Friends,
I’m here today at William’s request to do 2 things. The first is to speak about the Jewish festival of Passover- and this is the eve of day three of 7, running sunset to sunset- and the second is to allay some myths and point out some similarities between Judaism and Christianity, as they evolved.
So let’s start with the latter, but I promise you a taste of Passover at the end of the service as a sweetener for all this.
First, myth 1.
Christianity is the successor to Judaism. and therefore Judaism is what is described in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament for Christians) and rabbinic Judaism up to the end of the first century CE, Common Era, which you’d call AD.
The truth is that both religions developed and changed and were, at various stages, heavily influenced by each other. Examples of that include my synagogue, the West London Synagogue in Marble Arch, which prides itself on its magnificent organ, definitely borrowed from Christianity, and its decorum, similarly. Meanwhile, and relevant to this evening, since the end of WW2, Christians have become more and more interested in their Jewish toots and many, especially evangelical Christians, have begun to hold their own Passover Seder, learning from Jewish friends.
But that is based on Myth 2,
that the Last Supper was a Passover Seder. That is, of course, highly unlikely, and these are some of the reasons:
First, the Last Supper took place in 33 CE, before the destruction of the Second Temple, by the Roman emperor Titus and his troops, in 70 to 71. You can see that victory on Titus’ Arch in Rome. Until that point, there was unlikely to be anything even remotely comparable to the Seder, as Passover and the other so called pilgrim festivals, Shavuot (Pentecost) and Sukkot (Tabernacles) would have been marked by a journey to the Temple in Jerusalem and the rituals carried out there, including a sacrifice of the Paschal lamb. The Seder is probably much later as we know it. The first written record of it we have is 9th century, the Seder Rav Amram, and is a much shorter version than what exists now.
The second reason the Last Supper is unlikely to be a Seder, apart from the practice not existing at the time, is that the Romans would almost certainly not have carried out the death penalty on a Jewish holiday. Festival days, the Jewish calendar in general, go sundown to sundown. If the Last Supper had been a Seder, the first night of the Festival of Passover, Pesach, then the next day would have been a festival and no work or normal activities such as courts or sentencing or the death penalty would have been carried out.
But that is not to say there are no connections between our two faiths at this time. Let me start with the obvious one. We have what is called a Seder plate on the table for Seder. It has on it various symbols which we use, eat or discuss for the Passover Seder. Amongst these is a roasted egg. Easter has Easter eggs. In orthodox Christianity’s traditions, the eggs are often painted or decorated. The egg is a shared symbol, probably predating both religions, a symbol of fertility in the spring. And, if you don’t believe me, there’s another symbolic food on the Seder plate, parsley or other spring herbs. During the course of the Seder, we dip this parsley into salt water and eat it, early on in the ritual. And the reason given is that the salt water is a symbol of the tears shed by the Israelites when they were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt. But the origin is clearly celebrating early spring growth, and the dipping is probably an early version of salad, herbs dressed in either salt water or vinegar.
Then there are more complicated parallels, and there’s one that is particularly significant for our purposes. On the Seder table, we have a ceremonial pile of three pieces of matzah. They are said to represent the three Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or the three tellings of the Exodus story contained in the Haggadah, the order of service. Early on in the proceedings, the middle of the 3 is broken into two parts, and one of those is either hidden by the leader of the Seder for the children to find, or, more commonly, the children plot to filch it and hide it and it is then ransomed by them and returned to the leader in exchange for some kind of reward. On one level this is a way of keeping the children amused during lengthy and probably boring to them proceedings. On another, that piece of matzah, unleavened bread, which is hidden, is called the Afikoman. Now, everyone agrees that that word is Greek. But is it epikomios, entertainment, some form of dessert, which is often given as the explanation? Or is it, as the scholar David Daube thought, afikomenos, the one who comes, in other words symbolic of the coming of the Messiah? And in the Seder, once the afikoman is ransomed, it is broken into small pieces and everyone has a bit, and you can’t eat anything else afterwards. Is this symbolic of eating the Messiah? Does it fit with the Eucharist? Is this a really close link, if rarely acknowledged in Jewish communities, between our two faiths?
To further complicate things, there are various sections of the Haggadah where there are four parts to a story. There are four questions to be asked by the youngest person present. On one level, that’s to keep the children interested. But on another, the fourth question makes no sense. Were there originally 3 questions? Then there are four sons- in our egalitarian days now referred to as four children. The wise, the wicked, the simple, and the one who doesn’t know how to ask. Each of them comes from a rabbinic saying. The simple one says: What is this? And you tell them the story. The wicked one says: What does all this mean to YOU. To you, but not to him, and because he excludes himself from the community you tell the story as it is for US, but not for him. Had he been there, he would not have been saved. And then comes the wise one. He asks for an explanation, and the text goes on to say that you tell him EVERYTHING, and then the text is unclear. It’s either Hebrew, in which case it’s probably not telling him about the Afikoman, or, more likely , it’s Aramaic, een, definitely, in which case it means something like: You shall CERTAINLY tell him everything, including about the Afikoman. Now, if the wise son is involved in what is exceptionally secret, theAfikoman, it could well be a messianic ritual, restricted to some particular ‘wise’ group, and may shed some light on the origins of the Eucharist …….
So were there originally 3 questions, and three sons? And three pieces of matzah but one broken to make them four? And were those changed into 4 in mediaeval Europe, as an anti trinitarian move? It would seem far fetched, except for the fact that there is a stage in the Seder order where the door is opened and we used to recite : Pour out your wrath on the nations who knew you not…..”…. Based on Psalm 79, probably written in despair at the destruction of the first Tenple. This section first appears in the 11th century Machzor Vitry, a French version. Probably just at the time of the first Crusade in 1095.. The crusades were terrible for European Jews living in France and Germany and all along the Rhine. They were killed and persecuted, and some of that is linked to the idea that one should kill the infidel here in Europe first, before proceeding to the Holy Land. But it was partly more specific, and linked to the Blood Libel. That, bizarrely, appears to have started in England. There’s William of Norwich in 1144, and little St Hugh of Lincoln in 1255. The antisemitic canard goes that Jews needed the blood of a Christian child for the baking of matzah for Passover. A child disappears. Hue and cry ensues. And the child is thought to have been stolen by the Jews…..
So whilst opening the door is ostensibly to welcome the prophet Elijah, precursor to the coming of the Messiah, and is a welcoming symbol- let all who are hungry come and eat- it may originally have been instituted to show those outside that nothing nefarious is going on here, and is probably strongly linked to the appalling custom of beating the Jews during Easter week, particularly on Good Friday, when much was made of the ‘perfidious Jews’ in the liturgy. Often attacks on Jews in mediaeval Europe were led by the clergy, although the official church position was to protect the Jews and to require them to stay inside on Good Friday. This continued on and off and was only finally completely stopped after World War II, when the Roman Catholic church in particular realised how much some of these mediaeval attitudes had contributed to the Holocaust. But even just last year, in Spain, the people of Leon defended their ritual of ‘matar Judios’ killing the Jews, saying it was not antisemitic. Hard to justify given the name!
So what do we know about the expression in Leon, and indeed other Spanish cities…..? It refers these days to a form of lemonade which is red wine, lemonade, and sugar. People ask each other how many Jews they have killed, meaning how many lemonades they have drunk. I find that quite disturbing. The history is unclear, but probably dates back to attacks on the Jews in Holy Week, the view being that the Jews were guilty of the killing of Jesus, deicide, plus getting rid of them was a way of stopping having to repay the debts owed to Jewish moneylenders. Jews were not allowed other professions in mediaeval Christian Spain, and they were finally expelled from Spain in 1492….
So the history here is a mixture. Much is very disturbing and indeed sad. Yet underneath there are important links between us, as the origin of the Easter festival is the ‘sacrifice’ of the Paschal lamb, as in the original sacrifice in Temple times. We share eggs in common and spring celebrations, maybe a legacy of much earlier fertility festivals. And if David Daube is correct, there must have been early table fellowships amongst Jewish scholars, the sort of arrangement we know about from the Essenes and some Pharisaic traditions, where there was some Jewish custom of ‘eating’ a symbol of the Messiah.
But now many Jews have modernised their Seder. The Haggadah is in any case an anthology rather than a straightforward liturgy. So people are relaxed about adding things in. One common practice in progressive Judaism is to add an orange to the Seder plate. Why an orange, you may ask? To which the answer is why not? The ritual is attributed to Susannah Heschel, a professor at Dartmouth College, who included it to symbolise the inclusion of women and gay people in modern Jewish ritual. Urban myth has another story- that a man at a lecture by Heschel said a woman belongs on the bimah (the pulpit) like an orange on the Seder plate. And so an orange was put on the Seder plate!
At various Seders, we look to read something about those who are still captive, still held as slaves. Sometimes, we look at the experiences of people escaping poverty and oppression, asylum seekers and refugees. This year, we will certainly be thinking about those still held hostage by Hamas in Gaza, but we’ll also be thinking, I hope, about the terrible suffering of civilians, women and children, in Gaza. We may well be thinking of Syrian Christians and Druze, ever fearful of their new government. And of people held captive the world over, on this festival of freedom.
Easter symbolises a form of spiritual redemption and freedom. Pesach, Passover, is more concerned with this world, these hungry people, those who are suffering. In our modern and liberal Haggadah-, and people have been editing and compiling the Haggadah since at least the ninth century- we remember the suffering of those in Nazi concentration and extermination camps, AND those in the gulag. And we record the sufferings of all human beings at the hands of others. The story celebrates the journey of the Israelites from slavery to freedom, but the message is about the duty to help others gain that freedom, and to use that freedom for good.
The Seder ends with a series of songs, many of the Green grow the rushes O variety. They are mostly in Hebrew, but one, chad gadya, is in Aramaic , the language Jesus would have spoken, the lingua franca of much of the middle and Near East for hundreds of years. They recite the list of symbols, three patriarchs, four matriarchs, five books in the Torah, the five Books of Moses, Genesis to Deuteronomy, six orders of the Mishnah, the first collection of rabbinic laws dating to around 200 CE, and so on. And then we end with a great cry, Next year in Jerusalem, le- Shanah ha-ba’ah birushalaim. We add, in our liberal Haggadah, next year in a world redeemed!
Is that the literal Jerusalem, dating back to mediaeval scholars who journeyed from Moorish Spain to Jerusalem? A lengthy and often hazardous journey. We hear it in Judah Halevi’s poem, My heart is in the east…. Late twelfth century.
Or is it, was it, the celestial Jerusalem, the messianic age, and once again reminiscent of Christianity, and the spiritual liberation of Easter?
I do not know. But I want to leave you with one thought. Despite the difficulties Jewish communities experienced in Europe at this season over many centuries, there is much in common here, even if we don’t always see it or understand it. Far more binds us together than separates us, and in that spirit, as Easter approaches, let us celebrate together what physical freedom means, and what spiritual freedom means, and share the concept of freedom from want and freedom from hunger and oppression. Let all who are hungry come and eat…..
May this be God’s will, and let us say Amen….
And now a reward for listening to all that. I couldn’t bring everything. But here’s a Seder plate, and here’s parsley and salt water, matzah, and charoset.
I’ve explained the parsley and salt water…. Symbolising the tears shed by the Israelites as slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.
The matzah is unleavened bread, and, in my view, disgusting. And distinctly indigestible. It is eaten to commemorate the fact that the Israelites did not have enough time when fleeing Egypt for their dough to rise. It’s baked without yeast, and, to make absolutely sure it doesn’t rise, it’s baked, ground up again, and baked again, traditionally for 18 minutes to symbolise the Hebrew letters chet and yod, spelling chai, life, and adding up to 18.
And then there’s charoset, which my husband has made specially for you. In our version, it’s apples, nuts, sherry and lemon, a kind of apple pie filling crossed with mincemeat. Indian Jews make it with dates, as do Iraqi Jews. Everyone has their own slightly different recipe, passed down the generations. It is supposed to symbolise the mortar used by the Israelites building the storehouses for Pharaoh, but in fact it does 2 other things. First, it takes away the sharp taste of the raw horseradish that we eat, maror, to symbolise the bitter suffering of the Israelite slaves in Egypt. And, second, there may be a complicated tradition which we don’t quite understand, of combining matzah, manor- horseradish-,and charoset- back to 3s again. To symbolise quite WHAT we don’t know. But we are told it’s the first sandwich. This is what Hillel, one of the greatest first century teachers, used to do.
Please come and try.