An offbeat thought about Passover

The following somewhat offbeat thought about Passover doesn't have anything to do with Harry Potter and Torah, but I wrote it a year ago in another context and thought some of you might enjoy it. For Passover-related ideas related to Harry Potter click here, and for a Passover idea related to the movie Titanic click here. For the Harry Potter and Torah book at Amazon click here.

Now on to a new idea related to Passover.

Imagine the following scene, and how you'd react if it happened to you. You walk into your neighborhood fast food joint and see a sandwich described as "Grilled lambchop on a crispy bun with our special spicy sauce." Sound tasty? Imagine you go ahead and order it, pay for it, get to your table, unwrap it, take a big bite, and HUH? You find a crispy bun with spicy sauce, but no lambchop!

How would you react? Would you complain? Ask for a replacement? Ask to see the manager? Yell and scream? Or would you suffer through it? Try to enjoy it? Even if you'd eat it, would you decide that you really like spicy sauce on a crispy bun even without the lambchop? Is there any chance you'd hope to get another one just like it next time you were in that restaurant?
I think it's a good guess that most of us would complain. Some loudly, some quietly, some with understanding, some with impatience, but we'd all want the real sandwich.

Or would we?

We say in the Hagada: "In memory of the Temple, as Hillel did: This is what Hillel did when the Temple was standing, he would make a sandwich ("korech") with (meat from) the Passover sacrifice, matza, and maror (bitter herbs), and eat them together, to fulfill the verse 'eat it on Matza with maror'."

Hillel ate his lambchop sandwich, with meat from the Passover sacrifice, on a "crispy bun" (matza) with "spicy sauce" (maror). In memory of Hillel's practice, we eat a "korech" sandwich of matza and maror. But the lambchop is missing!

Why don't we miss the meat in our Korech? Why don't we complain "Where's the meat?"

The obvious answer is that most of us find it hard to relate to the sacrifices in the Temple service. Meat, for us, is something to buy shrink-wrapped in a store, or to order in a restaurant. We don't want to know what goes on at the meat processing plants or in the butcher shops, and we can't relate at all to meat processing as a holy part of a Temple service. Meat isn't holy, it's deliciously (or not) mundane.

And yet the Hagada also includes prayers to return to the Passover Sacrificial service. In the blessing over the second cup we read: "Blessed are You, G-d, ... Who has redeemed us and redeemed our ancestors from Egypt, and enabled us to live to this night, to eat Matza and Maror. So too, G-d ..., may You enable us to live to other Holidays... happy in the reconstruction of Your city... May we eat there from the offerings and the Passover sacrifices...." And we finish with singing "L'Shana Ha'Ba'ah bi'Yerushalayim," next year in Jerusalem, which in Israel we sing "L'Shana ha'ba'ah bi'Yerushalayim ha'benuya," next year in the rebuilt Jerusalem, next year in Jerusalem with the Temple.

(As an aside, the English word "sacrifice" is a non-Jewish translation. The Hebrew word "korban" has nothing to do with losing something or giving up something, it means "coming close," meaning something that embodies our coming closer to G-d, related to the Hebrew word "karov" which means "close.")

How can we even imagine the Passover holiday with a Passover Sacrifice? How can we possibly relate to Holy meat?

I think that clearly that we can't imagine it. Even if we can develop an intellectual understanding of the Passover sacrifice (and there are certainly a lot of explanations written in Torah literature on the meaning of the sacrifices and the Temple service), none of us can possibly relate to eating sacrificial meat. How could we? We have no frame of reference for it - we can't even imagine its being part of our life.

But this is no different from other mitzvos that need to be experienced in order to be understood.

If our only experience with wine was getting tipsy, would we understand the feeling of Friday night Kiddush? And yet Friday night kiddush feels different from wine with dinner. Shabbat challah feels different from dinner rolls. Fasting on Yom Kippur feels different from a strict diet. Matza at the Seder feels different from crackers as a snack. Prayers in Hebrew feel different from singing "Fraire Jaques."

Who thinks about the fruit they eat? Fruit is fruit. But fruit in Israel tastes different. Do visitors to Israel really rave about Israeli Orange juice because it's better-made than Tropicana? Maybe, but many feel some intangeable difference which I think comes from holiness. And there's no way to explain it.

Imagine if you'd never heard of a bris (circumcision, "brit mila"). Would anyone hear of it for the first time and think of it as a holy experience? "Barbaric!" we'd yell. "How can a service be built around a painful operation?" And yet this same mitzva is one that almost all Jews hold on to more than any other, as a central and emotional part of bringing a Jewish boy into the world. Because we've experienced it, we relate to it and feel it.

Eating sacrificial meat is something none of us can relate to, since we've never done it. But if we did, it wouldn't be unimaginable, it would be as real as Shabbat kiddush wine, Israeli orange juice, or a bris.

Picture the following scene in Messianic times: You walk into the meat section of a TempleMart supermarket in Jerusalem. There will be no guards or security cameras, since all guns and bombs will have been turned into plows (or microprocessors). You won't see anyone pushing or shoving in line, since everyone will love their neighbor. In the store, we'll see signs not only for different cuts of meat, but also for meat from that day's sacrifices. Some will have stickers saying that they can only be eaten in Jerusalem, or by people in a particularly pure state, or by Cohens or Levis, or must be eaten before dark that day.

There will still be non-sacrificial meat, because the amount of meat sacrificed each year is nowhere near the amount of meat eaten each year by the Israeli or Kosher markets. But we'll feel the difference. In the TempleMart, the Cohen family three-year-old will be whining about the "daily sacrifice burger" tasting so much better than the "regular burger" that his mother put in the cart, and the Levine family teenager will be absolutely refusing to eat anything for dinner other than shnitzel from that day's peace offerings ("like, no way!").

I know I'm going way overboard with literary license here, but my point is this: However life in Messianic times will look exactly, we'll have gained the ability to relate to the holiness of sacrificial meat. We'll "get it." It'll be as normal as Kiddush wine. And just like those of us living in Israel remember "the old country," and remember how before moving to Israel we didn't "get" how great it would be to live in Israel, I expect that in Messianic times we'll all remember back to now, back when we had silly locks on our doors because noone really loved their neighbor, back when we had metal detectors in airports because people were making war against other nations, and back when we just "didn't get" sacrificial meat, back when we'd never experienced eating food that so directly embodied our relationship with G-d.

Even now, though, we can realize what we're missing. While we're having our Seders, reading and acting out and remembering the Exodous from Egypt, we can at least think about something that's missing from our lives and from our psyches: the ability to relate to the original Passover Seders and to Hillel's original sandwich, as well as other aspects of life after redemption.

I happen to think that my Korech sandwich, with matza and maror, would taste a heck of a lot better with some lambchop. Maybe the only way we can relate to sacrificial meat and the Temple service is to say to ourselves in the middle of our Seders: "Hey! I want the meat in my Korech!"

Happy Passover to everyone, and L'Shana Ha'Ba'ah Bi'Yerushalayim Ha'Benuya.

The Passover Haggadah and the movie Titanic

I know, this isn't about Harry Potter, but the style of Harry Potter and Torah can be used for other movies too!

The Seder the Ship and the Saga

Every year many Jews face the same dillema on Passover. We celebrate the holiday with a Seder, and we want to read the Hagada (the book traditionally read at the Seder) and remember and discuss the Exodus from Egypt, as Jews have been doing for thousands of years, but the words and structure of the Hagada are hard to relate to.

Or is it?

Would you believe that the Passover Hagada is set up just like the Academy Award winning movie, Titanic?

While I'm not proposing Leonardo DeCaprio as Moses, and don't want to lower the Seder to the moral level of Hollywood, I do think that the analogy can help us understand the Hagada.

Titanic is a long movie with two big parts and a few small ones. First we have a brief introduction in modern times, showing people's interest in the ship, outlining the story, and introducting the lead character. The movie then goes back in time and launches into an hour-long story of the lives of two main characters, Jack and Rose, and their relationship as the ship sails. After an hour of character building and relationships, the ship hits the fateful iceberg, Jack and Rose's whole world changes in an instant, and we have the second half of the movie: an hour of heart-racing action as the ship sinks. Up and down the ship they chase, trying over and over to survive. Rose is among the survivors, and we then end with a few minutes back in modern times, with the touching culmination of Rose's long and eventful life.

When the movie came out, a lot of people complained about the movie being too long. After all, a movie about Titanic should be about the ship sinking. Why do we want to spend a whole hour learning about fictional characters? And why do we need as many scenes running up and down the stairs trying to get off the boat?

One answer is given in the movie itself. In the second-to-last scene we see a modern-day scientist thinking about Roses's first-hand account of the ship's sinking. He says "I've been looking for Titanic for years, but she never got to me before." In other words, the event he knew so much about intellectually hadn't really touched him emotionally until he heard it in the context of someone effected.

This is the goal of the Passover Hagada. The point of Passover isn't just to know intellectually that the Jewish people were slaves in Egypt and were redeemed. It's supposed to "get to us." The Hagada says that we have to "see ourselves as if we came out of Egypt," and explains that "even if we were all smart, all wise, and all learned in Torah, we'd still be obligated to tell the story of the Exodous" on Passover.

The steps in the Hagada are remarkably like the scenes in the movie. (Or rather, the scenes in the movie are remarkably like the 2000-year-old Hagada.)

At the beginning of the Hagada we have an opening, before launching into the exodous itself, where we discuss the significance of the story. Like scientists obsessed with looking for Titanic, Talmudic sages stayed up all night at their Seder. Like the scientist's brief overview of the ship's sinking, we review the symbols of the Seder for a few minutes (in the 4 questions) and summarize the facts that "we were slaves in Egypt... and G-d took us out."

We then start the story, but not with the Exodous itself. The Talmud says that the Seder "starts with disgrace and ends with glory." The Hagada starts with two forms of disgrace, that our forefathers worshipped idols and that we left our own land, the Land of Israel, to become slaves, with horrible suffering, in Egypt. Without starting with the disgrace we can't truly understand the glory. Just as the story of Jack and Rose makes the ship's sinking so much more meaningful, our idol-worshipping ancestors and painful slavery should give perspective to G-d's taking us to freedom and making us His people.

This is why the Hagada spends so much time talking about the Jewish people leaving Israel for Egypt, and emphasizing all the things the Egyptians did to us during the slavery. It isn't enough to know intellectually that we were enslaved, we need to imagine what it was like to have burden added to burden, to have personal and family lives interrupted, to have our lives and the lives of our children disregarded by slavemasters.

Then the Hagada switches gears faster than Titanic hit the iceberg. The Talmud describes redemption coming "like the blink of an eye." At the stroke of midnight G-d brought us out of slavery, and our lives changed from suffering to salvation. Not just that, He did miracles and more miracles. Signs and wonders. 10 here, 50 there, 200 here, 250 there.

In Titanic, everyone who survived the disaster went on to live lives that they obviously wouldn't have lived had they perished. Rose promises Jack "never to forget," and goes on to cherish the pictures showing her life's many accomplishments. Similarly, G-d's taking us out of slavery didn't just save people then, it led to the future lives of all the Jewish people. That's why the true "ending in glory" isn't just being freed from slavery, it's being fed in the desert, receiving the Torah, being taken to the Land of Israel, and there becoming G-d's nation, none of which would have happened if not for the miracle of the Exodous.

In Titanic, if Rose had only survived the ship's disaster, "Dayeinu," it would have been enough. If she had also lived to marry and have children, Dayeinu, it would be enough to make her salvation a huge thing. But we see at the end that she (in the story) did more than survive, she had an entire life of childhood friends, horse-riding and airplanes, marriage, children and grandchildren. These accomplishments are what make her being saved from Titanic all the more amazing.

This is one reason we sing Dayeinu at the Seder. It's not because we'd have been happy to have been brought into the desert without being given food, or to skip any of the other things listed, but because each step in the development of the Jewish people after the Exodus made the Exodus itself all the more remarkable.

Then, if we can really internalize it all, if we can feel how bad the Egyptians treated us and how much G-d did for us, it should feel natural to start praising G-d with the Hallel, the prayer of thanks. Only after all that, only when we "get it," are we ready for the matza and marror (bitter herbs), for truly living out the holiday.

Can our Seders "get to us" as much as the movie Titanic? Can we care as much about the Exodus by the end of our Seders as we care about Rose's life in the movie's final scene? Unfortunately, most of us connect more with movies than ritual. But if we try, and focus on internalizing the message of each step in the Hagada, maybe we can come close.

Hopefully, if the message of the Hagada can really "get to us," we can achieve what the Talmud says, that just as the redemption from Egypt happened on Passover, similarly on Passover we will see the Messianic redemption and true world peace.

Chag Samayach, Happy Passover, and Le'Shana Ha'ba'ah Bi'Yerushalayim Ha'Benuyah.