The week of Purim, I attended a Brit Milah ceremony. As I named the young man and held him in my arms, I could not help but remember last year when I officiated at the funeral of his twin siblings.
Here, swaddled and beautiful, was this living child receiving the blessings of his parents, brothers, and grandparents, all of whom bitterly wept with me at the sight of the tiny coffins last year.
“B’Damayich Chayi” are words we say twice at a Brit Milah.
“By your bloods shall you live.”
The twins died of blood-related causes.
“By your bloods shall you live.”
I remain captivated by the irony and truth of those words.
“Bloods” in the plural, spoken twice.
Which bloods?
On Pesach we ask, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”
We answer, “Matzah and Bitter Herbs and even Reclining.”
But the third question gives no answer anywhere in the Haggadah.
“On all other nights we do not dip even once. Why on this night do we dip twice?”
The question is not which dippings count for the two times-Carpas, Haroset, Egg, Hands-but why we dip twice.
I argue that the first dipping is for Joseph.
His coat was dipped into the blood of the goat to camouflage his sale into slavery by his brothers.
I argue that the second dipping is for the blood-dipped hyssop with which we marked our doorposts and lintels on the first night of liberation.
So much bloodshed.
My mother, whose blood was taken out of her body and sent through a machine this past year while a surgeon built her a new aortic valve, has lived through the era of the largest shedding of blood in all of history:
Stalin
Hitler
Mao
Hirohito
Mussolini
The Killing Fields
Hiroshima
Darfur
etc.,etc.,etc.
By her blood, now flowing through her own veins and arteries and valves again, she lives.
And we Jews live —
By our doorposts without blood but with the word of God on mezuzah scrolls.
Living in freedom —
the blood of freedom hard won by countless lives given and blood spilt.
Freedom is not free.
Its price is often blood.
Why is this night different from all other nights?
Because tonight we dip twice.
Once in remembrance of the blood of slavery and betrayal and death; once in rejoicing for the blood spread for freedom.
We dip twice to remember the cost of both.
I hold this precious child asleep in my arms and I recall the night Pharoah held his first-born child, dead, in his arms.
And I remember the next day when we sang a song of thanksgiving, marching arm in arm into the desert.
We reduce our cup of joy in the memory of the first-born of Egypt along with the millions like them.
Drops of wine at a seder; drops of wine at a Brit Milah; drops of blood and memory.
A cup diminished.
A cup refilled.
To life.
To the bloods of our lives.
“By our bloods shall we live.”
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