Maybe it was the Purim drinking that got me shuffling my holiday traditions, but this year I found myself thinking about developing a tradition of ushpizin – or, more specifically, ushpizettes – for Pesach.
Ushpizettes is a word of my own coinage. Ushpizin, of course, is the Aramaic word for guests, and what do we invite guests to do but to come zetz – sit (Yiddish, not Aramaic) – around our table. The Sukkot ushpizin are the seven biblical guests symbolically invited to share our sukkah on successive evenings of the autumn festival: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph and David. Many people have added to this list of spiritual visitors the names of seven women, also invited to the sukkhah.
With the freedom that comes from developing a new practice, the list can vary – sometimes including biblical figures, sometimes prophetesses, sometimes historical or contemporary figures. I call these women, a bit flippantly, I confess, the ushpizettes.
I imagine them as hybrid – part yiddishkeit, part rhythm and blues backup, part revivalist, part trail blazer. Think Miriam, Deborah, your bubbie, Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis, Rosie the Riveter and Diana Ross, rolled into one. They remedy the male exclusivity of the traditional ushpizin ritual. And they honour retroactively women like my bubbie, who cooked lavishly for the festival in a tiny kitchen, then schlepped the food down flights of stairs to the collective sukkah erected in the courtyard of her Brooklyn apartment building, where she served her husband and sons, but did not sit and dine with them.
But perhaps, I found myself thinking, we were focused on the wrong festival. If ever a holiday called for the spiritual presence of women guests, it is Pesach. There is, on the one hand, the unremitting maleness of the Haggadah narrative – the account of the coming into nationhood of our Israelite ancestors told with references to male agents, and the remembrance of the male rabbis who elaborated the story and codified the seder practice.
And how many of us still possess Haggadot that refer to the “master of the house” leading the seder. On the other hand, there is the long history of women’s labour, so fundamental to holiday preparations, and the biblical backstory – missing from the Haggadah liturgy – of women’s crucial role in resistance and redemption. And yet, the traditional seder ritual – the one most of us grew up with – passes over the place of women.
So let’s bring the ushpizettes to the seder. Although the ushpizin ritual is traditionally linked with Sukkot and not Pesach, it fits in so perfectly with the themes and practices of the spring festival. The seder begins, after all, with a general call out to those needing a place at the table, offering to take them in. And midway through the evening, we welcome the prophet Elijah to share a l’chaim with us. Some of us already welcome the prophetess Miriam, as well. So developing a tradition of ushpizettes for Pesach seems like a natural progression.
I envision the Pesach ushpizettes less as a liturgical list to invoke, and more as a substantive presence to evoke. There are, after all, only one or two nights of seders each year (depending on one’s geography, denomination or personal practice). The invitees can vary from year to year, evoked through storytelling, text study, singing or recitation.
I imagine the women of the Exodus, brought to life through their presence in midrash. Or a historical figure – Glückel of Hameln, the astonishing businesswoman and diarist, for example, available to us through her journals, written in Yiddish and translated into English. Or perhaps a poet, like Marge Piercy, whose cycle of seder poems focus on the elements of the seder plate and give them both transcendent and contemporary meaning. Or perhaps a guest more personally connected – the mother or grandmother linked to our first seder memories – whose voice, labour and spirit infuses our own links with Judaism and with the divine.
