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Jewish Life & Celebrations

Passover

Passover – Origins and Humanistic Celebration

Rabbi Adam Chalom

Rabbi Chalom from the Kol Hadash Humanistic Congregation in Chicago presents the reasons why Humanistic Jews celebrate Passover and its significance in today's society. © 2005 All rights reserved.

ORIGINS

The Passover Holiday has its roots in the earliest Jewish experiences of farming and shepherding. Originally, each "occupation" had its own spring holiday which occurred near the same time of year. The shepherds would sacrifice a lamb to hope for fertility from the rest of their flocks and then eat all the meat that night. The farmers would remove all old and leavened bread from their houses, eating only the more ancient form of unleavened bread.

By the time the Bible was written, these two holidays had become closely associated with each other. According to Leviticus 23, the shepherd holiday took place on the 14th of “the first month” (in the current Jewish calendar, the seventh month Adar), and the holiday was marked by a special lamb sacrifice called the “Pesakh.” The shepherd holiday began on the 15th and lasted for seven days, marked by a special assembly on the first and seventh days. The special feature of the farmer holiday was connected to its name: it was called Hag ha-Matzot (the Matza holiday), and the Jews traditionally ate only unleavened bread on those seven days, removing all leaven from their homes (Exodus 12).

The Priestly editors of the Bible, however, were not interested in simply recording Jewish cultural history; they very much wanted to connect what Jews did to what they believed were the two most important events in Jewish History: the Creation of the World in 7 days and the Exodus from Egypt. So they took these two holidays of Pesakh and Matzot and connected them to the Exodus from Egypt. The Pesakh was connected to the killing of the Egyptian first-born and the "passing-over" of Jewish households that marked their doorposts with lamb’s blood (Exodus 12:27). Why was the entire animal eaten in one night? Because Israel left Egypt in haste.

The Matzah is connected to the Exodus event also, but initially no reason is given. It is only in Deuteronomy that a reason is found: unleavened bread is eaten because Israel left Egypt in haste (Deut. 16:3). For at least 500 years of Jewish History, from the building of the Second Temple around 450 BCE to its destruction in 70 CE, Passover was one of the central holidays of the Jews. They would travel to Jerusalem from all over to sacrifice their lamb at the Temple, eat their lamb and their matsah and Maror (bitter herbs; all three mentioned in Exodus 12:8), and retell the story of how Yahweh brought them out of Egypt. In fact, the famous “Last Supper” of the New Testament was likely a Passover celebration conducted as part of the pilgrimage festival in Jerusalem.

As Jews lived farther and farther away from Jerusalem in the Diaspora, the telling of the story became a very important part of the celebration. After the destruction of the Temple, which made it impossible to perform sacrifices, the meal and the telling of the story (in Hebrew, Haggadah) became all-important. The Rabbis, the new leaders of the Jewish people, created a detailed plan for the observance of the holiday which they put in their first major work, the Mishnah, including elements like: telling the story of the Exodus, eating a variety of specific foods, eating matzah, and singing songs.

Their outline was eventually presented in its complete form as the traditional Haggadah, which remained basically the same, with a few additions, until the modern period. The story that is told in the traditional Haggadah is the same one that appears in the book of Exodus: God leads the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt and into ‘freedom’ under God’s rule in the desert at Mt. Sinai.

The traditional foods that are ceremonially eaten during the Seder are: Karpas (greens), Matzah, Betzah (boiled Egg), Maror (bitter herb), and Haroset (generally made with apples and nuts for Ashkenazic Jews, dates for Sephardic Jews). In many Sephardic families, a lamb shank is also roasted and shared. Most of these foods show up on the standard Seder plate. *


HUMANISTIC CELEBRATION

Today, Humanistic Jews find some significant concerns with the traditional Haggadah. There is significant historical doubt that the Exodus ever occurred remotely like the events described in the Bible, and some even doubt that the Hebrews were ever in Egypt in the first place. And the traditional narrative includes a very anthropomorphic, active, and ethnocentric God in whom many people no longer believe.

Thematically, the Haggadah celebrated the passive deliverance by God of the Hebrews, when today we prefer to celebrate the activity human beings can take to improve their own lives. Ethically, the Haggadah gloats over the suffering of the Egyptians who are mere pawns in the demonstration of Yahweh’s power, an objectification of the foreigner that we reject. There are few if any women in the Haggadah, and there are no daughters while four sons are described. And most important, the old traditional Haggadah has no mention of any Jewish History later than the Exodus, as if everything since then has been of less importance.

So what is meant by a Humanistic celebration of Passover? Humanistic Jews continue the tradition of telling the story, but they are willing to accept that it is just a story and not history. Humanistic Jews also talk about the possible history behind the story, a small slave escape embellished by later imagination. And the themes they emphasize are different: the courage of the slaves to escape, the power of human beings to change their destiny, the power of hope.

Humanistic Jews see all periods of Jewish History as important, and thus some of them can find their way into the Passover celebration. What recent event records the courage of millions of Jews to leave the land of their birth for a Promised Land? The immigration from Eastern Europe to America, perhaps the largest Jewish Exodus ever. Even more significant, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis in 1943 began on the first night of Passover, one of the best examples of fighting for dignity and using our own power to control our destinies. There is no limit to the number of themes that can be introduced into the Passover celebration. This is what makes it one of the most important Jewish holidays today regardless of denomination.

*Some Jews have begun to put an orange on their seder plate because of a story that has widely circulated. When an Orthodox Rabbi was asked “What do you think about a Woman Rabbi?” (some say the question was, “what is the place of gays in Judaism?”), he responded, “A Woman belongs on a Bima (or “gays belong in Judaism”) like an orange belongs on a seder plate.” Thus many liberal Jews have made the corresponding “so there!” gesture.

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