Passing Over Passover

Tags

matza, Pesach, Seder

Having grown up in a home where Passover/Pesach was observed with rigour, it came as something of a shock when I arrived in Israel to find that not everyone did the same. It was only in Israel that I heard about people filling their fridges and freezers with bread and pittot before the dreaded matza invasion. I always quite liked matza, and still do, and found it difficult to understand that not everyone felt the same way.

 It was also in Israel that I was introduced to different versions of the Seder and the Hagaddah. I grew up thinking that the way my father conducted the Seder (two, actually, because for arcane reasons, in the diaspora orthodox Jews hold the Seder twice rather than once, as is done in Israel) was the only way to do it. He would sit at the head of the table making sure that I, as the eldest child, had dutifully poured water over his hands before he embarked on reading the Hebrew in his quaint, Hamburg-accented Hebrew. He didn’t understand the meaning of the words any more than we, his daughters, did, and he would sometimes even go so far as to make fun of some of the more strange-sounding syllables.

 That was not, however, altogether a bad thing, as it at least occasioned some laughter and entertainment in what was otherwise a rather long and boring ceremony. In fact, at the Seder held in our house this year, I introduced the reading of one of the passages in the way he used to do, pronouncing them as he once did, and with the rest of the family repeating the words in chorus after me. It made me think of my childhood and my parents and brought a warm glow to my heart.

 The evening before the Seder was the occasion of a mysterious ceremony, in which the whole family, led by my father holding a lighted candle and a feather, would traipse around the house supposedly in search of ‘errant’ breadcrumbs. Pieces of bread had dutifully been placed in predetermined places, carefully laid on paper to prevent any ‘contamination’ of the surface beneath, and these were ‘discovered’ by my father. This led to his mock rebuke of my mother, and we all had a jolly good laugh. At first I would enjoy this game, but as time went on it struck me as idiotic in the extreme. It still does.

But it was the preliminaries to the Seder that still haunt my worst nightmares. How is it possible to scour the house from top to bottom, empty and repack every drawer and cupboard, change over all one’s dishes and saucepans, so that what is used during the year is put away and for the week of Pesach wholly different sets are used (two of each, of course, because dairy and meat must be separate) and also to get rid of every crumb of bread that ever sullied any crack and crevice of one’s abode? The logistics of merely contemplating this feat of acrobatics cause my head to ache.

To the best of my knowledge, there are still orthodox Jewish families who adhere to this form of obsessive-compulsive madness, and my heart goes out to them. I remember the state of exhaustion in which my late mother would arrive at the Seder table, and I would not wish it on anyone.

There is a lot to be said for keeping up ancient traditions, but in my view it is possible to be flexible in certain respects.

Obama and the Gordian Knot

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American Jewry, Jerusalem, John Kerry, Palestinian problem, traffic problems

  The visit to Israel of US President Obama caused great excitement for a variety of reasons.

The first was why had he come? Was it to reach an agreement regarding dealing with Iran’s steady progress towards a nuclear bomb or to exert pressure towards a solution of the Palestinian problem? Or perhaps simply to drum up support among American Jewry, which has been somewhat disenchanted with him of late? Opinions were divided, but the general consensus seems to have been ‘all of the above,’ which combined could be defined as something of a Gordian knot (i.e. an intractable problem).

Then there was the question of his schedule during the three days of his visit, with all the attendant security and protocol issues. Who would get to meet the President in person, who would be invited to one of the official dinners, and who would simply sit in an auditorium and listen to him speak? Among politicians and leaders of various kinds there was a great deal of jockeying for pole positions, and for sure not everyone got satisfaction, but a fair number did. Even Israel’s recently-crowned beauty queen, who hails originally from Ethiopia, was at the President’s dinner, rubbing shoulders with Chief Rabbis, politicians, mayors and leading members of the artistic and literary fraternity.

But what concerned the residents of Israel most, and particularly those of Jerusalem, were the traffic arrangements and restrictions during the presidential visit, which one wit has defined as an ‘Obamination.’ The main highway between Jerusalem and the airport just outside Tel Aviv was closed before, during and after the arrival of the President and of Secretary of State, John Kerry, the previous day. Almost all the roads in certain parts of Jerusalem were closed throughout a good part of the visit, causing distress and discomfort to thousands of residents, and harming local shops and businesses.

Because I live in a suburb situated just outside Jerusalem the only policy I could adopt was not to venture out of its confines between Obama’s arrival and his departure. Luckily, we are well-equipped with shops, banks, supermarkets and all that one really needs to survive. Granted, we couldn’t have got to our subscription concert on Wednesday evening, but that was cancelled anyway, so all was well in that respect. I’d just like to point out that when we moved here over twenty years ago there was not a single shop, bank or even ATM, and just one very tacky supermarket, which I have shunned ever since its rival opened.

The overwhelming impression Obama made was one of support for Israel, concern for its security, admiration for its achievements, respect for the Jewish and Zionist heritage and warmth and affection for its leaders. In his speeches he tackled the various thorny issues that confront Israel today, and when he addressed a gathering of over two thousand students he encouraged them to put pressure on the leadership to attain a peaceful solution with the Palestinians, one that involves establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Obama stressed that this is the only way Israel can be certain of remaining Jewish and democratic. His words were met with enthusiastic applause from the audience, which consisted of young people from all ethnic groups in Israel, but excluded students attending the institution of higher education situated across the Green Line.

Obama’s speech made it all sound very simple. Would that it were so. Alexander the Great, who cut the Gordian knot, thereby solving a problem which seemed intractable at the time, might have had a solution of another kind, but these are different times, and so problems cannot be solved with the stroke of a sword. Moreover, considering the results of the last elections and the composition of the present government, Obama’s efforts will probably have little effect. But it would seem that by addressing the students he is hoping for better results in the future.

And so are we all.

 

 

 

 

 

A Pacifist’s War

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Bloomsbury Group, Dora Carrington, Gerald Brenan, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Second World War, Virginia Woolf

‘A Pacifist’s War’ is the rather oxymoronic title of the book containing the diaries written by Frances Partridge between 1939 and 1945, the period of the Second World War. I saw the book on sale, and remembering that the author had some kind of connection with the Bloomsbury Group, with which I was fascinated at one time, I bought it. The Bloomsbury Group of writers and intellectuals who lived in London and its surrounding countryside in the first half of the 20th century included Lytton Strachey, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, and many others. From what I could remember, Frances Partridge had something to do with them, and I was not wrong.

Ralph and Frances Partridge

Ralph Partridge was Lytton Strachey’s lover and companion for some time, but was himself in love with Dora Carrington (known as ‘Carrington’), the painter who was in love with Lytton and devoted her life to him. With Lytton’s encouragement, Ralph married Carrington, though she made it clear she wasn’t in love with him, and they lived some kind of menage a trois at Lytton’s house, Ham Spray, in the Lincolnshire countryside. At a later stage Ralph met and fell in love with Frances (then Marshall), while Carrington fell in love and had an affair with Ralph’s best friend, Gerald Brenan. Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? But they all seemed to take it pretty much in their bohemian stride.

After Lytton’s death from stomach cancer in 1932 and Carrington’s subsequent suicide, Ralph and Frances were married and even had a son. They continued living at Ham Spray and during the period of the war they continued with their rural life there. Lytton Strachey had been a pacifist before the First World War, and Ralph had become one as a result of his experiences fighting as a soldier in that war. Frances had her own well-developed pacifist ideology.

Even with the advantage of hindsight I still cannot understand how anyone could adhere to the principle of pacifism when Hitler was threatening to dominate and subjugate the whole of Europe, and later also included England in his nefarious plans. The two world wars were the results of very different circumstances, and although the Versailles Treaty, which ended the first one, had a lot to do with the eruption of the second, Hitler’s rampant racism and anti-Semitism should surely have been enough to shake anyone’s adherence to principles that may have once had some justification but did not do so any more.

And so, all through the war, Frances and Ralph, together with their little boy, Burgo, continued to conduct their lives as if there was no war, no wholesale bombing of London and other parts of England, no troop movements, no casualties, no disruption of almost every aspect of life. Granted, they did accept evacuees from London, and grew their own vegetables, so that they were less affected by the food shortages and rationing than others. They both also went up to London from time to time and were apalled by the destruction they saw, but this did not serve to change their views, and as late as in 1943 Ralph appeared before a Tribunal for Conscientous Objectors and restated his ‘firm belief in the sanctity of human life and the brotherhood of man.’

If one hadn’t known that these were intelligent people (as indicated by their work and writing) one could have thought that they were really very stupid, or at the very least, misguided. I can’t decide if it’s just part of the British sang froid or a diminishing of the human spirit that allows Frances to write in April 1945 that she is horrified by the reports she reads in the newspaper about what went on in the concentration and in the next paragraph, on the same day, that she, Ralph and Burgo had a nice picnic and ate hard-boiled eggs by a stream.

It seems that there are some things that I will never understand.

The Co-Cathedral of Valletta and the Order of St. John

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Caravaggio, Cynthia di Giorgio, Giuseppe Mantella, John the Baptist, Malta, Mattia Preti, restoration

On our recent visit to Malta we were given special permission to examine the enormous painting by Caravaggio, ‘The Beheading of John the Baptist,’ that hangs in the massive co-cathedral (double cathedral) of Valletta, which is run by the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta.

After the cathedral was closed to the public, the alarm system was turned off and we were given close access to the area behind the altar where the picture hangs. It was a sight to see my husband perched on a three-meters high ladder, held by one of the co-cathedal’s employees, watched closely by the cathedral’s officials as he took photographs (without flash, of course) of aspects of the painting (St. John being the patron saint of the Order). This was the reason for our visit and he is now in the process of analysing the painting on the basis of those photographs.

Our brief visit to Malta happened to coincide with a ceremony held in the cathedral to mark the completion of the restoration of one of the many paintings on its walls and ceiling, and we were presented with an ornate invitation to attend the event.

The Order of St. John was founded in the eleventh century to provide care and shelter for the crusaders in Jerusalem. But together with the other Christians, they were driven out of Jerusalem and the Holy Land by the Islamic armies in the thirteenth century and eventually settled in Malta. The order of St. John includes representative units, or ‘langues,’ of all the major European countries, and each one of these has its own ornate chapel in the cathedral.

The co-cathedral in Valletta was built by the knights of the Order in the 16th century, and from the exterior it is an imposing, albeit austere, building. In 1607 Caravaggio reached Malta, where he sought refuge from punishment for killing a man in a duel in Rome. While there he painted six pictures, two of which still remain there, but his fiery nature got him into trouble again, so that once more he was obliged to flee.

The interior of the massive cathedral was subsequently decorated with a large number of ornate paintings, frescoes, sculptures and other decorative elements. The colourful ceiling is itself a major feature of the artistic heritage of the building, containing a series of frescoes depicting the life of John the Baptist painted in the high baroque style by an Italian painter, Mattia Preti, a follower of Caravaggio. He executed the work between 1661 and 1666, and this year, 2013, marks the 400th anniversary of his birth.

Many of the paintings and frescoes in the cathedral were damaged with time, and in the last decade the Foundation of the Order has devoted considerable efforts and resources to restoring them. Thus, the ceremony to which we were invited marked the completion of the artistic restoration of a painting depicting ‘The Allegory of the Triumph of the Order of St. John,’ an undertaking which involved work by a group of expert restorers and took the best part of a year.

The invited guests who filled the cathedral listened attentively as the Curator of the Cathedral Foundation, Cynthia di Giorgio, gave a lecture in English, illustrated with slides, about the painting in question. It is an enormous lunette covering a semi-circular area above the main door, and Mattia Preti did not use the customary fresco technique but rather painted with oils directly onto the stone wall that had been treated with linseed oil. This presented him with a rough surface and various other technical limitations, making the beauty and complexity of the painting all the more remarkable.

Ms. di Giorgio’s lecture was followed by one given by the chief restorer, the Italian expert, Giuseppe Mantella, who spoke in Italian. His talk was also illustrated by slides depicting aspects of the work, so that it was possible to gain a general idea of what the work involved. The proceedings ended with a concert provided by a choir, a string quartet and the cathedral’s massive organ, followed by refreshments in the library lined with portraits of former Grand Masters.

It is no mean feat to depict an allegory, and the artist had evidently invested a great deal of thought and inventiveness in painting aspects of the work of the Order. The female figure of Victory stands astride the bodies of slain crusader knights and infidels, brandishing a sword in one hand and holding the standard of the Order in the other. Angels, putti, figures depicting former Grand Masters of the Order and an evocation of the once-besieged town of Valetta are also shown. It is an impressive achievement, and one which is best viewed in situ.
Altogether Malta, Valetta, and the co-cathedral in particular, are well worth a visit. And best of all, everyone there speaks English!

For a more detailed analysis, see: http://yshefer.wordpress.com for Dr. Yigal Shefer’s article, Conclusions Regarding the Painting by Caravaggio of ‘The Beheading of John the Baptist’ in the Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta