We celebrated a fabulous Seder tonight, and as often happens, it was deeply meaningful and rich with symbolism and personal drama.
Our host, Doctor H, was three weeks removed from a near death experience in which he was trapped under an overturned drift boat, helplessly wedged underwater, unable to escape and not too far from his demise. It was also 'near-death' in the sense that the owner of the boat, W, actually did die in this mishap, and he was a fishing buddy of the doc, not to mention an expert boater. But not on this day.
There was a third guy in the boat, a friend of the owner, who was an inexperienced boater, and W made the fatal mistake, as it turns out, of giving his buddy the oars and helping him learn about operating a drift boat on the McKenzie River. It was clear that the rookie didn't know what he was doing, but with enough supervision and paying attention, it would be OK (allegedly).
As these things often happen, it was a brief lapse of attention on the part of W, who didn't realize that the boat was drifting toward some submerged logs, and by the time he instructed his friend to 'steer over there', the friend made one inefficient pull on the oars, then missed the water on his next pull, fell backwards into Doctor H, and in an instant they overturned in a hard current, and got pitched out of the boat. The rookie got thrown clear and managed to grab a branch and pull himself onto the shore. Doctor H got slammed by the boat, broke his fibula in 6 places and was trapped for about a minute underwater with no ability to free himself.
As he describes it, he was looking up into the light and first thinking that was the sky, and then wondering if it was that 'tunnel' that you hear about. The boat had him trapped and he thought for an instant of giving up, but fought that impulse and kept struggling. The boat was rocking around in the churning water, and at one point it moved enough for the doc to be pulled out by the current. It was as if God had said, 'Let this one stick around for awhile'. He floated about 20 yards downstream to where he could pull himself on to a little beach. But there was a big rise above him, and with a shattered fibula, he couldn't get any farther, but he was alive. His buddy W drowned under the boat.
It was a very dramatic story, but that's not why it's 'blog-worthy'. That came later, in the singing of Chad Gadya, a traditional song we sing toward the end of the seder. It's one of those songs that starts out small and keeps growing, like the 12 days of Christmas, and we were going one by one around the table, with each reader having to read a longer and longer paragraph (all in one breath). Joanie had mentioned something about how you never know who is going to have to read the longest one, and I naturally thought uh, it would be easy to figure out, just do the math, how many verses? how many people? but I kept it to myself.
And we did a great version of the song, me on guitar, everyone getting into it, having fun, each of us singing a solo paragraph, then all on the Chad Gadya chorus. Wouldn't you know that the final verse belonged to our host, and here's what his lyric was:
Then came the Holy One, Blessed be G-d, And destroyed the Angel of Death
That killed the butcher That slew the ox That drank the water That quenched the fire
That burned the sticks That beat the dog That bit the cat That ate the kid
My father bought for two zuzim Chad gadya (2x).
It's the first time that 'the Holy One' makes an appearance in the song to defeat the Angel of Death etc etc, and that's almost exactly how we were describing his escape from the clutches of death. Doctor H had said that at first he described his ordeal by saying that he had freed himself from the boat, but later he realized that no, he really didn't do that, it just happened, not through his efforts, it was more a God thing. And then he turns out to be the one to sing that verse. I couldn't help but mention the incredible 'coincidence' of the way the song played out. And just now, as I've tried to describe in words what it felt like, I've been at a loss for words, which rarely happens when I sit at the computer to pour out the blog. I rarely struggle with words, but I just took three cracks to come up with the word 'coincidence' in quotes, and that certainly doesn't do the feeling justice. I suppose it's because you can't write about God stuff in the normal parlance of every day life. It was a qualitatively different experience, and it happened under a big fat full moon in the month of April, on the day of liberation.
That's one of the things about the Passover Holiday, and why it's so profound. We are instructed to celebrate the holiday as if we ourselves were experiencing the escape into freedom. It was a great seder, among the very best ever. I'm still buzzing.
I've had this altered passover feeling before, wrote a song about it once nearly twenty years ago, and it's the same feeling now that I tried to capture then...
Is it the pull of the moon is it the rising tide
I got life in the blood tonight
I hear stories in the whistle of the wind
Get ready, we're leaving again
This night, this night, all right
What about this night?
This night, this night
Why is this night so different?
