
of seder do you call this if it’s not in Hebrew,
if the prayers aren’t in Hebrew?” So there’s a
tussle about language.
Meantime, the older man and the older
woman, whenever they come to a stumbling
point and they want to have a little argument
aside, talk in Yiddish. This brings in all their
cronies from their own generation, and all the
children are then left completely in the dark.
They are very annoyed; they say, “Come on,
come on, let’s have this in English, we want
to know what you’re talking about.” So there
are three-way struggles there....
Then came the issue of the ten plagues.
This is the recitation of all the afflictions that
the Lord visited upon the Egyptians. Deena
said, “Now we get to my favorite part of
the seder, and I see that my father has just
crossed it out. He wants to leave it out for
all the right reasons because we don’t want
to talk about the suffering of our enemies
here. But I must say that I always liked this
part because it keeps us from being sanctimonious,
it reminds us that we are all in symbolic
Egypt, we are all suffering, and I really feel
this should be put in.”
A big argument develops around this
question: What does it mean to talk about
these plagues, anyway? And they are terrible
plagues: they are vermin and boils and locusts
and cattle disease and blood and slaying of
the firstborn—really horrible things. So a
big discussion ensues: What are we doing
when we talk about all this? Her son Marc
says, “Look, there is nothing wrong with
including this. All we are doing is saying
that these things happened to our enemies,
and because they happened, we do not fully
rejoice.” Now what happens when you say
the names of the plagues is, traditionally, you
put your finger in your cup of wine and take
out a drop, and you drop it on your plate for
each one of the plagues, as you recite them:
“Boils...murrain...locusts...frogs...” So
Marc says, “We’re not celebrating these afflictions;
we are simply making our own rejoicing
less, we are making our cup less full because
our enemies suffered.” He is moved by the
nobility of this. And Greg says, “I don’t think
that’s what we’re doing here at all. We are
rejoicing. We are saying: ‘Look what we did!
Look what happened to our enemies!’”
This went into a discussion of who are the
Egyptians. Who is the “us” and who is the
“them”? This is the point in the seder where
we acknowledge that our enemies are part of
humanity—they are like ourselves—and that
is why we are diminishing our cup: what happened
to them happened to us. This, then, is
the “humanism versus particularism” issue.
As soon as it is raised, someone inevitably
chimes in and says, “Yes, and we also diminish
our cups for the Vietnamese.” Someone else
says, “South Vietnamese or North Vietnamese?
Or all the Vietnamese?” “What about
South Africa?” “What about people of color
here in America?” “And women!” All those
present bring in their favorite groups of
the oppressed. “Students!...Children!” My
children always say that to be a child is to be
oppressed. And what happens is that this list
of the oppressed enlarges and enlarges until it
finally verges on being absurd, then everyone
pulls it back in. But before they do, there has
been a big, very big, discussion of boundaries,
and the boundaries have been moved by force
of these questions: Who is “them” and who
is “us”? Are we Jews? Are we human beings?
Who are our co-sufferers?...
While the boundaries between Jews and
Egyptians are shifting and thickening and dissolving
in discussion, the camera is wandering
back and forth across the table and comes to
rest on my six-year-old son Matthew. He’s doing
the plagues. And seeing him do the plagues
on videotape, I understand exactly why the
plagues will never be eliminated. There he is,
sticking his finger in the cup and flinging the
wine, so that it hits the tablecloth—the white
linen tablecloth, on which the others have
been accidentally spilling their wine. But he
is allowed to do it—he is even encouraged to
do it. He is reciting these plagues in Hebrew
and putting these drops of wine on his plate,
and some of it gets flung elsewhere. You see
why there will always be resistance to making
certain changes in ritual, you absolutely see
that this is a moment of great excitement and
satisfaction for a child. There is this overlay of “yes...yes...friends...enemies....” But what he is really going to remember, besides
getting a present and getting drunk, is spilling
the wine on the tablecloth and not being
scolded for it.
When I moaned and groaned about how
badly behaved my children were at this, as at
all other seders, a wise friend of mine said:
Don’t you understand when you read the
text that this is what it’s about, that it has
always been this way? From the times of the
Temple, as long as there has been a Passover
ceremony, it is to keep the children awake, it
is to keep them involved. It’s because they’re
not behaving themselves and the adults
aren’t rebuking them that they really know
this night is special, different from all other
nights, and they’re given additional energy
by this permission. It’s because they do
grow sleepy after all the wine and talk that
you have to bring them back, to complete
the ceremony. So for the ceremony to succeed,
the children must be allowed to mess
up. This misbehavior—this space for the
children’s spontaneity and innovation—is at
the heart of the Passover story, which is the
story of a family getting its children to pay
attention, and this is always difficult. I found
this very wise and very consoling. . . .
The evening is by then over. There is a
good deal of chaos, and then some silence
when everyone realizes it has come to an
end, very inconclusively. Enough has been
successful so that the grandparents have
recognized what has happened, even if they
say it isn’t theirs. They have compromised.
The children have compromised, and they
recognize that this seder has something to
do with their lives. The exchange has taken
place. We have seen these people for four
hours passionately arguing about what is going
on there. Every single one of the major
people, during the course of the evening,
has said, “This is a terrible seder. This is not
my kind of seder. I would never do it again.
Next year I have other plans.” You know that
they’ll all be back. You know that much of
this will occur again.
Ritual has the power to generate its own
need to be redone. It’s never the mythology
that was wrong, it’s not the Haggadah. The
family didn’t do it right. So next year you get
to do it right. When a medicine man loses a
patient—and this is as true of our medicine
men as of Indian medicine men—it is never
the mythology or the germ theory of disease
that is at fault. The question of whether the
gods do indeed hear our calls never arises.
There is always some reason that explains
why it was the practice that was wrong and
not the theory or the mythology. So here,
too, they don’t look at the Haggadah and say,
“There’s something wrong with this text.”
They say, “Next year we’ll do it better, we’ll
do it different, we’ll do it right.”
And so they conclude. Spoken into the
tense silence that then occurred, probably
the only little silence that occurred during
the evening, are the words that Marc says,
somewhat lamely and very touchingly: “Next
year in Jerusalem.” This is as close to an
agreement and a success as any ritual needs
to come. Its very imperfections require that
it be done again—differently, better—the
following year, and somehow “next year
in Jerusalem” will never come, need never
come, should never come. And so it is that
human beings struggle to reinvent the reason
for coming together and performing
the great stories that tell them who they
are, why they are located in history and in
the moment as they are, and what their individual
lives with their struggles and their
confusions have to do with the great stories
of their people.
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Barbara Myerhoff’s talk was given at the Brookdale Center on Aging at Hunter College on June 6, 1983. It was part of a series of public lectures on late-life
creativity, organized by Marc Kaminsky at the Brookdale Center’s Institute on Humanities, Arts, and Aging and funded by the New York Council for the
Humanities. The talk has now found a permanent home in Stories as Equipment for Living: Last Talks and Tales of Barbara Myerhoff (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), edited by Marc Kaminsky and Mark Weiss in collaboration with Deena Metzger.
Whether it’s an African initiation ceremony
in Botswana or a Jewish storytelling session
in Los Angeles, ritual sets the ordinary apart
by its use of language, gesture, costume,
posture—sensuous things. And those sensuous
things are very persuasive and invite us
to suspend disbelief, exactly as we do in a
theater...
This article appeared in Voices Vol. 34, Fall-Winter 2008. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society today.
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