Why Is This Night
Unlike All Other Nights?
My family is welcome in the sacred space and time of Shabbos.We can eat in sukkahs and go to brissim and bar mitzvahs and shalom zachors and parties for Purim or Hanukkah. The only place our neighbors will never invite us, for complicated halakhic reasons, is the Seder on the first night of Pesach.
The story of Passover, in Exodus, is familiar to Christians. The glory days when Joseph was Pharaoh’s right-hand man and his brothers were honored guests in Egypt are four hundred years in the past, as far distant from their descendants as Shakespeare and the Mayflower are from us. The children of Israel have been slaves for generations, and now they are subject to a ghastly policy of state-ordered infanticide. In the midst of brutal oppression, they have somehow kept alive the old stories; they remember Abraham and the God who called him and gave him a new name and the promise of a land of his own. But the promises seem to be going nowhere fast, and Abraham’s God must seem about as real and powerful as the tooth fairy compared to the huge and haughty gods of the Egyptians, who gave their followers wealth and power, who look down from massive pillars at the suffering Hebrews. But God is waiting. He sees and hears and bides his time. And then a fugitive in the desert, who before he was a fugitive was a prince in Egypt, and before that was the child of a slave, comes across a burning bush and is transformed yet again. This time he is a prophet, changed by the voice of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who has come blasting out of the old stories to rescue his people.
It’s a dark and dreadful story, one of burning pride and icy stubbornness, of violence, terror, and destruction. It is also a joyful story of fidelity and salvation and freedom. The darkness and the joy come together at Pesach, when the Angel of Death kills the firstborn of every Egyptian family and passes over the houses—their doors smeared with blood—where the slaves are eating a meal of lamb and unleavened bread. They come together again on the shores of the Red Sea, where the Israelites look back at the waters closing over their pursuers and sing a hymn praising God for his steadfast love and guidance and for his terrifying power. He is a mighty warrior: his fury consumes his enemies like fire burning stubble.
Jews remember this dark, triumphant, painful, joyful story every spring. The preparation starts weeks earlier with a housecleaning of mind-blowing thoroughness. The Israelites ate unleavened bread at the meal of Passover for the simple reason that they were in a hurry and there was no time for the bread to rise. Now, in remembrance, my friends track down every trace of yeast, not just the obvious stuff in the pantry and the remainders of the sandwich that the eight-year-old snuck upstairs when nobody was looking, but every last speck of anything in corners and carpets that might possibly have been in contact with leavening of any sort. All the plates and pots and knives and forks have to be sealed up and put in the basement, and plates and pots and knives and forks that have never touched anything leavened are taken out and put into freshly scrubbed kitchen cabinets. During the eight days of Pesach, a whole extra layer of food laws comes into play. Everything has to be not only kosher, but kosher for Pesach, which means that it is certified to have not an atom of yeast in it. Apart from anything else, this gets awfully expensive as it eliminates most of the supermarket foods that are all right the rest of the year; corn syrup, for instance, is kosher, but not for Pesach.
When everything is cleaner than my house has ever been, at least since I’ve lived in it, the Seder comes—the reenactment of the Hebrews’ last meal as slaves. Everything is prescribed down to the smallest detail. Although it is a festive meal, cooked at home and eaten around the family table, the ritual element is so strong that it is more like a liturgical celebration than like, say, Thanksgiving. By and large on Thanksgiving one eats turkey and green bean casserole and that strange concoction with sweet potatoes and marshmallows. But if you don’t care for turkey, there’s no real reason you can’t have sushi. At a Seder, not only the six symbolic dishes, but even the way they are arranged on the table and the order in which they are eaten, are prescribed by both time-honored tradition and law. At Thanksgiving, again, it is generally regarded as a good idea for someone to take a few minutes to quiz the little ones on the story of the Pilgrims and the Indians, and if you come from a certain sort of family, you may well take turns talking about what you are thankful for. But if you prefer to talk about sports or politics or books, then there’s nothing to stop you. At a Seder there’s a little book by every seat with the script for the conversation, which is a theological commentary on the meal itself. As they eat, they read, question, discuss. The aim is for those present to identify so completely with the experience of their ancestors that the thousands of years between them vanish and they feel as if they are there, in Egypt, on the brink of freedom. The Seder, then, is thoroughly ritualized and deeply regular; it links the Jews to a story that is in the past and, therefore, cannot change.
Jesus’s disciples must have looked forward eagerly to their Seder. It had been a rough week. Jerusalem was swarming with pilgrims at the holidays. The authorities were on alert, and the usual tensions were raised to a heightened pitch. There were a lot of tensions in Roman-occupied Judea. The Romans cultivated a public image of liberalism and tolerance, but everybody knew that the image was a thin veneer over the brutal realities of imperial expansion and military power. If they felt that their dominance was being challenged in any way, they turned very ugly very quickly. Too much public grumbling about taxes, rumors of subversive groups, urban guerillas plotting rebellion, and out came the crosses and nails.
Jews responded to this situation in different ways. The priestly classes had the task of trying to maintain the integrity of Temple worship, offering pure sacrifices and prayer to a jealous God who tolerated no rivals, while staying on the right side of an empire so arrogant that they were on the verge of honoring their emperor as a god. The Pharisees worked among the common people, trying to help them to observe the Law scrupulously and to maintain absolute fidelity to God while staying under the radar of the Romans. Others were less ready to be patient; some denounced the whole structure, priests and Pharisees, as hopelessly contaminated by their compromises with the Romans, so they took off to the desert to worship in purity. Others dreamed of rising up and forcibly taking back their land from the hands of the Romans. All watched and hoped for Moshiach, the one whom God had promised through the prophets to send them.
This is why, when Jesus and the disciples arrived in Jerusalem earlier that week to the kind of welcome generally reserved for military conquerors, the Pharisees had pleaded with him to get the crowd to simmer down and go home before the Romans decided they needed to deal with the disruption themselves. Jesus calmly ignored them. Then, on their first visit to the Temple, he lost his temper, raging about thievery and smashing things. Next he established himself in the Temple, as if it were his own house, and publicly accused the religious authorities of being hypocrites, of acting out of love for their own status rather than love for God and Torah. Small wonder that the priests’ and Pharisees’ nervous suspicions quickly hardened into deadly hostility. They decided that Jesus had to be killed. He knew it, and let them know that he knew it, but it didn’t slow him down.
It must have been very frightening for the disciples. After three years with Jesus, of course, they were no strangers to controversy. But this was on an altogether different scale from dinner table debates with irritated Pharisees in fishing villages. Besides, Jesus had been saying weird and disturbing things recently. He had more or less admitted that he was the Messiah, and their hearts leapt and their minds filled with visions of fame and glory. But he dumped ice water on their fantasies. “Yes, I’m the Messiah. And it’s not what you think. It’s going to get really ugly, and I’m going to die. Do you get this, guys? Are you even listening? You need to be ready for this. They’re going to kill me. And you know what else? They’re going to kill you too.”
So they must have looked forward eagerly to Pesach. They found an upstairs room somewhere and made arrangements for the Seder. At least that one evening would be safe and calm and predictable. It would be just them, and they all had their parts to play, their familiar lines to say. Even Jesus, even as strange as he had been recently, couldn’t mess with Pesach, could he?
But, of course, Jesus does mess with Pesach. In his hands the unleavened bread is no longer just a reminder that their ancestors had to leave in a hurry. It is his body, he tells them, and it will be broken. The wine is no longer the blood of the lamb that kept the Angel of Death at bay. It is his blood, and it will be spilled, and they have to drink it. This Seder is no longer a story that is familiar and safe and comforting. This Seder is about the present, the turbulent, unpredictable present, and even more frightening, it is about a strange new future in which people will do what the disciples are doing and will remember this evening and reenact this meal in catacombs and palaces and barns and fields and living rooms and soaring cathedrals and tiny whitewashed Churches. All moments, past and future, are centered on this moment and on Jesus himself. And then Judas dips his bread in the cup and leaves, and Jesus goes out to the garden, and over the next three days the story of Passover and the freeing of the Jews is turned inside out, into the story of Easter and the redemption of all creation.
The situation is, of course, more complicated than that. Christianity is built on the foundation of the Jewish covenant, but it is not just slapped on top of it like a trailer home onto a concrete lot. Christian theology draws freely, indeed rather cavalierly, on the whole of the Old Testament, and while the links between Jewish and Christian festivals are a good place to start, they do not tell the whole story. At that strange, frightening Seder, when Jesus said that the bread and wine were his body and blood for the forgiveness of sins, he was putting himself in the place not only of the lambs of the first Passover, but also of the scapegoats that were driven out to the desert every year bearing the sins of Israel, and of the lambs, doves, bulls, grain, and oil that were offered in the Temple in accordance with the Law, and of the ram caught in the thicket by its horns that God provided to take the place of Isaac. The days that follow this strange new Seder, days the Church keeps as its holiest days, echo the themes of Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement (the holiest day in the Jewish year), and Pesach. When Christians think about the story of Jesus and then look back at the Old Testament, we see shadows and glimpses and hints—the technical term is types—everywhere we turn.
The intimate connection in the meanings of Jewish and Christian rituals and symbols can be surprising when the two religions live side by side as they do in my neighborhood. I got quite a start once when Ahuva casually dropped into the conversation the phrase “paschal lamb.” For Catholics the phrase is absolutely bursting at the seams with theological, symbolic, and spiritual significance: the Lamb who was slain, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. I was momentarily bewildered by the sudden turn in the conversation, and then I realized that she wasn’t talking about theology at all; she was talking about food. Paschal lamb? It’s what the Hebrews ate at Pesach, of course. I hazarded a quick explanation of what Christianity does with Passover, and when I got to the bit about the Eucharist, she reacted with palpable embarrassment, as if the whole body-and-blood thing were a skeleton in the Christian closet, something that everybody knows about but that people generally have the good taste not to speak of in public. The disciples certainly found the command to eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus shocking and unsettling. Maybe Christians should too.
As tightly interwoven as Easter and Passover are, theologically and symbolically, they don’t always happen at the same time. There’s a complicated business about solar and lunar cycles and the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar and things of that sort. The two festivals can be as much as four weeks apart, but I like it when they coincide, when our neighbors are scrubbing their houses at the same time that we are fasting for Lent. When we are getting into the car to go to Maundy Thursday Mass to remember the Last Supper, I like to know that the Rubins and the Gindoffs and the Schwartzes and the Cohens are in their houses doing what the disciples thought they were going to do when Jesus turned it all on its head. It is the sharpest reminder of how very close we are—and how very far. We are remembering the same stories, the actions of the same God, but our relations to the stories are different, and the way we remember them is different.
As it happens, I have actually been to a Passover Seder at a Church in Virginia, years before I had even been in the same room as an Orthodox Jew. It was interesting and educational and done in a spirit of respect for Judaism and Jews. There are a number of reasons why it is important for Christians to understand Passover, and there are plenty of Churches that host Seders, and I can quite see their point. But it made me somewhat uncomfortable at the time, and does so now more than ever. When I tentatively mentioned the subject to an Orthodox friend, she obviously didn’t like it one bit. She felt, I imagine, rather as I would feel if I heard that a group of ecumenically minded, well-intentioned, open-hearted Muslims or Buddhists had bought a book and got together to celebrate the Eucharist. I certainly wouldn’t hold it against them personally, but I’d really prefer they didn’t.
The story of Passover as it is enacted at the Seder is a family story, and as such is very personal. It wasn’t the ancestors of the Virginia congregation who smeared blood on the door frames of their huts, ate a hurried meal with all their possessions in bundles at their sides, clutched their children as wails of anguish streamed from the houses of their oppressors, and took off into an unknown freedom in pursuit of an almost-forgotten God who had remembered them just in time. When the Angel of Death swept over Egypt, our ancestors were getting on with their business in Ireland and Sweden and Africa and England, quite unaware that in a distant desert an unknown God was taking history by the throat and calling to his side the people he had chosen for his own. It would be many centuries before God made himself a child of Israel, took the story of the Exodus by the throat, and gave it to us and to the whole world.
Actually, this year some new friends, Reform Jews who have quite a different take on this issue (as on many others), have invited us to their Seder. I feel rather shy about it, and a little bit worried that our Orthodox friends will disapprove: but only a very little bit, and certainly not enough to return anything other than an enthusiastic, “Oh, can we? I didn’t know! Gosh, thanks, we’d love to come.”