Stinging the Ache
by Miriam Saperstein
Printer-frienldy version of the text
At the Passover Seder, we eat bitter herbs to remember the bitterness of the Israelite’s enslavement in the Narrow Place. We eat green plants (or potatoes if you live in places still frozen by Pesach) to remind us of spring. We dip them in saltwater. We recite the reasons why. Seder, meaning order, is a didactic exercise. Activity by activity, the lessons of Passover are taught via song, symbolic foods, and questions followed by their explanations. The plants are a pedagogical tool, encouraging us to not just talk about redemption but experience it somatically.
My mom’s dad, my Papa, and I speak on the phone every Friday before Shabbos. We speak of my garden and remember his. He no longer has access to the huge raised beds I remember from childhood, where he’d grow parsley and horseradish for the Seder. He tells me again the story of how he fell in love with gardening. My young Papa Jerry didn’t know his Papa, Papa Arn knew how to make magic, but Papa Arn, he planted seeds and two weeks later, carrot tops! Papa Jerry pulled them up, to check for their carrot roots. And then he tried to put them back. Papa Arn saw the child trying to rebury carrots in the dirt and asked: Zun, du host getun dos?
Yes, Papa.
Don’t do it again, my Papa remembers him saying, emphasis on the roundness in the “oh” of don’t. He went on to let many plants flourish and harvested them for many Seders.
On the call, I tell him how I am figuring out the steps to build an elevated raised bed so I can sit while gardening. Like the steps of the Passover Seder, there is a right way and a wrong way to build a raised bed. If using pallets, make sure they are marked HT for heat-treated rather than chemically sealed. Avoid the ones marked MB—methyl bromide is a gas used to fumigate wood, protecting it from rodents and insects, poisonous to human tissues and the ozone layer. The EPA currently bans most uses of methyl bromide but it has exceptions, and was in use for many decades prior to being determined a controlled substance by the Montreal Protocols. It’s one of many toxic substances invented to preserve and treat wood that now poisons the land, water, and air around us.
I used to live downstream of the Haverford Superfund Site, which I learned was classified as such by the EPA because of one business owner's decision to allow runoff from treating lumber with pentachlorophenol to runoff into the river. These kinds of chemicals and the attitudes that led to the contamination have poisoned and sickened so many people.
On days I was not too fatigued, I loved to walk by this creek downstream of that superfund site. Along the banks of this poisoned waterway, I greeted foxes, egrets, squirrels, poison ivy, raspberry bushes, and giant swaths of nettles. The nettles could have treated my fatigue but were dangerous from the water and soil they grew in. Herbal protocols in late stage capitalism can be the rituals of heartbreak in response to the unsolvable puzzles of symptoms and repeated contamination.
Judith Berger, whose book, Herbal Rituals, was one of my first Jewish herbalism lessons, describes the recognition she felt first encountering her friend and ally, stinging nettle. “A single plant or tree can provide the necessary strength to its human friend over a lifetime,” she writes. When I see a patch of nettles, my heart also swells in recognition. I first learned the plant by its tell-tale sting, spending an afternoon weeding nettles up to my shoulders from a bramble of raspberry bushes. Despite my long gloves and pants, I went to bed scratched up and tingling from the thorns of the raspberries and hairs of the nettles. Due to the complicated negotiations of my gut and bloodstream alongside other cellular dysfunction, I am often in need of the extra iron provided by nettle tea or soup, and even the site of them fills me with anticipatory vitality. These plants can be spotted emerging in early spring amidst the slush and mud, alongside chain link fences and by roads and waterways where soil is disturbed. I am careful where I harvest them, not wanting to inadvertently ingest poisons remediated from the soil they grew in.
My understanding of my body is that it will tell me what nutrients I need through cravings. When spring comes, I crave the bitters and the greens, two essential components of the Passover Seder. As I emerge like the shoots and ease open like the frozen ground turning mud, I notice the need for deep nourishment. I love to walk and gather and connect with the life springing forth around me. Judith Berger writes how “gathering nettles has taught [her] the skill of attentiveness.” Both the careful stingless grasp and the sting that reminds of the wandering attention are gifts.
When I pay careful attention, I can sometimes enter the sweet flow of moving and resting across the field of my day. Often I feel the sting of my body’s limitations. I overestimate my energy levels and find myself, arms tingling and head spinning, on the verge of collapse.
Throughout Europe, urtication, the practice of striking the skin with stinging nettle to treat aches, is an old practice. In Ashkenazi Herbalims, Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel describe how Ashkenazi Jews knew the medicine of this plant, too: “Nettle stalks, leaves, and seeds were used to sting, rub on, or apply to aching parts of the body.”
Nettle both revitalizes the tired body and reminds us to notice the ache. Passover, also known as the Holiday of Spring, occurs during Nissan. The start of Nissan is one of the four biblical New Years. Jewish time begins again and again, like a sick person refreshing their attention to the aching body, like a parent waking in the night to feed a baby then returning to sleep. The four new years tether our celebrations to agriculture and the nonlinear spiral, which is also a key part of crip time. The Seder must be done every year. No matter how much healing and growth is possible, the ache of the ancient narrative must remain ever fresh, bitter in the mouth, coursing through our veins, reminding us of spring.
Miriam Saperstein is a poet, visual artist and ritual crafter based in Western MA. They are the author of Besamim for Heartbreak (2020) and their work can be found in smoke and mold, Blue Bag, and the Syllabus Project.
