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'To See Ourselves As If': The Passover Seder and Holy Israel
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13604 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1988 |
3,701 Words |
| Author
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Jacob Neusner
Jacob Neusner is University Professor at Brown University and
author of Death and Birth of Judaism and other books. |
The single most widely practiced rite of Judaism in North America requires family and friends to sit down for supper. On the eve of Passover, nearly all North American Jews join, or invent for the occasion, families to conduct this holy meal. And when they do, they see themselves as holy Israel, redeemed in the here and now from the bondage of pharaoh in ancient Egypt. It is an enchanted moment.
How can so secular an act as a dinner party be turned into a highly charged cultic occasion, rich in deeply felt meaning? Such questions cannot be answered by simply reviewing the words that are said during the ceremony. The choreography, the bits and pieces of drama, music, song, procession, the display of eloquent symbols--all of these by themselves do not account for the power and magic of either Kol Nidre or the Passover seder. But somehow by consuming this ceremonious meal, the diners are transformed and placed squarely in the path of onrushing history. In the presence of those symbols that form families and friends into an Israel redeemed from Egypt, people become something else; words work that wonder.
At the festival of Passover, which coincides with the first full moon after the vernal equinox, Jewish families gather around their tables for a holy meal. There, they retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt in times long past. With unleavened bread and sanctified wine, they celebrate the liberation of slaves from pharaoh's bondage. Yet in the rite itself, a single formula captures the moment when, and thus allows us to understand how, the "we" of the family becomes the "we" of Israel and the eternal and perpetual coming of spring culminates a singular moment in the eternal unfolding of linear time. We begin there:
"For ever after, in every generation, every Israelite must think of himself or herself as having gone forth from Egypt."
This is a curious passage. Asking Jews to think of themselves in a particular way is one thing; that they do it is quite another. Start with the here and the now of everyday experience. What makes plausible for nearly all Jews everywhere the statement: "We went forth…."; and why do they, upon sitting down to dine, announce: "It was not only our forefathers that the Holy One, blessed be He, redeemed; us too, the living, He redeemed together with them"? A less plausible statement, a more compelling invitation to derision and disbelief cannot be imagined: No one sitting around this Passover banquet was there; pharaoh has been dead for quite some time; and Egypt languishes in the rubbish-heap of
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