Reflection
after my second ever Jewish Passover meal (the first being with a wonderful
woman in Namibia in 2010, Lucy Steinitz and the second being at the last supper
mass here at University of Cape Town, which was a seder):
I found
out, to my surprise, that my classmate Cara Singer may not have been wrong at
all in saying “you’re so Jewish!” when she found me frying Latkes, from a ready
box mix, one evening in a kitchen we shared in Little hall during the summer
after Junior year. I learnt this from my dad, when he paid a visit to Cape
Town. No, I did not have a Everything is Illuminated Moment – my mother is
Bulgarian, but she does not have any Jewish ancestors; her roots are in a
village outside the big city of Plovdiv, outside of where a large number of
Bulgarian Jews once lived. My father, is from rural Namibia and he is not from
an ethnic group that, like the Lew of Zambia or Igbo of Nigeria, have a genetic
fingerprint that matches the one the Kohanim of Europe have. It’s a bit simpler
– my last name happens to actually mean “Wise man”. The literal translation
from our language of Mulongeni into English would be “teach him”, but one
should not translate the name this way, says my father. “Wise man” is a better
translation. With that knowledge, I could call myself “Pancho Wiseman”. Now I see
my participation in the second day of Passover in Cape Town as a homecoming of
sorts.
During that
Passover meal, I remember seeing that a certain Jarryd, whom I did find most
handsome, had his gaze on me. Everyone gazed upon me when I stood there and
read aloud in Spanish the questions a child would ask about the Passover. The young
Rabbi read it in English and then he asked if anyone else knew another language
– I chose Spanish because there was a young lady from Ecuador seated across
from me “Why on all other nights we stand upright or we recline but on this
night we only reclining?” was the one question I struggled to interpret, but
looking at my Ecuadorian Hispanic friend smiling at me I managed, “?por qué en otras noches estamos derechos
pero en está estamos casi tumbados” was my attempt. Later I read the
Spanish version of the Gospel of John where the description of the last supper,
where disciple leaning his head on Jesus’ chest uses the verb recostarse, a verb I did not know during this Pesach. Yet Jarryd’s gaze was
on me after this point in the seder – during a later blessing. When I looked at
him, his eyes furtively looked away. It was only later that I found out he
never meant to express desire. Still I wonder to this day, what he did mean
with that stare.
