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Subject: Jewish perspectives on Passover and the Haggadah
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 17:40:49 -0800
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From: Sidney Slivko
To: heb_roots_chr@geocities.com
Subject: JUICE History Week 4
A Cultural History of the Jews
Tzvi Howard Adelman, Jerusalem
The Passover Seder as Cultural History
Today's Lecture
Today, in anticipation of Passover, I will explore the Passover Seder,
the ritual meal on the first night or two of Passover, and the Haggadah,
the collection of literary materials for the Seder that grew from the
first century till the twentieth, in light of these themes of blood and
sacrifice and show how in general the Seder, uses midrash, piyyut, and
extra-textual gestures to resolve biblical contradictions in the
ceremonies as well as texts.
For today's lecture, in addition to having a Bible available at your
side or on line, I would recommend a Haggadah. At this time of year it
is easy to get free copies of a traditional Haggadah text at many
supermarkets. There are a fantastic number of Haggadot on the market,
ranging from ones with commentaries, to those with illuminations, to
those with new rituals and liturgies (Reform, vegetarian, feminist,
current events, etc.) Perhaps the most useful, reasonably priced
edition with introduction, text, explanations, and bibliography is Nahum
Glatzer's edition published by Shocken based on the work of E. D.
Goldschmidt which is considered the authoritative historical analysis of
the Haggadah. An intriguing version of the Haggadah, The Polychrome
Historical Haggadah by Jacob Freedman, shows each historical stratum of
the Hebrew text printed in a different color, while the English
translation appears only in one color.
The Biblical Background
The many different biblical versions of Passover begin in Exodus 12,
what is referred to as the Egyptian Passover because it was the one
celebrated before the Exodus. The biblical narrative is repetitious not
only in God's instructions, but in Moses' retelling of God's
instructions, and then in the narrator's report of what actually
happened (at midnight), where many of the details of the narrative are
first introduced (verses 21-28). The centerpiece of the first Passover
was the lamb that was sacrificed, its blood collected in a basin and
then smeared on to the lintels of the Israelite houses with a bunch of
hyssop leaves (21), and its flesh eaten with matzah and bitter herbs
(8). The event had a three-fold salvific quality: the sacrifice itself
(for the Lord), the blood that protected the Hebrews from the death of
the first born during the final plague, and the eating of the sacrifice
with girded loins, sandaled feet, and staff in hand, that served as a
prelude for redemption to freedom. It is therefore important to notice
that the matzah and the bitter herbs were an original part of the
sacrifice and the eating of the lamb before the Hebrews left Egypt.
Matzah is then introduced again as an intrinsic part of the holiday, as
if we had never heard of it, although the Israelites had not yet left
Egypt, which according to later verses is when their dough did not have
a chance to rise (vss. 34, 39). Now, if they had already been
commanded to eat matzah, not to eat leavened bread or even to possess
it (the reason that today there is Kosher for Passover dog food) (vss,
17, 19, 20) it is not quite clear why they would have prepared bread or
why their bread not having risen would have been of any concern.
In subsequent books of the Bible, the holiday develops further. A year
later, in Numbers 9:1-14 , the Passover is celebrated in the desert,
but those who are unclean must wait another month for a second seating.
In Numbers 28:16-25 the holiday involves many more kinds of sacrifices,
also with bitter herbs, explicitly offering atonement for sins, in
addition to being accompanied by the requirement to eat matzot for seven
days. In the book of Deuteronomy 16: 1-8 and 26: 6-8 the story is
retold and the sacrifice is now required to take place at the place
which the Lord will designate, moving the holiday from the family unit
to a central shrine. In Second Kings 23: 22-23 it seems that the
holiday had not been observed for a while until it was revived by King
Josiah as part of his reforms and cleansing of the Temple in Jerusalem,
where the holiday continued to be celebrated with sacrifices.
With the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in the
year 70 CE, the central problem of Passover is how to keep the Passover
sacrifices in the Jewish consciousness, without repudiating them, but
not as an actual part of religious life. The Haggadah thus preserves
the memory of the cult while changing it to a symbolic level. In doing
so, the Haggadah asserts the validity of the biblical text and the power
of the divine word found in it while at the same time developing an
alternate method of expression and belief.
Jews, nevertheless, continued tacitly to assert the efficacy of the
biblical sacrificial cult while at the same time they seemed to have
ceased to seek the fulfillment of the cultic sacrificial needs in their
life. It may be argued that the need for cultic fulfillment and
forgiveness is not so easy to repudiate and that one of the gnawing
desiderata of Judaism has been for sacrifice and cult, including the
efficient use of blood. As I mentioned in an earlier course, there is
evidence that after the destruction of the Second Temple Jews continued
to offer sacrifices on its ruins, and to this day some Jews continue to
prepare for the establishment of the Third Temple, while many actively
pray for such an event. During the middle ages, as I argued in the past
two lectures, such a need was filled, in part, by martyrdom and child
sacrifice. If we read the Haggadah carefully and especially if we
examine the rituals of the Seder, we can still see how it preserved both
the repudiation of sacrifices as well as traces of sacrifice during the
centuries.
The Seder Setting
Before even turning to the text of the Haggadah there are a number of
items that appear on the Seder table, some of which are not even
mentioned in the Haggadah text, which are reminders, direct or indirect,
of sacrifice. The shankbone (zroah), as we shall see is explicitly
connected with Temple sacrifice. The egg (beyztah), which is never
mentioned, is often scorched, also indicating a connection with
sacrifice, a connection that is heightened with the association through
the talmudic tractate associated with Yom Kippur called Beytzah, and
further heightened when dipped in salt water, associated in Leviticus
2:13. The bitter herbs were explicitly mentioned as connected with the
Passover sacrifice in Exodus, and the parsley (karpas), with all the
dipping it is put through, stands in for the hyssop leaves with which
the lamb's blood was spread on the doorposts in Exodus (12:22).
Jumping ahead to the middle of the Seder where some of these items are
explained, we see a careful interplay of acceptance of the sacrificial
significance of them and a studied avoidance. At the section that
begins, "Rabban Gamliel used to say," (without specifying which one)
there is a ritual discussion of the Passover sacrifice, Matzah, and
Bitter Herbs. The text only identifies the sacrifice with the Temple
and not with Egypt or the period of the desert. But rather than talking
about the actual Passover sacrifice, the paragraph moves to discuss the
fact that God passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and
saved them . In the discussion on matzah, the paragraph goes directly
to the later explanation which involves the hasty departure from Egypt
without any mention of the matzot having been associated with the
original sacrifice, or subsequent sacrifices as depicted in Leviticus
2:4-5. Similarly when discussing the bitter herbs, all meanings
associated with sacrifice are displaced in favor of a figurative
explanation that the lives of the Hebrews were embittered by hard work
in Egypt based on Exodus 1:14, nothing much to do with the actual
Passover story, and about as close as the whole Haggadah ever gets to
the Moses story. When the bitter herbs are blessed and eaten (Korekh),
they are, however, mentioned, in the name of Hillel as a remembrance of
the Temple, but not the actual Temple sacrifices since the text limits
the meaning to the fact that when the Temple stood Hillel would make a
sandwich of matzah and bitter herbs, making explicit reference to
fulfill what is written in Numbers 9:11 about the Passover sacrifice,
but avoiding, even purportedly in the time of the Temple, explicit
reference to sacrifice.
Thus the symbols on the table, especially in light of the biblical texts
known to all, point to aspects of the bloody sacrifice of animals, but
the text on the page removes from the surface almost all mention of
these rites and rationalizes the presence of some symbols and ignores
others. For example, according to some customs, unsupported by any
explicit instructions in the Haggadah, Jews eat hardboiled eggs soaked
in salt water, but others pass the Seder night without partaking in any
egg at all, . (As one professor of mine once said when asked where the
egg came from on the Seder plate, "The Easter bunny dropped it on its
way by.") and certainly there are no Jews who eat the shankbone.
The sacrificial aspect of the Seder reaches an unstated but visually
profound presentation with the recitation of the Ten Plagues. Then, in
a tradition that can be dated back only to Safed in the sixteenth
century, Jews dip their finger in their wine and then drop the wine on
their plate (or a napkin for the more refined). Modern apologetics say
that this is done to diminish the joy of the wine because of the great
Egyptian losses. Although this explanation is rooted in a midrash
protesting the song that the Israelites sang after the Egyptians drowned
in the sea, in the context of the Seder such an it is both unlikely and
relatively recent. A more probable explanation dipping the finger in
the wine is the convergence of two facts about this ritual. 1) It
directly imitates the actions of the priests offering sacrifices as
described in the book of Leviticus (4:6) where they dipped their finger
in the blood of the sacrifice and sprayed it seven times towards the
Lord at the holy curtain of the ark. 2) One of the features of the
Safed community was their strong desire to reestablish the ancient
aspects of Judaism including the Sanhedrin, ordination of rabbis, and
Temple sacrifice, as well as the desire of some of them to die a
martyr's death (all these trends were embodied in the life of Joseph
Caro the editor of the Shulhan Arukh). Thus it seems that this ceremony
both consciously as well as subliminally reenacts the sacrificial
behavior of the priests.
Blood, Vengeance, and the Seder
Despite the vehemence of Saul Tchernichowski's poetic call for Jewish
vengeance against the nations of the world which we mentioned last week,
it was not a new call. Such a call appears in the Haggadah in at least
two places. 1) In the section on the plagues the Haggadah moves from the
usually accepted number of ten plagues to show that there were really
250 of them. The basic textual reason for such an expansion is that in
the narratives of Exodus and Deuteronomy no number of plagues is
explicitly given and in Psalm 78 other numbers and different orders for
the plagues appear. This section of the Haggadah, therefore, takes on
the quality of a brutality auction where the rabbis outbid each other in
describing the number and ferocity of the plagues that afflicted Egypt.
2) After the third cup is drunk, a quaint medieval custom has it that
the door is opened for Elijah the Prophet to visit. (Just as Santa Claus
can go down all the Christian chimneys in such a short time on Christmas
Eve, so too Elijah the Prophet can make it to all the Jewish Seders on
one night of the year. While there aren't as many Seders as Chimneys,
Jews provide both an incentive for Elijah to get around, by offering him
wine instead of milk and cookies, which ultimately may slow him down as
he imbibes along his route-- I am looking forward to your mail . . .)
The historical reason for opening the door and setting the cup for
Elijah has to do with the fact that during the middle ages the Jews were
accused of kidnapping Christian children at Passover time and using
their blood to bake matzah. Such an accusation, fanned in the wake of
the Crusades when Jews, as I mentioned last week, sacrificed their own
children, was therefore not difficult for Christians to imagine. (A
fascinating controversy on this subject was launched in the journal Zion
with an article by Israel Yuval in 1993; the articles are in Hebrew with
English summaries). Thus the Jews felt it necessary to open the doors
of the Seder to show that there were no Christian corps strewn about.
Because of this libel Jews also switched from red to white wine to allay
further suspicions against their use of blood. The focal point of the
opening of the door is the glass of wine. However, while going through
this gesture of openness and candor, Jews recite a string of curses
against the gentiles of the earth: Listen to the sound in Hebrew:
"Shfokh hamat-khah al hagoyim, asher lo yeda-uha ve-al mamlakhot asher
beshimkhah lo kara-u." "Spill out your wrath on the goyim who have not
known you and on the kingdoms who have not called in your name."
The themes of sacrifice and vengeance are two themes that run through
almost all the piyyutim that are sung at the end of the Seder, except
for America the Beautiful, O Canada, God Save the Queen, and Hatikva,
which seemed to be added to most Haggadot to soften some of the desires
for a return to the sacrificial cult and the calls for vengeance against
gentile neighbors. "And it came to pass at midnight," an acrositic
piyyut by Yannai, describes the carnage wreaked upon Israel's enemies.
Similar sentiments are found in Kalir's "And so you shall say: 'It is
the sacrifice of the Passover,'" and "Mighty is He," or "Adir
Hu," ask
for the Temple to be rebuilt. And "The Only Kid," "Had Gadya," deals
with an allegorical food chain of revenge.
The themes of blood and sacrifice are also brought together in the
various illustrated Haggadot from the middle-ages to the present, many
of which are regularly offered in reproduction editions, especially at
this time of year. The classic work on Haggadah illustration is Yosef
Hayim Yerushalmi's Haggadah and History which has recently been reissued
by the Jewish Publication Society of America. In a recent article
"Infanticide in Passover Iconography," in the Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes 56 (1993): 85-99 (if you plan on reading or
copying this article, be sure to go to the back of the journal for the
art reproduction plates which are not in the article itself), David
Malkiel asserts that an ancient Jewish legend, which left traces in
Midrash Rabbah, Rashi, Midrash Hagadol, and other classical sources,
tells how Pharaoh developed a case of leprosy which could only be cured
by bathing in the blood of Jewish children. Such a legend, which
parallel to Christian claims against Jewish use of blood, shows that
Jews also accepted, despite any possible negative polemical
implications, the efficacy of the use of blood for medicinal purposes.
Thus, while not part of the Seder ceremony, the Haggadah illustrations
presented their readers with the image of Pharoah bathing in Jewish
blood, with graphic depictions of the babies being slaughtered, their
blood being drained, and their corpses strewn about. Indeed these
pictures are found in the section of the Haggadah involving the plagues
(their exact significance is connected with the reading "Vanitzhak," see
below) heightening the non-verbal significance of this section. Malkiel
takes this point one step further by showing that the slaughter of the
children was depicted in the form of human sacrifice, which he then
connects back to the theme of the Akedah, martyrdom, and child
sacrifice, themes also depicted in Haggadah illustrations of the Akedah
and Solomon's decision to cut the baby in half (in Yerushalmi, see
plates 10, 45, and 92).
Some Haggadahs also have pictures of men wearing armor, carrying a
sword, riding horses, joined by dogs, sounding trumpets, hunting rabbits
through the woods. Rabbits, explicitly commanded in Leviticus, are not
kosher and weapons were also not always allowed to medieval Jews.
Clearly, this is not a typical scene from Jewish life from which we can
derive some sort of positivistic information. The reason for such a
picture is found in the text of the Haggadah. As in several junctures
both in the Haggadah and in the Talmud, the procedure is reduced to an
abbreviation as a mnemonic. Located near the picture of the rabbit
hunt, at the beginning of the Haggadah, intended to clarify the order of
the Seder when it falls on a Saturday night: Wine (Yayin),
Sanctification (Kiddush), candle (Ner), End of Sabbath (Havdalah),
Reaching the Holiday Time (Zeman), is the abbreviation Y.K.N.H.Z., which
can be pronounced Yaken Has, which in German means rabbit hunt. A
mundane arrangement of basic prayers turns to be an exciting, somewhat
bloody, hunt scene, a scene in which Jews could not participate in real
time, but in the virtual reality of the Seder they could. This new
dimension mixed the highly charged combinations of forbidden foods with
rituals, Sabbath blessings with activities (blowing, carrying, and
riding) that were clearly forbidden on the Sabbath.
Both the depictions of child sacrifice and the rabbit hunt reflect
Christian European cultural influences and are not found in Haggadot
from Islamic countries, showing the rootedness of the Jews in their
surrounding culture.
The Haggadah as Midrash
Most Jews tend to lose interest with the section of the Haggadah called
the "Maggid," from the same root as Haggadah, meaning the narration in
which the Passover story seems to be told in a myriad of details. What
I would like to do for the remainder of this talk is to show some of the
often overlooked, but fascinating ways in which the Haggadah builds its
own narrative by integrating contradictions and discrepancies in the
biblical text.
One of the most well-known examples is this section of the Haggadah is
the Four Children. In reality, what is usually depicted as a morality
tale involving the various states of moral development of four
prototypical children, is in fact a simple exegetical exercise with
little ethical base at all. There are four places in the Torah
narrative, connected in one way or another with the Passover story,
where the biblical narratives proposes how to formulate the story in
case a child asks about it. 1) Deuteronomy 6:20, "If your child asks
you tomorrow, 'What are the rules, laws, and statutes which the Lord God
commanded to you?'" 2) Exodus 12:26: "If it should come to pass that
your children say to you, 'What is this service for you?'" 3) Exodus
13:14: "If it should come to pass that your child asks you tomorrow,
'What is this?'" 4) In the final instance no hypothetical question is
mentioned, but an answer is given concerning the Exodus. The Haggadah
thus took each of these questions and associated it with certain
qualities of different types of children. 1) The first question is
associated with a wise child. I suspect that the reason is because it
mentions the sophisticated aspects of rules, laws, and statues. The
answer proposed is based not on the biblical text but on rabbinic law.
The actual response suggested in the Bible, "We were slaves in Egypt and
the Lord God . . ." is removed from the context of this exchange and
placed at the head of the entire section as the rubric for the response
to the Four Questions. 2) The second question is associated with a
wicked child. I suspect the reason is the terseness of the question.
The answer proposed by the Haggadah, however, which notes that he
excluded himself from the group by asking what the laws meant "to you,"
is problematic because the wise child used similar phrasing. The actual
answer proposed in the Bible, has been moved, as we saw above, to be the
centerpiece of the explanation of the shankbone as suggested by Rabban
Gamliel. 3) The third question is associated with a simple child. I
suspect that the reason is because the question is so short. The answer
proposed in the Bible is offered here as well. 4) Because the fourth
question was not actually asked in the Bible, it is associated with a
child too young to ask a question. The answer given is the one proposed
in the Bible, "You shall tell your child on this day, saying, "Because
of this the Lord God did for me when I left Egypt."
The abovementioned Elijah's cup also represents a similar exegetical
compromise around the table. In addition to its connection with the
blood libel (and I am not yet sure which came first) it represents a
resolve of a problem with biblical interpretation. The four cups of
wine that are blessed and consumed throughout the Seder are connected
with four verbs in Exodus 6:6-8: "I took you out from the burden's of
Egypt and saved you from their slavery and I redeemed you with an
outstretched arm and with mighty judgments." A fifth verb in the
passage, however, has yet to be fulfilled, "and I brought you to the
Land," so the compromise that commentators see is that the cup is poured
but not drunk. In shopping today in Jerusalem I picked up a couple of
commentaries that may help unravel whether the cup preceded or followed
the exegetical tradition and at what stage the door opening and cursing
were added. I also found in many book stores in both Hebrew and English
a Haggadah depicting how Passover was celebrated in the Temple with
elaborate references to the sacrificial cult, showing that such interest
is still alive and well.
The redundancies of the biblical text are thus neatly packaged into a
collection of prototypes that add much to the drama of the Seder and
ultimately return value-added meaning to the biblical text itself.
One intellectual tour de force of the Haggadah is the midrash passage
developed shortly after the Four Children, immediately after the cup of
wine is lifted and then lowered. The premise of this section is that
two different versions of the retelling of the Passover story can be
coordinated. The two versions are then integrated sort of like Dueling
Banjos in the film Deliverance. First a few words from Deuteronomy
26:5-8 are strummed: "A wandering Aramean was my father. . . few in
number." After the interjection of a few other passages these verses
are linked with passages from Exodus 12. To amplify but a few passages
here and to return to the example mentioned above concerning Pharoah's
bathing in the blood of Jewish children, Deuteronomy 26:7 says: "We
cried to the Lord the God of our ancestors, the Lord heard our voices,
and saw our distress, and our burden, and our oppression," which is
linked to the death of Pharoah, the connection is made to Exodus 2:23,
"It came to pass in the course of all those days that Pharaoh the King
of Egypt died and the children of Israel groaned from the servitude and
cried out." Thus the vagueness of Deuteronomy, as integrated here, seems
naturally to refer to the events of Exodus where Pharoah died and the
Israelites complained. Yet the sequence raises the problem of why the
Hebrews would cry out if their oppressive king had just died, a problem
that is resolved with the illustration showing that Phaorah did not
actually die, but became infected with leprosy, considered a form of
death in the Bible (Numbers 12:12).
Conclusion
A current joke that reflects the banality with which the Seder can be
treated summarizes all Jewish holidays: They tried to kill us, we won,
let's eat. Unfortunately, the Jewish education establishment both in
Israel and abroad, which still depicts the Hebrews as building pyramids,
for which there is no evidence whatsoever, have reduced the Seder to a
"model seder" of sponge cake, grape juice, four questions, and matzah
crumbs. Even more theologically sophisticated contemporary Jews use the
seder as a telescope to observe the distant historical event of the
Exodus from Egypt and the attendant notions of salvation and
redemption. The Haggadah, despite these trivializations and
abstractions, nevertheless remains a force in Jewish culture because it
carries a powerful charge. The Haggadah deals with matters of life and
death, blood and sacrifice, at many different textual and sensual levels
so that each year, and for much of the year for serious aficionados, it
shapes in a profound way a visceral feeling of connectedness with the
proceedings. Aware of the fact or not, Jews connect with the Passover
Haggadah because it not only preserves memories, but creates them.
Each generation has added to it and it has played a major part in the
formation of evolving Jewish consciousness.
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