Tapestries-45 | A meal of epic proportions
Reflecting on Passover on the eve of a cosmic meal.
The Jewish festival of Passover begins in a few days. We are celebrating the beginning of the festival with a traditional meal on the first night, called the Seder. Later this week we'll cram more people than can fit into our small New York apartment, and sit around for a few hours talking about how parsley, salt water, unleavened bread and many other obscure items are relevant to the story of a small nation crossing the Red Sea on its journey from slavery to freedom a few thousand years ago.
The Seder will be a team effort. Some friends will be there the day before to bring extra tables and chairs, and to help me play Tetris to figure out how to squeeze everyone in. Tali has orders in all over the city for matza-ball soup, beef brisket, chopped liver and gefilte fish from a range of New York staples like Citarella and Second Avenue Deli. And we've got guests bringing an array of dishes, like egg dip, roasted potatoes, flourless chocolate cake, and a smattering of salads.
That we are going to this effort, and do so every year, is equal parts cosmic and improbable. This piece, on the eve of Passover, is about exploring the cosmic and improbable, and reflecting on what it continues to teach us today about resilience, tradition, and time.
Where are the Hittites? A story of resilience
Passover celebrates "the Exodus," which is the story of the Israelites' journey to freedom from enslavement in Egypt. It is central to Jewish mythology, peoplehood, and identity. It has also been adopted as a broader cultural narrative, whereby “the story of liberation from bondage into a promised land has inspired the haunting spirituals of African American slaves, the emancipation and civil rights movements, Latin America’s liberation theology, peasant revolts in Germany, nationalist struggles in South Africa, the American Revolution,” and many others. The story is therefore particular and universal at the same time.
The Exodus story, like many other biblical stories, is almost definitely an amalgamation of myths, people and timelines. This piece isn't about the factual accuracy or historicity of the story (as fascinating as that discussion may be); it's about what the story and observance of the tradition represent. So with that in mind, let's proceed on the basis that to the extent the story occurred in some form, it did so about ~3,000 years ago (or more) around modern day Egypt and Israel.
When we look back at the centuries around this time and place, we see an array of empires, kingdoms and tribes, like the Amorites, Moabites, Assyrians and Hittites (to name a few), many of whom were dominant, technically-advanced societies of their times. So as I sit at home in New York in 2022, preparing for a meal with friends to discuss the events surrounding our founding myth in ancient history, I am struck by the following paragraph by Walter Percy:
“Where are the Hittites? Why does no one find it remarkable that in most world cities today there are Jews but not one single Hittite, even though the Hittites had a great flourishing civilization while the Jews nearby were a weak and obscure people? When one meets a Jew in New York or New Orleans or Paris or Melbourne, it is remarkable that no one considers the event remarkable. What are they doing here? But it is even more remarkable to wonder, if there are Jews here, why are there not Hittites here? Where are the Hittites? Show me one Hittite in New York City.”
Putting the Hittites specifically to the side (I don't know much more about them or their history), the question leaves a sense of bewilderment. Of all the peoples and nations and cultures that existed thousands of years ago in that part of the world, how is it that the Jews (to my knowledge) are the only people that have survived—let alone flourished—to the extent that they are still a cohesive, recognizable group spread across the four corners of the globe? When one contemplates this question, while simultaneously asking the attendant at the grocer whether the brisket is made with any flour, soy or rice (all ingredients prohibited at the Seder meal), the answer to the question stares you right in the face.
To my mind, the secret to Jewish resilience and survival—in the face of millennia of expulsion, persecution and genocide—is the primacy placed on telling and re-telling the story of our founding myths and beliefs, both to anchor our own stories to something larger than us, and to ensure that those that come after us understand the power of the continuity of community and identity. And for me, the Seder is the purest expression of this tradition.
What the Seder has taught me about time
One of the reasons I love the Passover and Seder traditions is because they rub directly against the grain of the materialist and hyper-rationalist world we occupy for the majority of the year. There is no instant gratification from observing the practice. On the contrary, the tradition and rituals exist explicitly for the benefit of those who will come after us; the Seder tradition therefore exists in its own time, which in a world obsessed with linear progress, is quite a counter-cultural approach. I have long been fascinated by the concept of "time" and how we engage with it. And the story of the Exodus has given me another powerful perspective on the concept, one on the other end of the technical spectrum to the description proposed by physicists.
The bible is very explicit in the book of Exodus where it says “And on that day you shall tell your child, for this God has taken me out of the Land of Egypt.” The telling of the story of the exodus is the central pillar of the Passover and Seder tradition. Then, later in the bible (when we celebrate the Jewish festival of Shavuot), God hands down the ten commandments via Moses to the Israelites who had just left Egypt, marking the creation of the Jews as a people, and the fulfilment of a covenant made with Abraham many years before. Jewish tradition holds that all Jews—of the past and of the future—were present at this event at Mount Sinai, which is obviously a physical impossibility but something worth pondering as it relates to the concept of time and the experience of the Seder meal.
Our modern culture is obsessed with a linear arrow of time; we believe that following the arrow forward requires us to innovate, update and develop ourselves and our societies in an onward march in one direction, leaving our past behind as an important, but largely ornamental artifact. In contrast to this linear approach, I see something eerily circular in the narrative arc of the bible and the Passover tradition. As mentioned earlier, Jews were commanded in the bible to tell the Exodus story every year. And when God passes down his commandments and creates a nation at Mount Sinai several chapters later—by giving this group of people laws and an identity—it is a partial fulfilment of his earlier covenant with Abraham to make a "great nation" out of his descendants.
Later this week, ~3,000 years later, Jews across the world will sit down at their tables to tell the Passover story, and in doing so, will once again unite as a nation in a spiritual and temporal sense. The observance of the commandment to tell the story is the thing that makes us a people. By sitting down together every year to tell the Passover story, we validate the teaching that all Jews to ever exist—past, present or future—were present at the giving of the commandments, and at the creation of a nation, because we are doing it all over again, each and every year. Said another way, we had to receive the commandments to become a nation, and we become that nation ever year at Passover when we all sit down to observe this specific commandment. Maybe it's the third coffee, but there's something about the self-fulfilling nature of this dynamic that bends my mind a little, and adds another cosmic layer to an already improbable event.
The improbability of this particular meal
The Exodus story involves the description of many miracles god performed on the Israelites' behalf in ancient Egypt. And without sounding dramatic, the dinner we are about to host in our apartment is a miracle of its own. At the table, we will have grandsons and granddaughters of Australia, Syria, Scotland, Russia, Poland, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Lithuania, Israel, Iraq, Canada, Romania, England, New Zealand, Czechoslovakia, Chile, India and South Africa (to my knowledge).
Each one of us at the table is a product of a particular history and the decisions, tragedies and good fortune of those that came before us. We are all atoms floating through space on different journeys and trajectories, and for one night, we will sit in the same room, observing objectively strange practices, compelled to be there by the power of an ancient faith and mythology. The improbability of us sitting together as this group—amongst all the possible alternative histories—is mind-boggling.
I don't know the ancestors of those who will sit alongside me at the table in a few days' time; I can only go back ~3 generations in my own lineage before the Holocaust shredded the majority of my family tree. But I do know that these largely anonymous individuals made many deliberate decisions and incredible sacrifices, so that one day their collective progeny could, just for one fleeting moment, share a room in a random apartment in Greenwich Village to tell an ancient story of questionable factual accuracy, while eating a strange assortment of foods and singing a bizarre set of songs that everyone somehow knows the words to.
I'm not sure about you, but for me, that's as close to magic as it gets.
Bringing it together
Judaism clearly plays an important role in my life. But if you ask me what that role is, I couldn't really articulate it. I wrote a longer piece on exploring this question a few months ago (just after Yom Kippur), and in considering why it is that faith remains relevant to me, surmised that:
“I genuinely want to believe that something grander and more exquisite exists than simply the dreams and anxieties of my monkey brain. I see in myself the ugly, self-centered impulses that rule my thoughts and actions when I don't have an effective mechanism for thinking outside of myself. I am not a religious person, and I don’t know that I will become one, but I see the tangible benefits of maintaining a belief in something larger than myself, which for my purposes, is the investment in practices that may seem outdated, but arguably still work.”
My concept of faith currently places more of an emphasis on community and continuity than a supernatural god. And Passover and the Seder simply represent another opportunity in the Jewish calendar to engage with and invest in the faith's traditions by empowering community. My exploration of faith is ongoing and I think it will feature prominently in a book I'm currently writing. Faith and religion to me aren't the only paths to a meaningful life; far from it. But there's clearly something in these practices that have enriched and sustained people over thousands of years, and their resilience and survival are worthy of closer inspection. And when we're surrounded by "a secular modernity that’s lost the plot, and that no longer knows what it is or where it’s going," faith and its practices can offer a potentially stabilizing and anchoring presence.
Judaism’s annual rituals and festivals might eventually operate for me as a consistent reference point in a life that otherwise can paradoxically be chaotic and monotonous at the same time. Perhaps the faith’s spiritual element is what attracts me, as it can puncture the flat spiritual landscape I tend to inhabit, and add a richness to my routines. At a minimum, the festival and its rhythms and traditions are a wonderful opportunity to be deliberate and thoughtful about how we construct our lives from a spiritual standpoint, and if this sounds like something you’d benefit from, it’s a wonderful moment in time to exercise the option to reflect. And it’s not an opportunity exclusively open to Jews only!
This year, Passover falls at the same time as Ramadan and Easter. So as the festivals approach, let’s wish all our friends, relatives and colleagues a Chag Sameach, Ramadan Kareem, and Happy Easter. Now it’s time to prepare.
If you’re interested in reading more, here are some of the things in my PIU that were relevant to the thinking in this piece:
Identity, faith and ancestry are front of mind for me at the moment, and with Passover falling this week, I wanted to share something on the topic that touches on these elements. I also just got back to New York from a week in Israel in late March. It’s a tense time there, evidenced by the wave of terrorist attacks that have seen 14 Israelis murdered in the last few weeks, including 3 gunned down last Thursday night at a packed bar on one of Tel Aviv’s busiest streets, one I walked down just a few days earlier. I write pieces like this to engage with my Judaism and faith, and I spend time in Israel because I want to invest in and contribute to a place I care a lot about. This piece isn’t about Israel, but I can’t entirely remove it from my thinking about faith either, and I hope to write more on the topic in the coming weeks. As always, thanks for being on the journey with me.
Photo by Juliette F on Unsplash
The improbability of us sitting together as this group—amongst all the possible alternative histories—is mind-boggling.- EXACTLY!! I always get emotional when I experience being part of the bigger picture..