Holiday often misunderstood, misused
Every year I tell my husband that Passover is my favorite holiday and every year he acts surprised.
I can’t blame him. I complain about not being able to find “Kosher for Passover” options at the grocery store — including non-leavened lunch items for the kids’ school — and about preparing for the Seder. But, complaining is my love language and Passover is indeed the most meaningful holiday to me. Maybe that’s why I, along with many of our Chronicle readers, was less than thrilled to see a photo featured of a certain Jesus-following Messianic group doing its version of a Seder.
The question of who owns the Passover Seder raises a number of thorny questions.
How do we tell the difference between disingenuous borrowing and sincere engagement? Jews aren’t the only group to struggle with this question of who has a right to a tradition.
In this instance, how can the story of the Israelites’ escape from Pharaoh’s bondage possibly mean the same thing to non-Jewish groups who participate in Seders each year? Or to anybody who believes that Elijah — whom we Jews open the door for each Passover in anticipation of his heralding in the coming of the messiah — is already out of work?
The short answer: it can’t. That doesn’t mean it can’t be meaningful in a different way. A lot of good has come from interfaith efforts. Seders themselves are often opportunities for Jewish families to welcome others into their homes. But this has to be done with care and — perhaps as a rule of thumb here — with some actual Jews.
Each year, I laugh along with other Jews at the ham-fisted — pun intended — Passover greetings from brands and politicians that include pictures of challah (a no-no during Passover) or apples and honey (wrong holiday).
For many reasons, I feel protective over the ritual dinner where we retell the story of the exodus.
The family tradition I grew up with evolved to a near perfect comedy routine by the time my siblings and I were opinionated teenagers. A proper Seder can stretch on for hours and though we never approached any world records, it was always a burden to my
father, a Cleveland-raised kid who has spent his adult life rebelling against his more conservative religious upbringing. “When do we eat?” he'd moan, as if he didn't know exactly when the first bites were coming in the lineup. Our Seders were one part current events panel debate and one part “Saturday Night Live” writer's room, which felt just perfectly and wonderfully Jewish to me.
Passover for me will also always be associated with my family's encounter with the Holocaust. The day after the holiday began in 1944, my great uncle and his family were taken to a ghetto, and later, to the concentration camps. An older sister had already made her way out of Europe when they were rounded up. He was the only person in his family to survive the camps, something he credited, in part, to the shoes that he slept with under his head and that protected his feet during forced labor and marches.
And then there is the broader significance of the Passover story itself, which has grown to encompass not just Jews' exodus from Egypt but our whole history and meaning as a people.
The texts we read during the Seder use direct language: you came out of Egypt. Our Haggadot — plural for Haggdah, the text containing the story and prayers that lead us through the dinner — appeal to us in our current moment: now we are slaves; next year we will be free. By doing so, the Seder becomes intertwined with thousands of years of history to reflect on the ways we have endured as a community, in an ongoing conversation. Each year, we read the story and the questions that story has inspired, and we reaffirm who we are.
When we taste the spring vegetable dipped in salt water, we remember the tears of our ancestors. And we remember that, for us, life is a study in contrasts. “We mix bitterness with sweetness, slavery with freedom, past with future,” is how one reading from “A Night of Questions: A Passover Haggadah” put it. “We live with contrasts because we know that no moment exists without a multitude of combinations — sorrow and joy, pain and comfort, despair and hope.”
When we ask the four questions, we remember not only our responsibility to pass down the stories but to continue to seek answers. “To ask questions is to acknowledge first and foremost that we do not live in isolation, that we need each other,” offers the Haggadah we used this year. “To ask questions is to signify freedom.”
This is the beauty of Passover; it's something so specific and yet, honoring it connects us to the broader world. It's something old and constantly new — ever relevant.
Though some non-Jews who have Seders today consider it a way to explore their Christian roots or connect with Jesus, the Last Supper did not resemble the Seder as we know it today. Jesus would have celebrated Passover much more simply, likely with a lamb slaughtered at the temple and eaten at home. The home Seder was likely a Rabbinic era invention whose exact development is hard to date but was likely commonplace generations after Jesus' death.
Since then, the ritual has continued to evolve and respond to its moment.
In the late 1960s, for example, the Freedom Seder brought together some 800 people, Black and white, Jewish and Christian. In a Washington D.C. church basement, “All power to the people,” rang out one year after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. That Seder, and the Haggadah authored by its organizer Arthur Waskow, helped link the ritual to contemporary struggles against oppression and inspire new interpretations of the holiday.
Today, new Haggadot hit the market every year with different reflections and reading. Even the Seder plate changes, such as when Jewish Studies scholar Susannah Heschel added the orange to recognize gay, lesbian and other marginalized Jews.
The Jewish author and food historian Michael Twitty filled his Passover Seder with food connected to African and African American histories, such as sweet potato for the karpas and pecans and molasses in the charoset. “Blackness deserves a seat at the Seder,” Twitty told the New York Times. “I use food to guarantee not just a place, but a legacy to build on.”
At other times, this expansive vision of Passover can blur things too much, sometimes past recognition. Reflecting on her experience as a Black Jew, physics and women's studies professor Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, wrote about the not uncommon practice of Seders that include spirituals or readings from the Civil Rights era that include the word “Negro” that are often sung and read by white Jews in a way that, she argues, performs Blackness.
Instead of leaning on someone else's culture, white Jews, she writes, should ask themselves whether this inclusion is a yearround commitment and what it means to them personally. “You may find yourself feeling like you do not know how to ask. That is a fine place to begin the story.”
A fine place indeed for a night about questions. To non-Jews who borrow the Passover Seder, I'd offer similar advice. There are deep reasons why it's painful for many Jews to see Messianic groups at the center of Jewish traditions. Seders can bring people of many backgrounds into rich and meaningful conversations but they need to be undertaken with, well, good faith.