My daughter Emma was thoughtful enough to send me some wonderful photos of Robin on the beach this weekend.

Emma is not devoutly religious, she identifies as Jewish, and she and Jay and Robin celebrate some of the Jewish holidays.

Passover began this weekend.

I admit to some melancholy when it comes to Passover. In my imagination,  if I were normal, I would be with family this week celebrating a major holiday, but most families are doing that alone this year, if at all.

And I am not normal. And I refuse to celebrate this one, in any case.

I moved away from Judaism many years ago. Between Covid-19 and my own obstinate and curious journey through religion and spirituality, I’ll be here, and they’ll be there.

My parents died some time ago, and their deaths ended a tumultuous and sad period in my life and the life of my family.

Today, I read about the Passover celebrations going on throughout the country and felt some pangs about being so disconnected from my original family.

I did something I rarely do in my mind; I went back to my childhood and the memories of the Passover that triggered my schism with Judaism, hurt my grandmother, launched my separation from my family, and persuaded my father that I was a hopeless rebel who was much trouble and little reward.

He just had too much trouble getting me to do what he told me to do.

Somehow, the photos of Robin triggered this. I don’t quite know how that works. I was never as happy any day as a child as she appeared to be this weekend.

My father and I did not get on well, sadly, and I think Passover was the starting gun of our long war. I think of it as launching my often controversial and wrought career as a writer.

I must have been around 10 or 11, and I was asked to read the Haggadah (the Jewish text that sets forth the order of the Passover Seder) passage which details how God slaughtered the firstborn of every Egyptian family as a punishment to the Pharoah of Egypt for refusing to let his Jewish slaves go free.

I don’t remember my thinking, or my passion over this story, or what triggered it. I know I had nightmares about it.

At the Seder – everyone in our family was there sitting around our huge living room table –  I was fuming about this passage. My parents were the hosts of the Passover seder that year. My mother had been cooking and cleaning for days.

I think my uncle Harry, himself a rebel and thorn in the family’s side, agreed with me.

He refused to ever go to Passover ceremonies; he thought they glorified violence, vengeance, and cruelty, not liberation.  Uncle Harry was my hero; he gave me I.F. Stone’s Newsletter as a gift and inspired my life as a journalist and writer.

My father didn’t think about things My Uncle did.

The reading of the Haggadah at the Seder table is a fulfillment of the command by God for each Jew to tell their children the story from the Book of Exodus about God bringing the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, “with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.”

For Jews, liberation is not symbolic, it speaks to life and survival. I understand that better than I once did, but it still does not work for me as a faith.

I told my parents that I didn’t wish to participate in the ceremony, which I thought was cruel and barbaric, and they insisted. We fought about it for weeks.

They said I would absolutely be punished if I didn’t read the Haggadah portion dealing with the death of the first-born babies.

This enraged me, and I could not get easy with it.

I remember seething at the table that Passover, then trembling, as my siblings and cousins each read their Seder portions with solemnity and without complaint or drama.

Mostly, I think, they wanted to get to the great food my mother made, including pies and cakes.

My mother and father were nervous, they cast several murderous looks my way as threats. My mother knew me better than my father and supported my interest in writing. She was something of a rebel herself, although she would never admit that.

She sensed I could cause some trouble.

When it came to my part, I was furious and had worked myself into a moral lather.

I didn’t understand how anyone could justify the slaughter of a nation’s firstborn babies for any reason – it felt unjust to me, I couldn’t imagine telling that story and digging into an Apple pie.

Being young and strange and headstrong and quite angry anyway, I really resented being forced to participate in a ceremony that had no meaning to me, or that had no meaning I could comprehend.

“How can all of you justify sitting here, celebrating all this bloodshed and not even wanting to talk about it?” I asked. But no one answered me.

According to the Haggadah, the Angel of Death went to every home in Egypt where the first-born baby drew a mark in blood by the door. All through Egypt, the wailing and mourning of bereaved families could be heard through the night hundreds of miles away.

So I did what I was warned not to do.

I said out loud – my voice was quivering –  what I was thinking, that I could not understand how Judaism, which celebrated peace and learning and family, could justify killing countless firstborn babies who had committed no crime other than being born.

I can still hear the gasp that went around the table, then an embarrassed silence.

My grandmother, suspecting heresy, was demanding to know in Yiddish what was going on. I loved my grandmother very much and did not wish to hurt her. But I did. She forgave me but never forgot.

I said I would not read the passage, and my father, through gritted teeth and blazing eyes, sent me up to my room to spend the night there without food or dessert. I was happy and proud to go; I think it was the beginning of my path to independence and salvation.

Since then, I’ve never embraced dogma.

I am more tolerant today and would not disrupt anyone’s religious celebration in so public and shocking away. I just wouldn’t go to the service.

I don’t tell other people what to do, and I try not to judge them for what they do and believe. We all get to walk on our own paths.

That Passover was important to me.

And as intemperate as it was, it was good for me. It was the beginning of my formation as a thinking human, not a cultural robot.

Most of my cousins shunned me after that; they couldn’t quite believe what I had done and assumed I was just crazy. In a world of rigid labels, there are a lot of people who no longer have a need to think.

My Uncle Harry took me out to a secret and celebratory lunch at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Providence. “Good for you,” he said, “you are not afraid to think.”

My father ignored me for a good while.

The Jewish God of the Old Testament was fearsome and unyielding. He took no prisoners and accepted few excuses.  I wondered if the Angel of Death might stop by our house.

It was a different world, of course.

Since that first time, I’ve never attended a Passover service; I am told the service has been rewritten and reimagined so many times it bears no relation to the one I walked out on.

It celebrates all kinds of liberation now, I am told, not just the liberation from Egypt.

I have mixed feelings tonight when I think of Passover. I suppose I sometimes wish I had a family around me so that we could celebrate some holidays together.

But I don’t really want to celebrate any religious holidays with anyone.

Maria and I have created our own kind of faith, and it suits me just fine.

I get sad sometimes because it is sad, but mostly, I get happy. Family, I’ve always thought, is the one dilemma that can’t be solved.

I did invite Emma to go to Quaker Meeting for a while with me to get a different perspective on faith. She liked it.

As I’ve written, my own spiritual direction is a curious mix of Quaker belief and Christian theology, with a nod towards Buddhism for its peaceful and meditative ritual. It’s quite strange, but I feel closer to Jesus Christ than any other religious figure I’ve read about or heard about. Go figure.

I don’t really know what I am. But thinking back, I kind of like that kid who spoke out and got sent to his room. Lots of people have wanted to do that to me.

And I am grateful to my Uncle Harry. I think it was him who taught me to think. Harry believed in my ability to think when no one else did.

I am getting better at learning what I am not, and what I am. I still don’t get the idea of murdering a nation of first-born innocents in the name of any religion at all.

I wonder what Robin will believe; I’m guessing Emma will make her aware of all her choices and let her do what she wishes. But I don’t really know.

And it’s not really my business.

Happy Passover to those who believe.