My Problem With Pesah

My maternal grandfather, the product of a 19th Century orthodox education but later also the gymnasium, purported to cast off religion at the age of 25, during a physics lecture. Yet, sometimes it seemed that his hostility to Judaism was a little forced. Although I’m convinced that he ceased to believe in any kind of god, I’m not as certain that he rejected the whole package.

There was at least an ambivalence that had a funny way of manifesting itself around Passover. I say ambivalence because if he had simply not cared any longer, I don’t think he would have made such a fuss. But like clockwork, moments before the start of each year’s first-night Seder, a war would break out. Grandpa Moses (as I fittingly knew him) would denounce Moshe Rabbenu as a “dictator.” My grandmother would respond with the non-sequitur, “Vos has de Moses?” (“What do you have against Moses?”). This would prompt gales of laughter from my mother and her brothers, my uncles and aunts.

At the time, I was too young to appreciate the humor of the moment. To be honest, I’m not even sure the recollection is my own or something I’ve internalized, having heard the story so many times. Either way, it comes to me every year around this time, almost as a Pesah ritual. As I’ve gotten older, however, a certain bitter-sweetness has infused this cherished family memory. For, like my grandfather, I also feel ambivalent about Pesah.

To be blunt about it, Passover makes me uncomfortable. The Passover holiday, and liturgy surrounding it, are inextricably intertwined with the concept of freedom. Indeed, it’s fair to say that freedom is one of the founding principles of the Jewish religion and Nation. Yet, I believe that there is a Jewish principle even more important than freedom, one that is primary to freedom and, without which, freedom is no more than an illusion. That principle is the truth, Emes.

The truth is primary to freedom because living a free life includes being honest and truthful with oneself. A person who lives according to myths or unfounded assumptions is being dishonest in a fundamental way. In that condition, it is easy to become a slave to those myths. And, of course, slavery and freedom are incompatible.

If we’re honest with ourselves, the Passover tradition is incompatible with reverence for the truth. Archaeology has raised serious questions about the premise that the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt or that they left Egypt in a mass wave. That, in itself, would seem to preclude the revelation at Sinai, since the Bible portrays them as parts of a seamless story. But even assuming that the exodus actually happened, what about revelation? Who really believes that the law, the abundant law in all its rich detail, really came to the Israelites in this way? And, indeed, the rabbinic tradition is full of midrashic alternatives to the incredible concept of a God conveying a prolix code to a single man, who then bestowed it on his followers.

The dependence on an elaborate myth as a founding moment of Judaism is surely a part of my discomfort with Pesah. The rest of the year, I can ignore it if I want to. But this time of year, the myth becomes a matter of religious ritual that’s hard to avoid. Yet, there has to be more to my Passover malaise than that. After all, as a non-believer I’m confronted on a weekly basis with a ritual that I don’t accept literally. Participation in the Shabbat ritual, nonetheless, holds great meaning for me. Something about the Pesah message doesn’t sit right with me.

So let me return to the Sinai revelation. The Sinai tradition posits a special entitlement to a piece of land in return for fealty to God’s principles. The contract, however, wasn’t offered to everyone, only the Chosen. In other words, the entitlement stems from a particular national and religious affiliation. In other contexts, many of us would be extremely uncomfortable with such a policy.

The sense of entitlement central to the Exodus tradition is not only unflattering, but destructive of our values. For even as the tradition symbolizes our love of our own freedom, it may blind us to the parallel, but apparently incompatible, yearnings of other national movements. We can start with the Canaanites, but more to the point is the dismissive attitude too many Jews have manifested toward the nationality most recently indigenous to that piece of land, the Palestinians. Passover makes a holiday and a ritual out of that dismissive attitude.

But it’s not my purpose here to go political on Passover because my problem with it is of a more fundamental nature. It’s not simply the Israeli-Palestinian conflict echoing in the background; more to the point is the general sense of entitlement manifested in the Exodus story and Pesah’s attendant rituals. Much as I’ve tried to think of Passover as a holiday steeped in universal themes and values, it’s actually the most particular of Jewish holidays.

In the past, Yom Kippur was the holiday that caused me spiritual and ideological difficulties. I found the expression of boilerplate prayers of contrition a completely artificial exercise. I’m still not comfortable with the breast-beating aspect of Yom Kippur, but that’s really not what the holiday, at its core, is about. Asking God for forgiveness at Yom Kippur time is a ritual, but the performance of teshuva (approaching another individual in contrition) is an act of personal accountability and humility. By contrast, Passover’s celebration of the Exodus and revelation myths represents an of absence of national accountability and humility on the part of the Jewish People.

So what do I think should be done with Pesah? Left to my own devices, I might take a break for a few years, let it air out and take another look with the benefit of reflection. But, of course, that’s not realistic since, first of all, nobody is going to do it and, second, there is the small matter of the Torah’s command to celebrate the festival every year. That, in itself, is an impossible tradition to buck.

Nonetheless, Torah doesn’t require that our seders be annual exercises in triumphalism. Though the Exodus is a central biblical story, like anything else in the Hebrew bible it is subject to reevaluation and interpretation. Unfortunately, many have already tried and failed at that. One year, we read passages from Bennie Morris’s “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem.” Then there are the “environmental” seders, the oranges on the seder plate and all the rest of the symbolic gestures toward making the ritual more “relevant.” It’s all window dressing.

Humility, honesty and a reverence for the truth are values most successfully pursued by individuals in their every day interactions, not on a community wide level. But Pesah is first and foremost a celebration about community, a particular community, not the obligations of individuals. How to infuse a holiday whose central theme is the victory of a particular Nation with the sacred values we demand from ourselves as individuals is a paradox that seems harder and harder to solve every year.