Linking chocolate bunnies and Easter

Rabbi Marc Gellman

Every year in the winter I deliver Hanukkah and Christmas blessings to you, my dear readers, and every springtime I offer Passover and Easter greetings. It is springtime. Last week I thought about Passover and this week I am thinking about Easter.

I always think first of the power of the cross. No religious symbol is more powerful, it perfectly symbolizes the Christian belief that sin has been overcome.

The Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber taught that Passover and Easter feature the two most important meals in Western Civilization.

Both meals require the eating of unleavened bread, a symbol of the hastily baked slave bread of the Exodus, and both require wine, the universal symbol of joy that in the Eucharist is also the sacrificial blood of Jesus.

In all of this, very close connections between Passover and Easter have been forged over the past two millennia.

Those are some of my high spiritual meditations on Easter and Passover. Now let’s talk about Easter bunnies.

My question, which given my choice of profession you dear Christian readers are going to need to help me with, is …why Easter bunnies? And while I am parading my ignorance here, what’s with the Easter Bunny bringing Easter eggs? Bunnies don’t lay eggs or eat eggs. Bunnies have nothing to do with eggs! My guess is that if the eggs and bunnies were not made of chocolate the whole bunny idea may not have caught on.

I think I might have a way to save the Easter bunny. Easter as a celebration of Jesus as the risen Christ is not going to get you to Easter Bunnies, but Easter as a symbol of springtime just might.

Bunnies come out of the burrows most visibly at the new growth of spring grasses. They are new and fecund life after a cold and barren winter. Easter is a celebration of this change of seasons and married it to a deep and foundational theological historical moment — the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus as the Christ. Bunnies remind us that holidays are not only about the linear record of historical time but also about the cycle of time in nature. Every Easter and every Passover is one year further removed from the Exodus and the Resurrection. That is the way with history, but every Easter and Passover occurs in the spring and every spring is like every other spring. In history everything is new, in nature nothing is new and we are given spring holidays that also celebrate history so that we can become spiritually balanced. Nature worship does not bring us to singular historical events and history’s God, and history worship does not give us a real connection to nature and nature’s God. True faith is a balance between nature and history and in the midst of the great historical celebration of the Resurrection it is also important to see the bunnies that bring the springtime into our grateful hearts.

Happy Easter!