Chapter 2, "Beginning Again," spans the years of early married life, young motherhood and midlife, developing in depth questions of how gender and class impact on formative spiritual being: What is the significance of class origin in the formation of self and the empowerment of self; how did the emergence of Jewish feminism foster personal spiritual transformation. Overarching the stories of the mores and social history of the last three decades, the Jewish communitarian and renewal movements, and Jewish life on the college campus, is the picture which emerges of how the cycle of the Jewish calendar year comes to provide an ever renewing source of sustenance in the author's deepening spiritual life.
A case in point, the seder. The work begins a week or two before Pesach. Brutal physical labor which drained me even as a twentysomething. Spring cleaning with a vengeance. Starting from the farthest corners of the house, scrubbing, serious scrubbing, down on your hands and knees, emptying the backs of closets, overturning, rearranging, polishing, cleaning like a person possessed, then finally entering the eye of the storm, the kitchen itself. Nothing is safe, the normal year-round order completely overturned. The food in the pantry must go; the refrigerator, the stove, must gleam, even cleaner than for snoopy in-laws, even cleaner than for resale--clean enough for God. Rational sense it doesn't make, it's tradition, so you do it. Then the schlepping, of meat, of fish, of dairy, of vegetables. Many pounds of onions, many pounds of mushrooms, of lettuce, of carrots, of celery, of tomatoes, broccoli, squash, potatoes, radishes ... from the grocery to the car, from the car to the kitchen, I am so tired, all I can think is lettuce, onions, no part of me doesn't ache, what did you have in mind God? Then you're going down the home stretch: cooking, cooking, set table, Eddie's grating horseradish, the guests are at the door.
Over the years we found a rhythm that accommodated communal obligation and personal longing: the first seder usually necessitated our being at the kosher dining hall with Eddie officiating; the second night we were at home. The guest list was limited to about fourteen, the greatest number our small dining room could hold, yet a number that felt still intimate enough for community. Each guest was asked to bring a question, preferably, though not necessarily, one related to Passover. Once a year this opportunity to sit with students who were especial favorites and often far from home, with stranded foreign visitors, with childhood playmates, with faculty going through a bad divorce, with neighbors who had only just gotten up from sitting shiva. We'd sit and talk about the meaning of our lives, our search for freedom, our yearning to live in a redeemed world. Never did we get to the food before 11:30 at night, rarely was the reward for a stolen afikomen negotiated before one in the morning. We'd sing, we'd sing, then fling open the door for Elijah. One year, long, long ago, a particularly precious memory for me: Eddie related the custom of some Sephardic Jews to sit through the seder with a knapsack of matzah on their backs, as if ready to "go out" from Egypt at a moment's notice; then these Sephardim would symbolically walk the borders of their town, carrying matzah as they went. Sara, a beautiful student (who was then perhaps a sophomore, now long since a professor of mathematics at an Israeli university where she lives with her husband and four children) exclaimed with frustration, "We always talk about such things, why can't we ever do them?!" So up we all got, all fourteen of us, and walked the staid streets of Princeton in the dark, singing, carrying our matzah in our hands, spirits soaring.