I’LL BE HOME FOR SEDER

Hanukkah, despite an ironic coincidence of calendar, is not our "Jewish Christmas." Passover is. Lest I be quoted out of context, please read on:

Crass commercialism aside, even the most devout Christian recognizes that the real grandeur of Christmas is that it exalts more than a religio-historical event. Christmas means memories of trimming the tree, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, opulently decorated store windows and "The Little Drummer Boy." It means an extraordinary array of nostalgia-laden foods and elaborate gatherings where they are consumed. It means family members traveling copious distances at absurd expense . . . just to be home.

Christmas is, in a word, a sacred occasion of homecoming. It validates the most basic human instinct to return to our primordial source of warmth, comfort, security. Homecoming . . . the universally hungered-for respite from strange people and befuddling forces that we know on some primal level are the bitter consequences of straying too far from the womb-like embrace of home. What tribe, what culture, could survive were it not to provide some opportunity to return to the nurturing security we learned in earliest childhood to cherish as most sacred?

Any gentile who has ever felt the magnetic pull to "come home" for Christmas, will instinctively understand our boundless affinity for Passover. Passover is homecoming. Religious significance is remotely secondary to the irrepressible impulse to come home, which Passover has come to embody.

I count my blessings. I thank God for a beautiful home, a beautiful family. We have a delightful Seder. Yet, all notions of "home" will forever be bound up in bittersweet reminiscences of Seeley Avenue, Chicago, circa 1958. I am eight, very proud of having mastered the Hebrew litany of the "Four Questions," very determined to stay awake until Seder's end and to drink "all four" of the ritual cups of wine. I never notice that I am the only child amid a sea of adults arrayed around a kitchen table made festive in an apartment so simple that we have no dining room.

Pa, my mother's father, conducts the Seder in the narrative singsong of the Polish shtetl of his youth. Grammie Ida fusses obsessively over dishes as consecrated as any Divine law: matzo balls, sweetest carrot tzimmes, potato kugel, the lightest sponge cake. Auntie Levin grumbles on as usual, with or without cause. It is tolerable behavior from a woman who once traveled the vaudeville circuit with a poodle act. Uncle Joe and Aunt Min put aside long-standing differences to harmonize lustily on the chorus of Dayenu. By the third cup of wine, my always-ebullient mother does her yearly imitation of Little Orphan Annie, deftly placing a Mogen David bottle cap over each eye. Even my law-and-order father loosens up, providing the appropriate barnyard noises that accompany the singing of Chad Gadya.

Pa impulsively puts another chicken leg on my plate, because "little (120-pound) Maishe Chayim" did so beautifully in asking the Four Questions. He calls me by my Hebrew birth name, after two great-grandfathers whom I never knew. Foiled for another year, by dinner's end I am sent off to bed. I awaken the next morning to a vague buzz in my ears that I have not yet learned to identify as a sweet-red-wine hangover. This is the read Passover. This is home.

The years take their toll. Pa, Grammie Ida. Auntie Levin, succumb to old age. Death has brought blessed respite for my Alzheimer-ridden father. Joe dies still in his prime from too many cigarettes and too much rare steak. Minnie, my mother's best friend and soulmate, is killed by a reckless driver. My mother, so vital and good-natured to the end, finally succumbs to heart disease in mid-2000.

And "little Maishe Chayim"? He has ventured too many miles from home to make a life, far too attentive to the quality of his writing and to transitory crises, and nowhere nearly attentive enough to the longings that inevitably tug at him at this heart-tugging season.

An edge of reality seeps into the bittersweet. There are many beautiful Passovers yet to be celebrated with a wonderful new bride and a delightfully growing family. I will chant the ritual to Pa's ancient singsong. Linda will make the most delicious kugel. Perhaps Joey will provide the barnyard noises. Baby Sophie, already so much like my sainted mother, and Baby Shimon, already so much like my sainted father, will likely perpetuate my mother’s memory as Little Orphan Annie, bottle caps deftly over her eyes – when it is safe enough to do so. Our married kiddies will whoop and holler with childish glee. And, Ben, still the youngest, will do an exemplary job with the Four Questions and will awaken, no doubt, with a Mogen David-induced buzz in his ears.

An edge of reality seeps into the bittersweet but never entirely overtakes it. Rationality says, "These are the good old days." Rationality says that we are creating our own body of memories, our own sense of "home." that will tug at our progeny the way that Seeley Avenue tugs at me. But, who can be entirely rational when overwhelmed by an urge so compelling as the need to return to 1958 and to the life-giving source of warmth and nurturing that we call "home"?

As he approaches his 54th year, Marc Wilson sits at the head of his dining room table, conducts his Seder and works at creating a legacy of melodies and memories that his own children and einekach will inherit. But a little part of him that he cannot, will not, repress forever remains eight-year-old Maishe Chayim, sitting next to a doting grandfather at a very ordinary kitchen table elevated to majesty by the aura of unshakable security and wellbeing that enveloped us all.

Don't worry, Pa. I will be home for Seder . . . if only in my dreams.