Going with the Grain by Susan Seligson

Author:Susan Seligson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

“You’ll see the boxes. Look for the boxes.” Aside from the street address this was all the direction Dubrovsky had offered. Outside there is little to distinguish the bakery from any other of the drab doorways and stoops along treeless Albany Avenue. From the subway stop I walk along a battered promenade populated by Chasidim bundled in black wool and the black and Hispanic laborers who commute from Bedford-Stuyvesant or Brownsville. I turn onto Albany Avenue to encounter a few expensively dressed matrons in scarves or hats moving along the sidewalk with their broods. From the windows of a yeshiva comes the warbling sound of boys reciting from the Torah. With the exception of computers, popular culture seems nonexistent here. There is no Gap; there are no Starbucks, movie houses, cafés, or pet shops. There is nothing but hardware stores, kosher markets, and no-frills pharmacies with signs advertising wigs made from human hair.

I spot the boxes. They are balanced in the arms of local patriarchs and their wives busy preparing their homes for the eight-day holiday, during which Orthodox Jewish law forbids the eating, and in fact the mere presence, of leavening, or chametz. That includes a Milk-Bone dog biscuit, or the dregs of an Oreo in a jacket pocket. At the Seder table they will recite that “On other nights we eat both leavened and unleavened bread. On this night we eat only matzo.” Scholars have written that Jehovah, God himself, would eat nothing but matzo. And to hear the Lubavitchers tell it, the only matzo worth presenting to Him would be their own schmurah matzo. Coals to Newcastle, you’d assume, but I’d heard that people living in Jerusalem order their Passover matzo from Dubrovsky’s.

Even the minutest granule of chametz can contaminate the sanctum of the schmurah matzo bakery, and so I respectfully shake the flecks of this morning’s croissant from my sweater. I rid my coat pockets of wayward dog biscuits. In truth, though we never practiced the ritual in our house, I always loved the notion of “getting rid of the chametz.” I warmed to its metaphorical power. It is really a cleansing, inside and out, timed with the rebirth embodied by spring. Getting rid of the chametz to me meant getting rid of petty grudges and the lingering stings of persecutions real and imagined. After sunset on the eve of Passover religious Jews conduct a ritual, candle-lit search for any wayward chametz. We’re not talking about a stray Yodel or Fig Newton. The devout are meant to search cracks in the floorboards and the netherworld behind dressers and couches. No microscopic fleck of leaven should escape them. Just for good measure the sages advise people to plant a little baggie of chametz—bread crumbs, say—and pretend to “find” it, thereby fulfilling the Passover commandment. Next morning they must take the chametz outside and burn it and recite the following, or something close to it: “I hereby relinquish any association with or ownership of all and any leaven

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