Tradition, quotes Jonathan Sacks, is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism, he differentiates, is the dead faith of the living. And having delivered this obscure turn of phrase, he explains: Traditionalism is by definition conservative, nostalgic (kasha varnishkes, chopped liver). Tradition is forging a link, expressing the passion of those who passed the torch on to you.
My grandmother from Pittsburgh would cook the Shabbos chicken soup on Thursdays. On Friday she would take the soup vegetables; carrots, sweet potato, and zucchini, mash them with eggs and matzo meal and fill the entire frying pan with an oversized latke. We weren't allowed to eat it before the Shabbos meal: we nibbled it instead and I never remember there being even half of it left by nightfall.
At a family bar mitzvah I asked some cousins if they had the recipe. All of us have tried it, I was told, and no one has gotten the recipe right. A simple little nothing of a kugel and no one could get it right. It went with Bubbie to the Mount of Olives.
I grew up after Fiddler on the Roof was a surprise hit, when ethnic roots were just getting "IN" and Delancy Street was becoming a Jewish icon. To many, my family was a living relic, borsht and tzimmes in a bottle and brought to your doorstep. I remember a clear rebellion against being pigeon holed into a place we didn't want to go and we were never looking for.
Bubbie was not nostalgia. She was very much my doing homework and getting the groceries. Pictures of all the grandkids were in her milchige "china closet" but nothing about her was ever placed on a doily covered pedestal.
She had fought all the Russian bureaucracies of the early Twenties to get her and her bashert into Palestine. She lived in the back of a stable on a moshav, and the women moshavniks were jealous that she was always singing when she worked. She came to America, to her husband's family who ridiculed her keeping kosher: Mrs. Sandviches they called her. "I try very hard to understand you," she told them a half century before tolerance became a hackneyed term.
My grandmother was something we looked to become - and often despaired. As she sat in the dinette saying her Tehillim and davening so meticulously and faithfully a cousin once said, "Oh Bubby, it's no use. I'll never be like you." And what do you think, I was born a Bubby saying Tehillim, she answered.
So without ever having heard the distinction of tradition and traditionalism, I embraced the former and ridiculed the latter. Maxwell House Seders were tinny. I prefer foccacia to borsht. There are no dancing rabbis on my coffee table or bless this shmutz signs in my kitchen. Tradition I upheld, not traditionalism.
Now I think I may have overstepped it. While the distinction is a crucial one, nostalgia and retaining family memories develop a passion for tradition, the torch passed form Sinai on, that our children are reaching up to grab. Somewhere with the carrots, zucchini, matzo meal and eggs was mixed in a devotion and love and pride and confidence to continue the work that was begun and given to us.
"Why do you insist your children be just like you?" My grandmother was hotly challenged in the thirties. "Why do you steal my most precious dreams?" she replied, "I want they should be better than me!"
She maintains her dream was, in the end realized: none of her grandchildren see it.
If past experience is any indication, this Pesach, G-d willing, I will sit down with my children, with friends and family to the Seder. We will break the matzah and dip the egg, choke on the bitter herbs and recline with wine. We will be forging a link and transmitting the passion of illustrious ancestors with simple acts. We will also indulge in Bubbie Lew's egg and onion, my mother's gefilte fish (both of them got it from their mothers) sing Zaidie Lew's Hodu and introduce the Seder plate the way I saw my father do every year until I was married.
We will live with the faith of those who lived before us. . .in between bites.