Some years ago in a quest to become more cultured, more
literary, a better person, a deeper person, I undertook to read
Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. I picked it up and scanned the
very first sentence: “All happy families resemble one another, but
each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That is absolutely
false, I said, and I never entered one word deeper into that opus.
One book I reread every year gets the idea of family happiness
right: the Passover Haggadah.
The fact is both of Tolstoy’s propositions are dead wrong. All
unhappy families resemble one another, but every happy family is
happy in its own way. Are there real differences, interesting
differences, between families unhappy due to too little money or
strife over too much money? Does it matter if the husband had the
affair or the wife did? If the father’s stubbornness prevents the
cooperation, or the son’s ego? Nope, unhappy families are boring,
with minimal variations on the theme of surly selfish individuals
pulling in contrary directions.
It is happy families that are interesting, because each working
combination breeds its own magic. It does not take much to
disagree; disagreement is the natural state of entities with
divergent wills; agreement is the novelty, one which must fashion
its own original shape. This insight is the key to virtually every
successful sitcom. The humorous and dramatic tension resides in the
natural disparities the characters overcome to work together as a
family.
The Haggadah is the standardized text for the recital of the
Exodus story. The Bible designates the family meal as the venue for
the transmission of this formative, even transformative, narrative
— “a sheep for each father’s house, a sheep for every home.” And
the text, using subtle derivations from scattered Biblical verses,
sketches a description of a projected, presumably archetypal,
household. There are four sons: the scholarly one, the resistant
one, the easygoing one, and the oblivious one.
Pedagogic techniques are prescribed for the different
prototypes. Engage the scholarly son intellectually by discussing
the minutiae of the various laws. Dazzle the easygoing son with
flamboyant evocations of the amazing miracles. Draw the oblivious
son into the process by directing interest and attention toward
him. And what of the resistant son, the hostile one, chip already
imbedded in shoulder? Speak to him about the importance of
belonging. Even if he is not enjoying the specific style of the
party, he should relish the kinship and the acceptance. “If he
takes himself out of the group, then he has denied the most
important thing.”
Sure enough, the many funny movies about the first night of
Passover highlight the tensions between these characters, their
modern-day counterparts often very entertainingly drawn. (The
evening’s format, including verbal presentations and mealtime, is
known as the Seder, a Hebrew word meaning a series of things done
in an orderly sequence.) Last year’s When Do We Eat?, with
Jack Klugman, Michael Lerner and Leslie Ann Warren, was a gem of
the genre, although it includes crude sexual elements and is
definitely not for kids. It is an especial treat for lovers of
Jewish music, because my friend Stuart Wax filled the score with
compositions by Shlomo Carlebach (1925-1994), a genius who fathered
a new genre of Jewish sound after the Holocaust.
These lessons of holding a family together translate well in our
own time. There is the college kid, on a track to becoming a doctor
or a lawyer (or, worse, a professor), who is stimulated toward
major life movements mainly through the intellect. Not only on
Passover night, but all year, he needs to feel there is room in the
home environment for intelligent discussion. Activities undertaken
by the family need to have a sound rational basis to make the home
a place he finds hospitable.
The tough kid with the chip on his shoulder needs acceptance, a
degree of tolerance, but also clearly drawn lines he may not cross.
The sweet amiable good-times kid who is not yet particularly
motivated in any direction needs to be inspired with the family’s
passionate commitment to its values. And the oblivious kid who is
content to drift incuriously will respond — perhaps not right away
— to being made the focus of our attention and caring.
And so, with respect to Count Leo, the religious tradition seems
to speak more realistically, and more spiritedly, to the real
vicissitudes of the human condition. Let us enjoy Passover this
year with this idea: an unhappy family is less than the sum of its
blessings but a happy family is more than the sum of its
discontents.
