#1053 3/28/21 – Passover Reprise: “We’re in the Same Tale, Still”

Passover Reprise:  “We’re in the Same Tale, Still”

The political, religious and other divides, emotional along with substantive, between and within our Jewish people in the U.S. and Israel these days are deep.  And it’s not that we don’t have much of the rest of the world rather less divided on the subject of us.  E.g., the “Quartet,” led by a salivating European Union, is right now sharpening its knives to carve up the Land of Israel, our historic homeland, to EU us out of its defensible Judea-Samaria hill country heartland and the historic heart of Jerusalem.  (A more deserving redividing resolution: Redivide Berlin.)

But for all our divisions in these troubled times, One Thing binds our People, religious and secular, together – that family-centered ritual, Saturday night this year, which we’ve observed now, in the homeland and in the countries of our dispersion, for three millennia.  Last year I wrote in that week’s #1002 a brief essay marveling at our collective persistence.  It garnered more email comments, I think, than any other, going back a thousand weeks.  So here it is again, with best wishes for wonderful Seders.

#1002, 4/5/20 – “We’re In the Same Tale, Still”

WHY THIS NIGHT IS DIFFERENT FROM ALL OTHER NIGHTS

“We’re in the Same Tale, Still”

There’s a line in Tolkien’s magnificent saga The Lord of the Rings tellingly applicable to us Jews of today.  To set the scene:  The evil enemy had lost the One Ring that gives him his invincible power and it has fallen into the hands of the hero, Frodo, who has been charged by the Council with bearing it to the Cracks of Doom deep in the enemy’s land of Mordor, where alone it can be cast into the fire and so unmade.  Frodo and his servant, Sam, have made their way, through many hair-raising adventures, to the mountains on Mordor’s border, where they spend a cold night recounting the long heroic history of a power for good, a tiny bit of which had been given to them during their travels by an elf queen in a starglass of light, to be a light to them “when all other lights go out.”  Sam, realizing that the light that they bear, which alone had saved them in one totally dark spot, is part of that power for good’s long history, exclaims, “Why Mr. Frodo, we’re in that same tale still!”

A particularly dark moment in our people’s three-millennia history occurred in the early years of my lifetime.  Six million Jews in Europe were exterminated in a Holocaust that was a culmination, not an anomaly, in the Jewish people’s long centuries of mistreatment in Europe.    America, which might have marshaled a massive rescue of Europe’s Jews, did not.  Dr. Weizmann lamented the world was divided between places in which Jews could not live and could not enter.  Britain, trustee of the western Palestine Mandate with its Jewish national home, barred Jews from going there before, during and after the Holocaust.  It must have seemed to the survivors of Hitler’s Holocaust, trekking through still-Jew-persecuting Europe’s mountain passes in winter snows to reach ports where barely seaworthy Aliyah Bet ships could sail them into the teeth of the British blockade, that except for that British-blockaded Jewish homeland of Israel that wanted them, all other lights had gone out.

That land of Israel that alone in the world wanted Hitler’s survivors is not a land in which we Jews had not lived during the long dark centuries between Hadrian and Herzl.  The Jewish people’s enemies call Israel “the Zionist entity” to date Jewish connection to the late nineteenth century Zionist movement.  But every ruler in between Roman destruction of ancient Judaea in CE 135 and Israel’s independence in 1948 as the land of Israel’s next native state had been a foreign empire invader.  And during those foreign rule centuries, we Jews had never left.  Historian Parkes rightly asserted in Whose Land that it was the continuous tenacious homeland-claiming physical presence of the Jewish Yishuv all through the post-biblical centuries, in spite of every discouragement, that had written our time’s Zionists “real title deeds.”

Foremost among the remains of ancient Judaea extant today is the Temple Mount, supported on the west by the Western Wall.  Around the Mount and in the City of David have been and are being unearthed Jewish kingdom-documenting archeological finds, including just now a “pilgrims’ road” leading up to the Temple.

For long, a paucity of tenth century BCE remains, especially in Jerusalem, led cynics to claim “King David was as real as King Arthur,” but in the 1990’s a ninth century BCE enemy king’s stele was unearthed in Tel Dan boasting of victories over the northern kingdom of Israel and over “the House of David.”  Other evidences of a substantial literate kingdom of Judah dating back to David’s and maybe Saul’s time have been unearthed.

What is it that bonds Israelis today to Israelites of old, and today’s Diaspora Jews to Israelis?  A sense of unique common heritage antedating even David and Saul, even the Conquest under Joshua, that drives even the secular Jews to participation in Passover seders, the most widely observed ceremony among Jews.

In a beautifully written book, The Jewish Festivals: From Their Beginnings to Our Own Day, Hayyim Schauss traced back the history of the Jewish celebration of Passover, noting that in late Second Temple times family roasting and eating of the sacrificed lamb was accompanied “with ceremonies that are almost identical with the Seder observed by Jews today” (pp. 46-47).  But it goes back way before that.  “Pesach is the oldest of Jewish festivals.  Jews observed it in the most ancient of times, in the days when they were still shepherds in the wilderness” (p. 39).  Indeed, it goes back before that.  Schauss cites Moses seeking Pharaoh’s permission for his people to go out into the wilderness “that they might observe their feast in honor of God,” a cause-effect relationship with the Exodus later reversed.  And he cites those ceremonies, the sacrificing of a sheep or a goat and “the daubing of the tent-posts with the blood of the slain animal” and “a hasty meal in the middle of the night” at the first full moon of spring, as a nature festival of ancient peoples into which the Israelites later instilled historical and national meaning (pp. 39-40).

We recount at the Seder all the miracles the Almighty performed for us in Moses’ time – escape from slavery, parting of the sea and crossing on dry land to escape the pursuing Egyptians, the giving of the Ten Commandments, sustaining us for forty years in the desert, bringing us into the land of Israel, as He had promised our forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

We just don’t just do this, observe the Passover Seder.  We’re enjoined from Moses’ time to do this, to tell our next generation on that day, saying it’s because of that which the Lord did for us when we came forth out of Egypt.  Tolkien would tell us, “We’re in the same tale, still.”