Pen-Elayne on the Web

The Ritual of Freedom

Ignore the "posted at" time below, I've worked on this intermittently prior to publishing it but Blogger records the first time you save the file rather than the time it actually gets uploaded.

A primer first, I guess, for the two or three people who haven't sat through The Ten Commandments (see yesterday's entry) or were too busy giggling at the performances to pay attention to the storyline: Passover commemmorates the events described in the second book of the Torah, Exodus, specifically the book's title which refers to the descendents of the Jewish patriarch Jacob and matriarchs Leah and Rachel being freed from 400 years of bondage in servitude to the Egyptians, thanks (according to the Bible) to some well-timed miracles from God via the prophets Moses and Aaron (Miriam's brothers). The name "passover" refers to the last of these plagues, the slaying of the first-born. From Exodus 12:3, 5-7, 23: ''Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying: On the tenth day of this month every man shall take for himself a lamb, according to the house of his father, a lamb for a household... Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats. Now you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month. Then the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it at twilight. And they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and on the lintel of the houses where they eat it... For the Lord will pass through to strike the Egyptians; and when He sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over the door and not allow the destroyer to come into your houses to strike you.'' This whole sacrificial lamb motif carried over, of course, into Christian mythology, with Jesus becoming the ultimate sacrificial lamb with his death on the cross (the remembrance of which is always the first Friday of Passover), and the Last Supper being a seder meal.

The seder, or ritual Passover dinner, is the Jews' way of passing on the Passover story to succeeding generations, very key during the hundreds of years of the diaspora (i.e., the dispersion of Jews outside of Israel from the sixth century B.C., when they were exiled to Babylonia, until the present time) when it was dangerous to openly practice Jewish rituals. The evolution of the Haggadah, the book accompanying the seder, is still continuing; here's a good primer on its early history. One of the things I like about Passover is that these rituals of remembrance and celebration are always evolving (again, see yesterday's entry about feminist hagadot), even in my lifetime. It seems most reasoning people figure, as long as the basic mitzvah (loosely translated: "religiously-required good deed") of recounting the tale is fulfilled, the particulars are adaptable.

So now many rituals include a Miriam's Cup in addition to Elijah's, and I wonder if the door is opened to let them both in now. Although Elijah's return is foretold by the prophet Malachi in the last few verses of the Old Testament, and the tradition says that when he comes to usher in the true Messianic age, it will be during Passover. Nothing about whether Miriam or any female prophet will accompany him, but the Old Testament wasn't written by women. I mean, even the Jews' true Messiah doesn't get to be female - in the song welcoming Elijah, the Moshiach is referred to as ben-David ("son [male descendent] of [the house of King] David") rather than bes-David ("of the house of David") Interestingly, I was always told that the door needed to be opened by the oldest unmarried girl because Elijah would also bring with him (the promise of) her future husband, but I can't find any correlation to this online so I'm beginning to suspect it was just done within my family or perhaps the shtetl whence they originally hailed. Every family has something peculiar, I suppose; I wouldn't be at all surprised if Neil Gaiman's family talked about Solar Frogs during their reciting of the ten plagues.

But I digress. The Passover diet (foods forbidden during Passover generally consists of five grains – wheat, barley, spelt, oats, and rye – when those grains are mixed with water for long enough to rise) was never that big a deal to me except for breakfast. For lunch and dinner, Asian (rice-based) or Mexican (corn-based) will do nicely. The modern tradition with which I tend to take the most issue has to do with something at the very heart of the Passover celebration - freedom. We've heard that word bandied about a lot lately, the people leading this country have been paying it major lip service for at least the last two years, and for Jews it often seems to be inextricably intertwined with aliya, the Hebrew word for "ascending" or immigrating to the State of Israel. L'shana Haba'ah B'y'rushalayim! goes the saying at many seders: "Next year in Jerusalem!" Nothing is considered as important to many religious Jews as the idea that we all ideally ought to be living in Israel.

And now you begin to see the problem. Not only do many of us not want to live there (although it's an interesting place to visit, as I recall, lots of cool excavation sites and the guys all crowd around you even if you're a plain-looking, four-eyed, fat 13-year-old girl 'cause you're an American and they figure you have money), but it's, you know, the size of New Jersey or something. As relatively few of us as there are (and Jews are a vocal minority population-wise, compared with most other religions), we still wouldn't all fit. Well, unless "we" kick out the people living there now via occupation and bulldozers and settlements, and maybe annex Syria after the country for whom "we" are a client state overruns it and refits that oil pipeline they just shut down to divert it to "us" instead. And as those quotation marks start to appear around "we" I find myself slowly backing away from the entire discussion to the point where I don't bother reciting the "l'shana" phrase now any more than I sing along to "God Bless America" during the 7th inning stretch.

So, as with all things Jewish and ritualistic, I make my own meaning from Passover. And it includes at its center the ideas of inclusion of everybody, men and women; and of peace and freedom for all, Jews and non-Jews alike. So let it be written; so let it be done. ("DAA, DAA da DAAA, da DAAAA DAAA da DAAA"...)