“When I was a child and our large family used to gather at my grandparents’ house in London for the Seder meal, I would always wonder why, at the point when we opened the front door to the needy, nobody ever entered. We kids would protest that of course there were going to be no starving homeless in our grandparents’ quiet cul-de-sac. We needed to head to nearby Finchley Road or Kilburn if we really wanted to find those in need. But our parents would urge us to come inside, “Let’s finish the Seder,” they’d say, “There’s nobody there.”
Well last night, with a diminished crowd and aging grandparents breaking matzo in a smaller flat, I am pleased to say that when we opened the door, there was indeed somebody there. A 90-year-old woman had apparently got lost on her way home from hospital and was confused about where she was. She told us that she had known that here was a Jewish home and that she didn’t want to be alone on this special night.
Finally, it seemed, we had a chance to act in the true spirit of the occasion and we invited her in to spend the evening with us. (Though, as it turned out, she soon announced that she was exhausted and after a bit of a process we managed to locate her house and keys and escort her safely back home.) Nevertheless, for the first time it seemed that as a family we had directly heeded the call to bring people in from the streets and share our wealth with them in celebration of the Jewish people’s freedom from slavery.” Read on at Comment is Free.
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