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April 6, 2001
Passover edition
Miriam's cup and Exodus gifts
New rituals have made their way into the Passover seder over the
years.
ROY BERNARD MANN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
The festival of Pesach is without question the defining annual
event of the Jewish year, the Jewish family and the Jewish spirit.
How much have all our Pesach sederim expressed family togetherness,
fresh recognition of Jewish heritage, the lesson of cherishing freedom,
the truth that a feast of thanksgiving belongs to the spring as
well as to the fall season in any year, the sense of gratitude that
we have been spared the horrors of the Holocaust and other tragedies
of centuries past, and the sense of carrying the torch to the next
generation?
But a seder is much more. It is gaiety and mirth, improvised wit,
love and affection for friends and guests as well as family members.
This varies little from family to family, place to place, though
personal misfortunes and hard times bring a rough setting to any
Pesach.
It is the same in an Orthodox home, a Conservative home or the
home of a Reform or other-stream family. The Pesach seder is a celebration
of Jewish life.
New gestures and rites have found their way into the seder over
time, and there is much to be said for several of them. In the very
beginning, well before the sojourn of the Israelite clans in Egypt,
the Hebrews offered springtime thanksgiving in two separate feasts.
The farmers of the field took the first of the spring grain harvest
as their thanksgiving to God. A portion of grain was ground and
baked in the form of a flat matzah, prepared without leavening,
all done right in the field, to express gratitude in the very hour
that sickles were put to the first of the ripened barley. Chag HaMatzot,
Festival of the Unleavened Bread, it was called. Within a few days
of this event, shepherds and cattle herders offered sacrifices from
the firstborn of their flocks and herds. The first lamb became the
central symbol and their feast became known as Chag Ha Pesach, Feast
of the First Lamb.
The place of each festival is woven into the Haggadah's combined
thanksgiving for field and flock, signifying the diversified agriculture
of Israel's and Judah's post-Exodus times. Our seder today displays
the tokens of this broad agrarian past - the shank bone for livestock,
the greens for all manner of crops and the matzot for the grain
harvests.
The next plateau was reached following the great tragedies of the
first and second centuries of the Common Era. The Temple and much
of Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 CE, while the failed Bar-Kochba
Revolt in 132 CE was followed by Roman genocidal warfare against
Judea - nearly 600,000 men, women and children of the towns were
slain by Rome's legions after killing tens of thousands of Jewish
warriors in the field. The shank bone and roasted egg of the seder
honor the Temple's memory, as well as that of ancient Jerusalem
and the land.
These days, Pesach is reaching yet another plateau. In recent years,
rabbis of Judaism's several streams, writers of various inclinations
and individuals without pedigree have engaged in creative modifications
to the traditional Haggadah, which itself was fashioned in the second
and third centuries CE as the Jewish remnants reaffirmed their claim
to life and their continuity with the land from which they had been
so untimely ripped by Rome.
In that period, the stories of Rabban Gamliel and other post-exile
rabbis were recorded. The place of Elijah's cup (the fifth cup of
wine, which is reserved for the prophet destined to herald the Messiah's
arrival) was set. Songs of praise for God such as "Adir Hu"
("Great is He") and songs with gentle moral teachings
such as the Aramaic-lyric "Chad Gadya" ("One Kid")
were included. And the awesome pledge to return to Jerusalem and
the land of Israel ("Hashanah Haba'ah B'Yerushalayim!"
- "Next Year in Jerusalem!"), at the end of the seder,
became its consummate expression of fealty to the faith, traditions
and land of our people.
Perfect, in many ways. But imperfect as well. The role of women
in the people's story is not told in the Haggadah. Yet the Torah
itself tells of Tsipporah, Moses' wife, and Miriam, his sister,
in the saga of the Exodus. Miriam was noted as a prophetess, a woman
of insight and good counsel. Her dance of exultation in celebration
of the Israelites emerging victoriously over Pharaoh's forces must
surely have reinforced Israel's spirit and its readiness to move
on through the forbidding wilderness ahead. Miriam deserves recognition
in the seder and there are many today who set out a sixth cup of
wine, Miriam's cup, in honor of this charismatic figure and of the
significant and under-recognized role of women in our history.
The story of springtime and Israel's love of the land is not well
told in the Haggadah. It is as though its authors - the fourth,
fifth or later generation of descent from forebears who had been
so cruelly wrested from the land by Rome's legions - had simply
forgotten what it was to plow a field, use a sickle, nurture olive
seedlings, hunt for deer, grow a melon crop or shepherd a flock
across hard hillsides to grass and water. To remedy this, several
Haggadot have woven new verses on nature and the environment into
the Pesach story.
We could also better call out Pesach's "big picture"
values. After counting out the 10 plagues, consider adding a new
recitation - the 10 gifts of the Exodus:
1. Love of freedom and abhorrence of slavery of any kind.
2. The revelations of Law at Sinai - the regulation of social
behavior based on justice, truth, equality and concern for the
disadvantaged.
3. Gratitude for all good fortune sent one's way.
4. Appreciation for the desert sunset, the beauty of the natural
world.
5. Appreciation for our interdependence with the environment.
6. Commitment to the utopian and the ideal.
7. Recognition of the need for society to bridge tribal differences,
as taught at the Tent of Meeting.
8. Triumph of reason over belief in the supernatural.
9. Respect for Earth's sustenance and for the threat of famine.
10. Love of saga reciting and song which, over time, transformed
into writing, choral and instrumental music and the arts.
Whatever your seder tradition, may your Pesach be warm and loving
and memorable.
Roy Bernard Mann is a freelance writer living in Austin, Tex.
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