On Vanya and Passover
A play and Pesach. A play-sach.
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: Next Monday, paid subscribers will get ET Leave Home, a monthly travel recommendation.
There will not be a regular issue or a podcast next week because I’m going to be traveling for most of the week. But! We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled content the week after that.
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
For the Forward, I wrote about Betar US’s lists and using the pretense of Jewish safety to keep safe the boundaries of a certain understanding of Jewishness.
Relatedly, from NPR: “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced it will begin screening immigrants' social media for evidence of antisemitic activity as grounds for denying immigration benefit requests. The screenings will affect people applying for permanent residence status as well as foreigners affiliated with educational institutions. The policy will go into effect immediately.”
In the Guardian, Osita Nwanevu wrote about Trump and the rewriting (and rewriting, and rewriting) of the American story.
The big news of the week is, of course, on how Trump is crashing the global economy for no real reason beyond his conviction that tariffs are good, but I still think this is the most bone chilling development. As this New York Times opinion piece put it, “Of all the lawless acts by the Trump administration in its first two and a half months, none are more frightening than its dumping of human beings who have not had their day in court into an infamous maximum-security prison in El Salvador — and then contending that no federal court has the authority to right these brazen wrongs.”
MY VIEWS ON…
…Vanya and Passover!
If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you may, at present, be thinking to yourself, “Didn’t she write one of these around this time last year about seeing Uncle Vanya with her mom?” You’re right! I did! And now I’m going to do it again!
Last Saturday evening, my mom and I went to see Vanya, which is just Uncle Vanya except it’s set in basically contemporary Ireland and also all the parts are played by Andrew Scott. I thought that maybe this would be a gimmick—oh, look at me, I’m one man playing all the roles, isn’t that impressive—but it wasn’t. Or, it was, but it was also excellent. The thing about Uncle Vanya is that everyone in it is convinced of their own unique sadness and suffering and pain, but they’re all sad, and suffering, and in pain. They’re all a little, or a lot, disappointed by life and what it’s had in store for them. And seeing one person act that out—showing the isolation and the connection, the individuality and universality—was, to me, very moving.
At the very end of the play, Sonya gives Vanya this speech about how all there is to do, really, is to live. To keep living and to keep working not because it will make you happy or change things, but because it’s all you can do. She talks about how, in the end, after they’re dead, God will pity them and things will be beautiful; in this version, they changed it to, just before they die, they’ll understand that they’re beautiful and good. But it’s the same, isn’t it? In this life, now and for the foreseeable future, you’re small and suffering and doing your best and it’s not enough—it never is—but you have to keep doing it anyway. We’ll live through the long days and the dark nights, the monologue goes. I thought about what is happening to and in this country and world and felt so sad. I felt my baby kick inside me and felt an overwhelming happiness to be there, seeing this. To be alive. To get the chance to endure. I wiped away tears and tried not to let out loud, disruptive sobs.
I have talked about this performance and especially the end a lot since Saturday. I have thought about it even more. And given the time of year, I’ve thought about it in the context of Passover. How that, too, is the story of enduring, of trying to find dignity where there isn’t much. That is a happier, more hopeful story, but I have thought about whether the themes aren’t similar: we’re promised something better, but the story’s not really about receiving something better. It’s about trudging through to try to find it.
In synagogue, we read an adaptation from Michael Walzer: "Standing on the parted shores of history, we still believe what we were taught before we ever stood at Sinai's foot: that wherever we go, it is eternally Egypt. That there is a better place, a promised land; that the winding way to that promise passes through the wilderness. That there is no way to get from here to there except by joining hands, marching together.” I have thought about whether that’s not, in its way, a different version of Sonya’s monologue. Whether the whole Haggadah isn’t, too.
Wherever we go, here we are, stuck in some version of suffering and pain and tyranny. Wherever we go, we have no choice but to try to make it out and through. The story is one of wandering. Of making it through the long days and dark nights.
Chag Pesach Sameach. I hope those celebrating have a happy, meaningful holiday. I hope we do the only thing we can do: work to make it through.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
From JTA: “The shuttering of federal agencies that support museums and arts organizations could cause a ripple effect in lost funding, Jewish arts administrators say.”
From the Forward: “This spring’s elections to the World Zionist Congress, with the Israel-Hamas war still simmering, have exposed an erosion in support for a Palestinian state among the Conservative and Reform movements, which together represent about half of American Jews…the Conservative movement has removed explicit references to “two states” in its platform, while the Reform movement has reduced the emphasis on it. And during two debates in recent days, candidates from both slates have tempered their past backing of a land for peace deal.”
From Haaretz: “The Israeli military is preparing to incorporate the southern Gaza city of Rafah and its surrounding neighborhoods into the buffer zone it is establishing along the border.”
-ET