Maybe Next Year

As Jews all over the world begin the work of kashering their kitchens and utensils for Pesach and plan their guest lists, for the third year in my four years as a Jew, I find the holiday approaching with a mixed sense of blessing and dread.

Becoming a Jew just over three years ago was the fulfillment of a lifelong yearning. No one ever said it was going to be easy being quite frequently the only Jew in my neighborhood, apartment building, and one of a tiny handful in my city. Added to the challenge was winding up in a wheelchair two years ago. Most invitations stopped because homes aren't wheelchair accessible, and it was just assumed before I stabilized that I would never be able to navigate with brace and crutches a few feet at a time into a non-accessible home.

We are such inclusive people. In the synagogue, I am humbled by the accommodations that have been made for me and the "Love Bug", my candy apple red power wheelchair, so that we're all on the same level. I can have an aliyah, read the Haftorah, and even have the indescribable honor of reading from the Sefer Torah - my motivation for hounding my physicians for a locking leg brace and crutches so I can stand to read the Torah. Inside the shul is the one place where I am an equal, and joining in services and classes, we are all alike.

But outside, cold hard reality sometimes cuts like a knife. The world is not wheelchair accessible, and attitudes and assumptions lock us out of experiencing normal life more surely than any physical obstacle.

I have come to expect isolation in my living environment, the only Jew in a formerly Catholic, now secular small retirement complex for the elderly and those in wheelchairs. Some days it gets really lonely and oppressive, particularly when I'm asked why I don't attend the social club dinners (ham and bean suppers is the usual menu) or the First Friday Mass in the Catholic Chapel, or the sincere but incredulous (and inevitable) "you REALLY don't believe in Jesus?", but most days I'm pretty much a part of normal goings on.

The Christian holidays don't really bother me as I feel no connection, no longing, and they are indeed just "days." Although I could do without the decorations and trappings and the smell of ham in my apartment building, I would not deny that holiday tradition to the kind elderly people with whom I live.

But the intense, almost unbearably lonely and desolate times occur during the most treasured days in the Jewish calendar. Such mixed emotions, and guilt over feeling the pangs of loneliness at such a special time, especially as I'm so deeply honored and privileged to participate in holidays as a Haftorah and Torah Reader, the real high points of my life. I should be over the moon in anticipation, and really I am. But with the mountaintops come the valleys, and the lowest valleys in my life are of being a Jew, "reasonably" observant, trying to live a Jewish life, dreading once again asking myself the Four Questions at a makeshift seder for one, with no one there to respond.

I've tried for the past two years to make it a "pretend happy time" and managed a fifteen minute seder last year. I've spent a year planning in advance, but this year I just have to surrender. I can't pretend. I simply can't kasher my home for Pesach this year, I can't cook a brisket for one and make the mahror, roast the egg, lay out the Passover China for one and make do. And I dare not open my door. I don't yet have a plan. I don't know whether I will be able to ignore the first night of Pesach or whether I will cry my way through it. I suppose it will start out the former and wind up the latter, because it is impossible for a Jew to ignore the occasion of our freedom from slavery.

I think a lot these days about my circumstances. Surely I am not the only Jew in a wheelchair in a primarily Gentile environment. I seem to be a pretty vocal one, and for that I am both ashamed and bewildered. What do other people in my situation do? Do they attempt a seder? Do they ignore the holiday? Do they just take an extra sleeping pill and hope it will all soon be over?

And a very real, painful question from the person who was always the kid yelling out that the emperor had no clothes: Has anyone ever compiled data on whether there is an increase in the suicide rate among elderly and/or mobility impaired Jews who find themselves alone and isolated on the holidays? "Do not separate yourself from the community." Why is that not instead, "Community, do not separate yourself ..."

This year, at a time when I should experience the joy of Passover, I feel detached and ostracized from my community simply because I am an inconvenience. It leads me frequently to wonder - the Israelites who fled Mitzrayim - what happened to those who could not walk? Were they also left behind?

My prayer is that every Jew, regardless of financial, physical or other circumstance, has an opportunity to observe Pesach at a seder table in the company of others this year. Perhaps a fifth question is appropriate: What can we each do to make this possible?

Chag Kosher v'Samayach