Elijah the Prophet: A child’s view of plagues, miracles and the open door

Jack Doppelt

March 26, 2021

[This is the first in a series of three stories published in preparation for the upcoming Passover holiday. A version of this piece has been incorporated into our family's Passover Haggadah since 2001.]

They don't see him. They never do when they open the door. I've gone from one Seder to another and I see him. Maybe that's what happens when you grow up. You stop seeing and you stop believing. I've been seeing him for a few years now. I hope I don't stop seeing him now that I'm b’nei mitzvahed. He doesn't have a shape, like Santa Claus. No beard. But he carries the traditions with him. Not in a bag either. I can see them. I can hear them too. 

The tradition of telling stories. The tradition of enough stories, of being antsy and hungry, of sneaking a peek at the last pages while no one's looking to see when Shulchan Orech -- the dinner being served -- will finally come. How many pages to go? That's the tradition of the matzah right there. No time, gotta go. Can't wait until it's finished. Can't wait for the dough to rise. Same thing really. 

The tradition of the four questions, of watching us, the younger ones, show off for the grown ups. Okay,

                                Traditional Four Questions

they want us to show off. But I get that tradition. They call it qvelling. I like that word. What if, just what if, I didn't know the four questions or much of anything else about my past? 

As I think about it, I don't know much about the past, what my grandparents did or were like or thought about. But I do know they asked the four questions. I can see them. I can hear them at a table just like this, with family, with friends, with strangers. Doing what we're doing. Eating what we're eating. Remembering the bad, fearing the worst, and finding hope in it all. Because it's there. That's what he comes to remind us about.  

They keep talking about plagues, about ones I've never heard of. The grown ups keep having to look them up. What's a boil? What kind of vermin? How bad can hail get anyway? There are real plagues around. Every day. Wars, famine, starvation, disease, things people face every day, one worse than the last. I could count ten in just the people I know, at this table, at any table. 

The part I really don't get, every time I hear it, is Dayenu. Don't get me wrong, I love the song. See, just thinking about it brings out the rhyme in me. But it's about all these miracles. One for each plague. More. Bringing the Jews out of Egypt, dividing the sea, providing Manna, the Sabbath, the Torah. And at the end of each line, we sing Dayenu. Any one would have been enough. I don't think so. It's not that I'm not grateful. I am.

But plagues don't go away. They're here all the time. We're not done needing miracles. Sometimes the plagues don't seem so bad, so the miracles don't have to be so miraculous. But they're still miracles. And they happen all the time. That's why he comes every year. The door is always open. 

And in walks the tradition of the miracle.

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Action figures who heal and summon implausible miracles

 Jack Doppelt

March 26, 2021

[This is the third in a series of three stories published in preparation for the upcoming Passover holiday. A version of this piece has been incorporated into our family's Passover Haggadah since 2004.]

As I recall the Seders of my youth, what has stuck with me even more than the Maxwell House sponsorship was how ridiculous much of the service seemed to me at the time yet how much I cherished it. 

If this year’s Maxwell House is Zoom, may the children of today come to cherish it too. 

I looked forward to Seders as a time when I would almost pish in my pants with laughter over some of the traditional passages that linked the core themes of slavery, freedom and Jewish survival. 

It came right after the Kiddush and the Four Questions, right in the heart of the answer that started with, “Because we were slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt.” It seems that Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Joshua, Rabbi Elazar the son of Azariah, Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarphon met in B’nai B’rak for “a pilpul” or a discussion of biblical text. From one store-sponsored Haggadah to another, the names were spelled differently, so that I got hopelessly confused among Eliezar, Elazar, or Azariah. It was clear that they were the action figures of the Jewish people -- my people -- and my dad expected that I would come to revere them and respect their wisdom. 

But they didn’t seem to have much to offer. They were puzzling over the meaning of “a mighty hand and an outstretched arm” and over “the days of thy life” or “all the days of thy life” as it referred to how long we Jews were to recall the going forth from Egypt. They seemed to get mystical guidance from the son of Zoma, another action figure, who seemed to solve the riddle by concluding that we were to recall the Exodus even longer than life itself, into the time of the Messiah, whatever that meant to someone like me who was having a hard enough time recalling the earned run average and career strikeouts of Sandy Koufax, a true action hero. 

Sandy Koufax's career statistics

W	L	ERA	G	GS	CG	SHO	SV	IP	H	R	ER	HR	BB	SO	HBP	WP	BF	WHIP	ERA+	WAR
165	87	2.76	399	314	137	40	9	2,324.1	1,754	806	713	204	817	2,396	18	87	9,497	1.106	131	53.1

[Source: Wikileaks [not available in those days]

Then later in the Seder service, we eavesdropped on another discussion of the sages. At some other time way back when, Rabbi Jose the Galilean, Rabbi Eleazar and Rabbi Akiva were puzzling over whether there were 10 plagues or 50 plagues, or 40 or 200 or 250. It became an involved math problem over whether each plague stood for four, that in the end was not resolved other than to break into song with a round of Dayenu. 

 Today we face one plague or is it thousands or tens of thousands for each inflicted person or family? 

 It seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that we the Jews, and we the people of the world, could use action figures who devote themselves to healing who are capable of summoning grand and implausible miracles. 

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Because We Can? Pondering oppressor and oppressed

Jack Doppelt

March 26, 2021

[This is the second in a series of three stories published in preparation for the upcoming Passover holiday. A version of this piece has been incorporated into our family's Passover Haggadah since 2014.]

It is disorienting to be in the holy land in 2014 as Passover looms, to be in occupied Palestine, pondering oppressor and oppressed. 

The Passover Seder is my bedrock as a Jew. My father’s stature in my eyes is rooted to his role as searching leader of the multi-hour dinner theater cabaret. I've never met either of my grandparents or anyone who came before them. 

Yet I take on faith, something more real than Biblical faith, that they read from the Haggadah from generation to generation. Did they honor the Passover story as one in which we were the Chosen People protected by a discriminating God or one in which we were the oppressed guided into liberation by a just but vengeful God? For generation after generation, the two parables were inextricable. Are they now? 

Years ago, I wrote my first Haggadah and I’ve been revising it irregularly ever since. There are my emendations that call upon Sholem Aleichem’s Helmites, Sandy Koufax, an Elijah who brings with him the tradition of the miracle, and Grace Paley’s realization that there were neighbors where she grew up in New York who were not Jewish but who nonetheless "often seemed to be in a good mood." 

To be sure, it is more confusing being a Jew with eyes open in the occupied territories than it is being a Jew with eyes restfully closed in the comfort of privilege. I process the story of Sheldon Adelson declaring from on high in Las Vegas that Republican candidates are not to use the term “occupied territory.”  It is understandable for Jews to fear relenting, and to need to say with resoluteness that this land is our land to live in and to protect. It is also almost unbearable to ignore the arrogance and brutality that comes with being an occupier and an oppressor of others who share that land. It strains reason or imagination to see Adelson as Moses on the Mount and not Pharaoh on the throne. It also mocks my father’s sense of decency, and he was a learned man. 

Still it is confusing. Within 15 minutes on the main road running the length of the West Bank of the Jordan River, I was drawn into the enigma of the day. I was being driven around by a young Palestinian couple who were kind enough to offer to show me the land. We were heading south from Nablus to Ramallah and we hit a traffic snag. 

Photo credit: Jack Doppelt, April 2014

We sat, as one car after another in front of us peeled off from the stalled line of cars, and paused to our left to explain briefly in Arabic that it was settlers raising some kind of ruckus. We complied, and turned around, not knowing what alternative road we would take. We knew nothing more, and my hosts thought better than to try to find out. I asked why, do they think, and they said, “because they can.” A few minutes later, on a different stretch of road, we encountered four young, loosely masked boys, in Palestinian red and green. They were gathering stones and preparing for a confrontation they seemed intent on provoking. My hosts again did not want to know more. We drove on. 

Photo credit: Jack Doppelt, April 2014

Passover looms. It has always been a celebration of spirit and perseverance and justice for me, one in which we thank God as we recall grand gifts we’ve been given - getting out of Egypt, dividing the Red Sea, surviving 40 years in the desert, and being given the Sabbath, the Torah, the Temple and a place to live. Dayena. Any of them would have been enough. And yet with that celebration, I feel a personal and collective shame that it is not enough, and we seem to rejoice in using our power to oppress. 

Why? Because we can?

Photo credit: Jack Doppelt, April 2014

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My dad, the closet Talmudic scholar

 

Jack Doppelt

Jan. 27, 2021

[A version of this piece was published under the name Jack Chaim Doppelt on Storied Stuff on June 17, 2020.]

My dad came to the US before WWI and retained a quaint, stiff, accented English in his speech and writing. He became an orthodox rabbi about the time Jewish life was evolving into a more relaxed reform culture. He didn’t get a synagogue pulpit and went into the family leather goods business. 

By the time I came along almost 30 years later, he’d abandoned most pretenses of an orthodox Jewish home. My mom was the one who kept the traditions alive. My dad’s advanced age made it hard for us to do many of the father-son activities of the era. No catch in front of the apartment, no bike riding, no hiking, no camping. We played tennis, just him and me. I cherished it and made the tennis team. He drew fish. We played some chess. He brought home handles from his leather goods business and I sat on the floor and painted them black with newspaper under me. He, my mom and I watched TV every night that I was home. I got to stay up with them for parts of the talk shows after the 10 pm news. We didn't own a record player and didn't play much music in the apartment. 

Friends bought me a record player my first year in college, They delivered it for my birthday. Some drove, some hitchhiked and were picked up by Steve Goodman, the folk singer we all adored. He  happened to be headed to my college to perform, driving a steady 90 mph.

My dad died when I was in college. 

Much of my dad’s past remained a mystery to me. Family secrets can be affixed tight with super glue. I discovered in casual encounters with people that my dad was something special once upon a time. 

“Are you Marcus Doppelt’s son,” someone asked me. “You know that “he was a Talmudic scholar.” 

Not while I was alive, I thought. I got it confirmed by cracking open a corner of the family secrets. I also discovered that my mom and dad were first cousins. My mom had me, an only child, when she was 47. As I’ve often said, I’m about as good as I could have been. 

Not many family mementoes of my dad exist. I’ve preserved the few that do. One cluster has been up on a wall wherever I’ve lived. They commemorate my dad’s “smichas,” a Hebrew word I doubt I’d know the meaning of if it didn’t mark my dad. It refers to the ordination of a rabbi and it means learning, or someone you can rely on because of his learning. 

The other is the family “cose” or kiddush cup that my dad used for 

special occasions like for Friday night Shabbas dinners and for Passover, 

when my dad shined. He’d take a sip and pass it to my mom and me. 

I take it off the shelf to use on those occasions too. I take a sip and pass it along to my wife and kids. 

L’chaim, dad. 

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