6. Traditional Jewish Tales Made Up from Boro Park

Sukkot: The Festival of Booths

 A Time for Pea shooters and St John’s Bread

Games have their seasons and children sense the passage of time in a different way than adults.  There is a time when you shoot marbles on the dusty yards [berms] in front of houses, and then without anyone asking or announcing a change in the order of the universe, everyone has a small jack-knife and the game on the same piece of dirt is mubbledy-peg.  Once the grass is grown, however, you cannot scratch lines and so that it is time for another street sport to begin. Stoop-ball starts to appear when the weather turns chilly and night falls early. King uses the same ball but requires a length of brick wall without any other architectural features, not a flight of stairs up the door of your house, in other words a New York stoop for Brooklyn stoop-ball.  The player throws the ball [a Spaldine pink, cost 15 cents brand new; always better than a furry and dirty grey tennis ball] and if he catches it with one bounce it is five points, without a bounce ten points. If you hit the edge of one of the constituent step gains you fifteen points with a bounce, twenty without, except the final very narrow edge right under the door, worth 100 points with a bounce and one thousand without.

You not only need to such intricate rules and values, but you also have to sense the differences in weather, not the condition of the soil, and feel deep within yourself the same feelings as the other kids on the block. The right equipment, implements and toys just happen to be available—balls, knives, white and coloured chalk, bottle-tops and so on. One also needs to know intuitively how much time there is after school before the sun goes down. In the summer some games can go on and on way until ten o’clock while in the winter by five the mothers are screaming out their windows their kids should come in to get washed for dinner and do a bit of homework.

At the end of summer and the early days of autumn, the between time when Jewish communities celebrate the season of festivals, the chagim, the series of High and not so high Holidays. Things happen and things appear, and children know it is time for special games, and they seem to know instinctively and altogether  how to play these games. No one ever consciously learns the rules. The laws, regulations, customs and rules are in the collective memory of childhood. They run parallel to and sometimes intersect with the official calendar of Jewish ritual time.

Take the holiday of Sukkot (or as we knew it in Boro Park: Succos). It is a harvest holiday when ancient Israelites would live in temporary accommodations in the fields—succas, booths, huts, and fancy names like tabernacles (which sounds like a disease, but that is tuberculosis). The ancient and wise rabbis understood it as a historical memorial for the time when, having just come into the Promised Land after Forty Years in the Wilderness, these same Children of Israel, camped out at the edge of the tribal territories that would be their own once they had conquered the pagan nations living there and had time to construct their own houses, buildings and the Temple. You knew these were all important events because we have to write them with capital letters, except in Hebrew which doesn’t have majuscules but only two forms of writing, one with square letters for printed books, another with curly letters for your own copies.

For those of us who had lived for generations in the Diaspora and been scattered amongst the nations (goyim) and n ever knew but only dreamed in our holiday songs and prayers and in the make-believe rituals of a State of Israel, we used to play at being either ancient agricultural tribes or conquering peoples waiting to construct out own cities. Nobody knows, we told ourselves, when we will really be able to return to our own homeland, which is now called Palestine, but a little later, when I am old enough to follow maps on the wall of my Hebrew school, it will be called Israel. So even though the world has always looked solid and stable to me, and the same people have always been around me and been as relatives, friends and family, I came to know that nothing is as it ought to be.  The real place to live was back in the Old World with the relatives left behind because they were old-fashioned people, though we still loved them, or sometime in an unforeseeable future which Eliyahu would tell us about. America was a good safe country, but still, you never know…

Soon, maybe next year, we will be in Jerusalem. Then we will be properly home and we can camp out in the fields to gather in the harvest and remember when we first returned from the Land of Egypt and a time of Bondage (not to be confused with a bandage which is a dressing, plaster or band-aid depending on which street you live as well as which city), along with a season of wandering in the desert. Until then, so we will be patient and we will play let’s pretend. We will buy bamboo shoots or sticks, straw, and fresh vegetables we usually don’t eat and build tabernacles or huts: they will be tiny booths in the backyard or small temporary shelters on the balcony of your apartment. You hang the various holy species on the make-believe wall and look up in the sky through the straw roof to make sure you can see the seasonal stars in the sky. If it doesn’t rain all the time and the wind is not too strong, we can all sit out in our booths or huts and eat at least one meal a day in this spiritual picnic.

You know when this ancient holiday is coming when the horse-driven cart comes in from somewhere and an old man who only speaks Yiddish knocks on doors to tell your parents it is time to buy their bamboo. As soon as this happens, every kid on 47^th street knows what he or she has to do. Get a few odd lengths of bamboo, find your penknife (and hope it isn’t rusty) and start to make by cutting carefully pea shooters. You pull out with your fingers the inside of the reeds. Then you ask your mother for a little bag of split peas, green or yellow, it doesn’t matter, and begin to test if the dried ammunition will pass through the tube when you give a blow. It usually takes many tries to get it right. Within a day or two, however, every boy and a few girls on the street has perfected his or her technique and created a small arsenal of weapons along with sufficient ammunition to last through the seven festive days of Succos.

The various tribal armies on the street are almost ready for the great Jewish wars to begin. What the soldiers have to do next is find something to chew on while they are out in the field of battle waiting for the enemy to arrive.  No one knows from whence or why, but at this time of the year we were also able to find long black pods on the street.  Some called them bocca pods, some Saint John’s Bread, some carob seeds. The carob tree has long pods and when chewed tastes a little bit like chocolate, but it was too pasty or powdery and so even hard to spit out. But where do they come from?

 

This is a great mystery, a holy secret. Nobody comes around in a horse cart or wheels a barrow through the streets and parents do not order them from somebody who knows somebody who maybe has a brother-in-law at the shul. So where do they come from?  Bocca or carob pods don’t grow in Brooklyn like trees. They are not one of the four kosher species: ethrog, lulav, hadass and aravah; that is, a kind of citrus fruit, a date palm, a myrtle branch and a willow stem. Somehow they are brought in from far places, like the long bamboo stalks and sweet hay, and then sold to Jewish people who need them for their game of Succos.

For us, all these epistemological, theological and geographical problems don’t matter. The world is as it is, whether it was different before or will transform itself someday soon or not; nothing is really real, except the games we play.

Our game is to make pea shooters and stockpile split peas and pile up the bocca pods.  We don’t think about why we do what we do, or how it is that all of us, at the same time without any consultation, start to play the same games every year. Nor do we reflect on what it all means, and especially whether the games we played were actually enacted midrashim or riddles or parables of who we were.

Then one afternoon, everyone has gathered with their weapons and ammunition, lines up between garbage cans and ash cans, and any wooden or card-box boxes they have gathered along the street or from in back of the shops on 13^th Avenue. Somebody shouts: Ready, set, go! And the war begins. Boys and girls in one army shoot their split peas at the boys and girls of the other army. The air is full of cries of delight and despair and more delight, as well of soggy peas and spit. Then it is over. The projectiles have all been fired, the bamboo pea-shooters have served their purpose and fall into the gutter to be crushed under cars that pass or park next to the curb. Everybody is exhausted, tired and happy. We look at each other and say: Next year in Jerusalem, having no idea where or what Jerusalem is, let alone Palestine or Israel, and knowing in our heart of hearts that a year is a very long time, with many holidays and games to come.

Our games exceeded our knowledge and our understanding. Our intuition prepared us—in a strange way—for what we did not have the wisdom to foretell, on the one hand the future that was just a few years ahead, the actualization of Theodor Herzl’s Old-New State of Israel, an Eretz Yisroel born of a real and deadly war; on the other hand, the horrendous crimes of the Shoah in the years when we were already alive and yet which we could barely feel in the fears, anxieties and nervous activities of our parents—things that they themselves had only begun to conceive of in the rumours and then the news reports of the day.