Pesach Spiel Conclusion (Spiele 2020 pt. 5)

Part 5: Why is the explanation different?

In a past Seder, I spoke about my thoughts on the importance of the 4 questions generally, and this year I thought that I might give my commentary on the idea of “on all other nights”. Unlike other holidays, all of which do have their own rules and could use the same phraseology, no other holiday makes you spell it out. Even Yom Kippur, the most stringent holiday in some respects doesn’t have this blunt language. However, The result of the answers reflects the origin of the holiday itself, and not its customs. This holiday was taken straight out of Exodus, but even that fails to explain everything. For instance, who knows what is meant by “on all other nights we eat sitting or reclining, but on this night we only eat reclining”? And moreover, we are sitting, so this would seem to be a break of halachah or at least tradition. What this means is that we are supposed to lean to the side as we eat. That sounds weird, and do we really do this anyway on any other night?—forget about all other nights. Probably not, but—and this is crucial—the Egyptians did. Leaning to the left while eating and drinking wine was something the Israelites were barred from doing, so in this sense it is basically a middle finger to the Egyptian slave owners. It also evokes the idea of relaxation like the nobility might; remember that this is the emergence of egalitarianism.

Pesach makes us ask a lot of questions—they’re built in—but no other holiday builds in the explanations to the symbolism to be reiterated every year. You should know them already, or if not ask the rabbi. Heck, even Shavuous, which I do believe is the most similar other major holiday to Pesach—though there is an optional minor holiday which is a second Pesach for those who missed the first—has crazy rituals of sleeping in a specific type of tent and shaking around a bunch of plants and an esrog. What? That sounds like something a madman invented. 

This is not done for Yom Kippur; it can not be likened to the secular New Year since one thing it isn’t is a celebration, nor can it be compared to other nearby holidays, because that just leaves Labor Day really. It is however, the holiest, and lest we forget that religion really is about religiosity, only surpassed by ritually and (sort of) etymologically similar Shavuous-Pentecost perhaps, though Pesach-Easter share the adjective Pascal, and that by itself is pretty impressive.

And I know this is getting a little long, so I’ll try to conclude my analysis of Passover through other holidays with one more perplexity. There are lots of twin or triplet holidays in Judaism, but commonly only one has the spotlight. Pesach-Shavuous and the cousin Sukkos is one, and obviously Rosh Hashana-Yom Kippur, but there’s also Chanuka and Lag B’Omer, and their distant cousin of Tisha B’av and the rest of the 3 weeks of mourning—though that’s also like a half-dozen holidays wrapped into one all by itself. I would bet that most of the non-observant people around could describe one part from each pair but not the other. Chanukah is big in America, but Lag B’Omer commemorating the Bar Kochbah revolt, while basically unheard of here is bigger in Israel. Moreover, both of those two are regarded simply as festivals of light and fire in the US and abroad, but in Israel the stories and songs around them commemorate military victories. The people of Israel needed a story of Jews expelling invaders from the land. Purim too, while religiously significant was often abandoned by many Eastern European Jews in the early 20^th century until they turned to it as a story of Jews overcoming another dictator who wanted them all dead, which was then often used as a way to process what was happening before and during the Shoah. In short, whether it is about denomination, politics, or feelings as a minority, holidays do not have intrinsic meaning to all Jews at all times.

People are quick to make connections—it's a hallmark of our intelligence in pattern-recognition—and so going back to the initial question, I believe the reason this holiday is so popular, and therefore different to all other nights is simply a matter of adaptivity. People can bend this holiday in every which direction without it breaking, because the core foundations: freedom, national unity, and our collective destiny in the hands of and path with G-d are fundamental to each us.