The Fifth Servant (27 page)

           
The prayer continued:
“Tsadek Adinoy b’khol d’rokhov—”
The Lord is righteous in all His ways.

           
THE FIRST GREEN VEGETABLES of the season offered us a foretaste of the Garden of Paradise, or at least a welcome change from the colorless gruel we’d been eating all winter. And yet I couldn’t wait to jump to the end of the Seder so I could get back out there and knock on some more doors. I figured I wouldn’t be treated like such a stranger this time, since Pesach is the night all good Jews open their doors to everyone, even the poorest outcasts, to celebrate the season of our liberation and to remind us that we were
all
strangers once in the land of Egypt.

           
But first we had to get through four pages of opening prayers, plus an extra prayer Rabbi Loew tacked on for the well-being of our Christian rulers.

           
The whole extended family was crowded around the table with barely enough room left for Elijah’s cup, but it was kind of nice being squeezed in among them all. It made me feel like I belonged.

           
The rabbi’s granddaughter Eva kept the little ones sitting still by seesawing between girlish tenderness and her family’s renowned firmness. Young Lipmann watched her every gesture, looking like he’d sit through the plague of hailstones if she asked him to.

           
Rabbi Loew blessed the first cup of wine, and we leaned a little to the left and drank.

           
We washed and dried our hands, dipped the greens in salt water, then Rabbi Loew held up the middle matzoh and broke it in half with a snap that seemed to shake the walls, and for a second the supernatural took hold of our minds, as if the waters of the Red Sea had come thundering through the streets of the ghetto. Then the sound came again, reduced unmistakably to a harsh dry pounding on the front door.

           
It was the municipal guards coming to take inventory and search the house for contraband. They brought one of the town clerks with them, since taking inventory meant that somebody had to know how to read and write.

           
Rabbi Loew told one of the Jewish servant girls to show the guards around, then he resumed the ceremony.

           
The guards stomped through every room in the house bellowing things like, “Item: one sideboard,” and relaying the words back to the clerk for him to catalog.

           
Undisturbed by the choppy seas around him, Rabbi Loew held up the first matzoh and said, “This is the poor man’s bread that our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt. Whoever is hungry, let him come in and share it with us. This year here. Next year in the land of Israel. This year slaves. Next year free men.”

           
We turned the page in the large Haggadah, and the first word of the next section stood out in thick black letters an inch high:

           
Avodim
.

           
SLAVES we were of Pharaoh in Egypt.

           
In the right-hand margin, a woodcut showed a man swinging a sharp hoe. He was dressed in the tunic and leggings of a Bohemian peasant.

           
One of the guards said, “Item: one silver candelabra.”

           
Another one said, “That’s not silver, that’s pewter.”

           
In the beginning, our fathers were idol worshippers.

           
By the time we got to
But I took your father Abraham,
I could hear the guards asking each other where all the fabled Jewish wealth was hidden.

           
Blessed is He who has kept His promise to Israel
.

           
The accompanying woodcut showed a shammes in a hooded cloak blowing a
shofar
, although the puffs of air coming from the mouth of the trumpet made it look like it was spitting forth fire and smoke.

           
Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land
.

           
A pair of women’s voices in the kitchen cut through the mystical mood. Hanneh the cook was complaining what a pain it was putting the whole meal together without the
Shabbes goyim
helping her out. Yankev ben Khayim looked particularly distressed by this interruption.

           
Because not just one alone has arisen against us to destroy us. In every generation they have risen to destroy us.

           
Jacob fled to Egypt with only seventy members of his tribe, but God nurtured his people until they grew numerous and strong—the text gets fanciful here—like a
beauty with firm breasts and flowing hair
.

           
Here the illustrators had slipped in a picture of a young woman with a fiery halo of blond hair and a modest loincloth around her middle. The image was supposed to be allegorical, but it didn’t look very allegorical to me.

           
And the Egyptians dealt evilly with us
.

           
They set taskmasters over us.

           
And we built the cities of Pithom and Raamses. And since the artists the Kohen family used when they first printed this edition of the
Prague Haggadah
had no idea what these cities actually looked like, they carved one of them in the image of a walled European city of a couple of hundred years ago, while the other was represented by a tower just like the one at St. Andrew’s Church in Kraków.

           
But we cried to the Lord our God.

           
The city guards met their match in Hanneh the cook, who threatened them with her plentiful supply of sharp implements if they poked at her delicate stuffed fish with their dirty fingers.

           
And the Lord heard our voice, and remembered His covenant with Abraham.

           
And He smote the firstborn of Egypt.

           
And here the illustrators went wild, depicting a group of men in modern clothing hacking and impaling babies until the blood ran out. And off to the side, someone who looked like a queen was bathing naked in a vat of their blood.

           
And Pharaoh commanded:

           
Every son that is born shall you throw into the river
.

           
On the opposite page, men and women were throwing babies off a stone bridge with guard towers on each end just like the bridge that still stands in the center of Prague.

           
The next page showed an angel with a sword, even though God said:

           
I shall pass through the land of Egypt.

           
I, and not an angel.

           
But you can’t picture God.

           
And I shall smite every firstborn
.

           
With great terror.

           
With signs and wonders.

           
Although there is another interpretation of this passage regarding the plagues.

           
The children’s eyes grew wide with wonder as we dipped our fingers in the cups and spilled out ten drops of dark red wine, one for each plague, to placate the evil spirits while reciting the names of the plagues in unison like the tolling of a bell.

           
But the rabbinical discussion that followed—about how we can deduce from the Scripture that the Egyptians actually suffered
three hundred
plagues—left the children squirming again, and it ended just in time for the bouncy sing-along professing our gratitude for all that God has given us when any one of his gifts
would have been enough
.

           
Dayenu
.

           
Because God passed over our houses when He smote the Egyptians.

           
You shall tell your son on that day
—

           
How the Holy One, blessed is He, redeemed us all.

           
But I have no son.

           
Rabbi Loew blessed the second cup of wine, and we leaned over and drank.

           
You’re supposed to drain the cup, but I’d been fasting all day, and I was starting to lose my strength from hunger. We finally got to the
matzoh
and
maror
, the bread of freedom and the bitter herbs of slavery. A pair of opposites. So naturally, we mix them together. Take
that
, Pharaoh! See what happens when you mess with the Chosen People?

           
Rabbi Loew blessed the third matzoh, broke it up and passed the pieces around so that we could all take a bite.

           
And let me tell you, after reciting the whole ritual while the succulent smells of the sacrificial feast fill the room, that first taste of dry flat bread makes you
know
in your heart and
feel
in your soul how truly miraculous it is that God makes wheat come out of the ground for us. All we have to do is mix flour and water and—if we can actually find the time to bake it—we get bread, which is why we always say a blessing over the bread.

           
A man called Yeshua Ha-Notzri, better known as Jesus of Nazareth, did exactly the same thing at his last Seder, and for some reason the Christians elevated it to a divine mystery.

           
But even a shammes can say the blessing over the bread and wine on my side of town.

           
Finally a pair of servant girls brought out the first dish, hard-boiled eggs in salt water. But we weren’t allowed to touch a thing until Rabbi Loew quizzed the children about why eggs are eaten during the Holiday of Spring. (They’re symbolic of mourning and rebirth.) Young Lipmann clearly knew the answer, but he wasn’t considered a child anymore since he turned thirteen.

           
“Because they represent the Jewish people,” Eva said. Her answer caught me by surprise.

           
Who else but the Maharal’s granddaughter could come up with an interpretation I’d never heard before?

           
“How so?” the rabbi pressed her.

           
“Because the longer you keep the eggs in hot water, the harder they get. So it is with the Jews.”

           
If that’s the case, then the Jews must be as hard-boiled as they come.

           
THE GUARDS MOVED ON TO wreck some other family’s Seder.

           
We finished the meal, and blessed Him whose bounty we had eaten, and we drank the third cup of wine, and we said
Pour out Thy wrath
, and we sent a child to open the door for Elijah the Prophet whose cup of wine awaited on our table. And we called upon the Lord from this narrow place:

           
All the nations have surrounded me.

           
Save us, O Lord, we beg You.

           
For His love endures forever.

           
We begged Him to save us from the sword of our enemies, and asked Him to rebuild His house, and we drank the fourth cup of wine and switched into Yiddish so that even the women could join us as we raised our voices in song and asked the all-powerful God, the righteous, mighty, eternal, gentle, consoling, and loving God to build His temple speedily in our days. Soon, soon. Amen and amen, selah.
Omeyn, seloh
.

           
“CAN I GO NOW, R ABBI?”

           
“No,” said Avrom Khayim, butting in. “We need him to help straighten up the mess the guards made.”

           
“I release him from those duties,” said Rabbi Loew. “But keep your ears open, Ben-Akiva. Remember—when King Antiochus forbade us from reading the Torah, we read from the Prophets instead.”

           
Meaning he wanted me to be ready to adapt to anything. I could handle that.

           
“And remember to trust in God even when everything seems to be going against you, because His plans are beyond our comprehension. After all, if Jonah had not spent three days in the belly of a fish, he would have drowned.”

           
So being swallowed by a fish was actually a good thing. I bet you never looked at it that way.

           
“And remember to trust yourself.”