Pesach Spiele 2020 (full)

How to order this: (Only sections written in blue were written after this was first drafted, with a new focus to the coronavirus)

Why is this night different (to me) Part 1 | a personal story

Why is this night different (to holidays) Part 2 (skip to part 2)

Why is this night different (to the Jews) Part 3 (skip to part 3)

Why is this night different (in theologico-history) (skip to part 4)

Why is the explanation different? Part 5 (skip to part 5)

Part 1

I love Pesach, or Passover, how I grew up saying it. I grew up very differently to how I am now, and something that isn’t addressed much is how even my words have changed. In addition to knowing and using more Hebrew than I ever did—or more accurately, could—in a general basis, something that I don’t think is discussed often enough for Baalei Teshuva like me, who had only cursory religious involvement for what’s still at least 2/3^rds of his life or more, is that I had vocabulary all over the place. I used the English Passover, a fair amount of Yiddish where my current friends use Hebrew, and pronounced the final letter in the Hebrew alphabet and indeed my name in a sort of ad hoc way—knowing only charoseT but also briS for instance—and those were just whatever I picked up by chance over the years on the few occasions when it was relevant. In that sense, it was required for me to do what few others have the opportunity to do: to pick how I wanted to speak. I love speaking—no one writes 5 spiele for Pesach in the middle of summer if he doesn’t—and my interest in linguistics has helped move me along I suppose, but as I learned Hebrew (if you’ll permit me to call what I’ve done learning Hebrew) I went with the Ashkenazic pronunciation in this and on other arrangements. The fact that I learned Yiddish before even looking at Hebrew made that somewhat of an easy decision, since a fair amount of Hebrew is built in, and built in with a specific accent, but you can see that having had to reflect on the specific languages, and then even the specific accents of those languages (including English as well), it should be sufficient to say that I’ve had to choose almost everything else.

What I didn’t choose, not really anyway, was my feelings toward Pesach. I had no idea about what Shavuous, Lag B’Omer, Tisha B’Av and the others were, and probably even at 15 I could not have given a sufficient explanation of Rosh Hashana or Shabbos. What I did have though, even if it wasn’t in the way I would do it myself now, was a Seder. It wasn’t kosher, and it wasn’t until I went to meet the parents of a girl one year that I realized how much we lacked in terms of songs and prayers, though that year and those memories only added to my current nostalgia and jubilation at the chag. I had to develop new feelings to all of those other things, but despite being limited in my diet beyond the ordinary restrictions, and being limited in activity for several days, and everything else that comes along with this, I still have a very dear love for the holiday—no one writes 5 spiele for Pesach in the middle of summer if he doesn’t—whether that be the single Seder and car-ride home of my childhood or the 8 days (plus the next 42) that it is to me now.

I couldn’t say why this year I was particularly nostalgic. Writing the bulk of this in Austria in the hot summer months away from my family perhaps made me think of home, and of lost Jewish connections. Perhaps I realized that I had already had the last Seder hosted by my family—though corona proved that wrong—and that I am becoming my own man who will have to think of how he wants it for his own family one day, Bezras Hashem, but whatever the case, while everything has changed around Pesach for me, it has always meant most of the same, steady things.

Part 2: Why is this Night Different to all other…Holidays?

Pesach is, by some statistics, the most observed Jewish holiday, and as it happens, my favorite by far: I started writing this in August if that gives you an idea. I’ll get back to my own reasons in a minute, but I have thought at length about why this would be, broadly speaking, and I’ll elaborate on my the progression of my thoughts as I tried to explain what that really means for the holiday, and for the Jewish people as a whole.

  To begin with, an obvious statement: this means Pesach beats out the high holy-days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and it beats out Chanukah, which is probably the most recognizable Jewish holiday within the non-Jewish Western World. Pesach has sandwiched itself—though not because of Hillel’s invention—between the most and the least holy of the mainstream Jewish holidays. If Chanukah got that status because of its proximity to Christmas, as well as having not one but two recognizable symbols: dreidls and chanukiyos, I don’t think that Pesach is propped up by its own religious standing, and neither do I think it continues to be promoted by the existence of Easter. Nonetheless, I don’t know how much it matters. Not only is Easter-celebration diminishing among some Christians, and it is certainly less of a cultural phenomenon than Christmas is, somehow, but what Chanukah latched onto was the commercialization of Christmas, and that doesn’t really exist for these two spring-time holidays.

I do think it has to do, however, with what is appealing to the less religious. You don’t need to convince an Orthodox Jew to observe Yom Kippur, even though it lacks the notable symbols, or indeed food, and it is focused on G-d forgiving our mistakes. Indeed, having inhabited secular, reform, and orthodox circles at some point in my life, anecdotally speaking I don’t see Chanuka as being particularly observed in Orthodox circles to the same degree, per se. I thought that Pesach is the holiday of the everyman-Jew, since Pesach is not too religious to scare off the sort of Jew who only identifies around eating smoked salmon and throwing in the annoying elitism of a mispronounced Yiddish word every so often as a sort of Ashkenazi wink, but neither is it too removed from the scripture for the Orthodox Jew who would sooner do crystal meth than eat a ham sandwich. And besides, who doesn’t like food? Though then again there are two holidays derived from mostly the same story for which not only are you allowed to eat bread, but one is literally a harvest festival. I’m talking about Passover’s twin, Sukkos and to a lesser extend Shavuous.

So sure, is Passover the Jewish Thanksgiving?: Yes, though American Jews also celebrate regular Thanksgiving, and you can’t eat stuffing or pie here.

Is it Jewish Easter: Yes, and remember that The Last Supper was a Seder, but the cultural significance to that is less every year.

Is it particularly religious: Yes, but so are Sukkos and Shavuous, and those are probably more flexible and open to turn into a party.

Pesach is a blend of many things: holiness and purity, along with practices that might be considered kitchy to the non-observant, just like any other holiday. The Seder-plate is one sort of gimmick, but the list goes on: not eating bread, grains, legumes and more for 8 days stands out to me, as does leaning to the left to drink wine and eat matzo. I don’t think that matters though. What sticks out to me most is that Pesach is a religious holiday that isn’t about being in a synagogue or by a river or in a tent or whatever. Certainly there are special prayers and other things that those who attend services will say and do, but Passover is a holiday that is meant to be celebrated in a home. There are other holidays that might be a bit more party-filled—Purim springs to mind—and indeed The Book of Esther doesn’t even mention G-d (or at most it does once) but I believe it is precisely because Pesach is a story of Jews and G-d working side-by side which makes it so attractive to Jews of every denomination or indeed lack of denomination. For Purim, orthodox megilah readings can be as plain reading as any other book, while liberal shuls distinguish themselves by putting on increasingly raucous interpretations of the story as to remove, at times, any of the original content; like a Jewish Halloween. Pesach doesn’t need that. Pesach is about G-d, and it also about people listening to, but moreover not listening to G-d. It is a story about the Israelites becoming the Jewish people, and moving from the status of merely tribes to becoming a nation. This is a story of vengeance towards abusive masters, a story of the Jewish people starting on the two score journey to the Holy Land, delayed, as we always are, by our own human foibles and deficiencies. It is a story of the origins of Shabbos, not Genesis when G-d created the rest, but of a time when the Jewish people emancipated themselves, and had the power to determine the course of their own lives. I will get back to this at a later point, because I think this, I will argue more than anything else, is what is important. Pesach, on the surface, doesn’t make sense as a popular holiday. It has rules about cleaning, and cooking, and eating; Pesach also spells everything out for people. It’s an instructional holiday like none of the rest is.

So to end my winding exposition, I think that Pesach is the most observed Jewish holiday not because of obligation, as many may feel with the high holidays, nor as a sort of cultural competition that exists with others, but because of the needs of the modern Jew. In a time when fewer people with more liberal religious inclinations are attending synagogues, or participating in other Jewish activities generally speaking, and in a time when fewer people believe in G-d broadly speaking, people reach out to certain occasions to bring them together around something commonly understood, whether that is family, food, or something much greater.

Part 3:

Picking up where we left off, is that Passover is, as I would argue, the most egalitarian Jewish holiday, but perhaps the most fundamental part of Passover, in my opinion, is that it marks the start of a journey of thousands of years and countless generations who followed the Torah, and everything that came after. Really, I will say that it is a story of liberation. But the Torah, the Nevi’i'm, the Mishah, the Gemara, all of it really is a series of guides for how to live our lives. If someone came to me now and said, “excuse me, I know you’re enjoying life, but how would you enjoy hundreds (sort of) of extra rules, including a whole new schedule, diet etc.?” I would not be interested in that terrible sales-pitch. But the difference here is not even the message per se but the context. It is not easy to keep kosher for Passover. Kosher for Passover food itself is not known for being cheap, and even those in an already kosher-for-the-other-51-weeks-of-a-year house need to spend some intense time boiling utensils and pots, cleaning the ovens, scrubbing the floors ad nauseum, and even cleaning out the pages of books etc. etc. That’s not freedom; it’s not liberation, some might say, that’s work, and that’s expense. Or how about not working not only on Shabbos, but also not on the Chag? That’s quite time consuming, depending on your point of view. At what point do we become slaves of a whole new kind?

Lots of people would have lots of answers to that. Mine might not be the consensus—especially in the less G-d-fearing circles—but I’ll give it to you anyway. Let’s start small. In childhood everyone has to grapple with the fact that things are the way they are at times not because there is an obvious sense to them—at least not obvious to the child—but it benefits society in the end. Many of the things I said about Passover, I could say about clothes; the are often expensive, you have to clean them which takes time and sometimes extra expense, some occasions call for special clothes and special accessories, plus, people judge me for it. It would be a lot easier to go around naked. However, not only does that make for chairs that I would not want to use second, unpreparedness for cold climates, and warding off insects, the extra dimension of ‘modesty’ is something that I hope to G-d we have to wait until puberty to understand. All of that it true. Moreover though, once we receive clothes, it gives us more freedoms than we had before, with different tastes and styles that may be—I would argue—a much better reflection of one’s identity than nakedness. Society knows this, and as it happens it was one of the first things to happen in the Bible.

With Shabbos, it’s very similar too. It does not always make sense to a non-Jew or a non-observant Jew to observe Shabbos. It comes with the problem of having to allot time differently, and possibly losing opportuniting for making money or having other occupational appointments, but it’s also not even always good socially, unless you live very close to all friends, family, and synagogue. And yet, it is shown to improve sleep, improve mental health, and it trains people to stop trying to change the world, and just to be content. That is a basic human impulse to want to change the environment around us, whether that is writing down some amazing idea, traveling somewhere exciting, transferring money, or even involving ourselves socially in some other ways. It takes a great amount of self-control, even for those who have practiced such a way for a lifetime, to be content with the world as it is, to be content with those around us, with the food in front of us, and to be satisfied with a week’s worth of work we’ve accomplished. To say to a world begging for us to work day-in-day out not only in occupation but in everything else a firm and resolute ‘no’ takes determination and a sense of self-worth that people are not always trained to have. A slave works because he has to for fear of a very real punishment, so rather than thinking of ourselves as slaves to religion or religious practices, ask yourself why would we want to make ourselves slaves to work?

Now too, however, we’re faced with a different problem altogether. Rather than seeing the struggles of being called away to work, called away for friends and appointments and everything else, we’re called to stay inside and to keep, generally speaking, apart. And so looking back on the fact that unlike so many other things, this is a home holiday, we are caught off-guard with the realization that this struggle to stay inside, to make the most of what is available around us, not going out for shows, for food, or even for certain necessary appliances. Again, we are called to find a contentment in a world which goes against our very instincts to find contentment with. And yet, it is for the good of our families and everyone around us to sit still. To work through what we have had and what please G-d we will have again. We are waiting, not for a promised land now but for a promised time; a time when we can go out again, and when we don’t have to be scared to gather together for the comforting, emanating warmth that our loved ones bring.  

We had more rituals for our lives because we do indeed have the freedom to do so. It is true that we are free agents, perhaps the freest of any point in Jewish history, and to throw that away is arrogant, but that shouldn’t be a reason by itself. It takes self-control and extra planning to attempt to go against our instincts on this, but to take it slowly, and to take it easily, with the faith that our actions, especially our actions when done as a nation, do effect change. Consider that we are reliving not only the flight from Egypt, as symbolized with the bitter herbs and matzo, but we are commemorating the failures of the Jewish people to listen. The journey through the desert which even Moses himself could not finish took about 40 years longer than a 2 week journey should take not because of navigational incompetence, but as punishment. We can be sad about it, but we can also use it, the time of cleaning, and of reading the Haggadah at home, studying in synagogue, and taking not only Shabbos but also the Chag as time off from work of any sort and instead think. This is a holiday of freedom, but it is a holiday of immense restrictions as well. We are commanded to be joyful, and yet we cannot act as openly as we might otherwise. Like the child learning social customs for the first time, we cannot view freedom and free expression as individuality, anti-social behaviors, and acting upon libidinal desires. Instead, freedom, true spiritual freedom comes from something much deeper.

Part 4:

Think for a moment about the Bill of Rights. ‘Rights’, in this case, is synonymous to ‘freedoms’, insofar as both mean things that we’re allowed to do. Let’s just take the first one for now to illustrate a point. If I have the right to free-speech, that doesn’t come from nowhere. If I were living on my own in the middle of Siberia or the Saharan desert, I would not need a Bill of Rights; I could say whatever I want. What’s going to happen? Forget about guns, I could buy a bazooka and fire it into a hill. What’s going to happen? The rest of the rights don’t really work considering a person in isolation though, because rights always come with something else, specifically a duty. I have the right to speak freely but a duty to tell the truth and not to harass others. I can own a gun but have a duty to use it only when my other liberties are threatened. I have a right not to be enslaved and a duty not to use my agency to enslave others and so on and so forth.

When we think of Jewish laws—and maybe you could wish to liken the 10 commandments to the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights—we might think of these like anything else passed by a government: a set of guides for how to behave and interact with society at large, but that method is backwards. Instead, think of them like this. I have a duty first, a duty to serve G-d and the chosen people, and all of those rights fit in the middle. I have a duty, for example, to say as many blessings every day as I can—a round estimate I like to aim for 100 per day—but the nature of those blessings, and the wording around them etc. are mine to choose to an extent. Often people tend to get in the habits of the same sorts of ones, but often for a given blessing there are several to choose from, and room to invent more when necessary. Our right is for to structure our lives around these duties. And this is enshrined—or more literally engraved—into Jewish law. 

The word for freedom in Hebrew is Cherus, but in that form it is it used not once in the whole of the Tanakh. Indeed, another of the names not mentioned in part 1 of this for Pesach is Zman Cheruteinu: festival of freedom. However, as Rabbi Sachs puts it, “it begins with the line “Ha lachma anya: This is the bread of affliction, today we are slaves but next year we will be free.” However, the only time this root word meaning freedom is used is in “Charut al ha’luchot”. This doesn’t mean ‘freedom’, though, the phrase means “engraved into tablets”, describing Moses’ first tablets. That piece of information on its own is fairly well known, though my Hebrew is not good enough to have deciphered that on myself. Still, we can think about the ramifications of this message. It is not the only word for ‘freedom’—I don’t have the chops to dissect Biblical Hebrew any more though—so just consider that those Israelites, who were just escaping from hundreds of years of bondage in Egypt, now had a new set of laws. Not all of them like it either; in Exodus through Deuteronomy there are many examples of Jews trying to rise up against this established covenant, but the covenant was always stronger, or they would be punished. That’s a bit like the rest of society. People are free to live their lives so long as they don’t infringe upon others, and if this happens then either the social fabric will make this transgression seem like ripple in the ocean, or the law will crack down upon the transgressor. This makes inherent sense, which is why many, especially the communists and socialists have turned away from G-d and tried to replace it with the government. That doesn’t work, but that could not have made logical sense in the past before this moment. It was simply impossible that in a pagan, idolatrous society in which truth was subjective, because there were multiple gods and therefore multiple reasons why something could happen, but no laws. If I did something to upset the gods, in their eyes, this was a serious problem, but not one that could be totally expected. The story of Exodus and the rest are basically just accounts of the Jews moving to the Holy Land, all the while breaking commandments left-right-and-center. They were punished, but they knew why. There was sense. They could do what they wanted and they knew, for the first time in human history, a step-by-step breakdown of why this was, and what they could do.

So, going back to Shabbos, we aren’t slaves to follow the laws. However, if you can’t break those habits of the things which keep pulling you back in, then maybe it isn’t idolatry in the traditional sense, but you are clinging onto your machinery in a way which blurs that line. Well, Shabbos is one example of hundreds if not thousands, ranging from things big to small, but Passover is when it all started. Passover, a chag and therefore something meant to be observed in a similar way, is the holiday of the Jewish people because it is the holiday commemorating what made the tribe of Israel into the religion of Judaism. We may commemorate the journey of the Jews in tents in Sukkos—a similar period in time narratively—but Passover is the holiday commemorating when sense was finally brought not only to the cosmos, but to the understanding of truth and reason. Passover is the holiday commemorating a freedom from Egyptian slavery, and we should always remember this, but it is the holiday which gave us laws, and therefore gave us freedom to operate with our own agency, and able to live together as one people. In that way, it is really the holiday for every Jew, because secular or fundamentalist, we all recognize what it means to yearn for a society that works for everyone, and a destiny that is our own.

Chag sameach everyone, now let’s eat. 

Part 5:

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.