Shofar Adar II/Nisan 5771
Jewish Family Congregation www.jewishfamilycongregation.org
April 2011
From the Rabbi’s Desk Though the Torah tells us a lot of details about the exodus from Egypt, there are a few items omitted, things we’d really like to know. For example, the name of the Pharaoh is never given, and that would help us to date the story very clearly. Nor do we know exactly what is meant by “ the Sea of Reeds”. And there isn’t enough information to identify for certain the location of Mt Sinai. The scholarly deduction is that the exodus took place around the year 1250 BCE. That means that our ancestors left the degradation of slavery in Egypt about nearly 3300 years ago. And just recently, the people of present-day Egypt have thrown off the yoke of the degradation of tyranny, just as our ancestors did. It will be interesting to see what they do with their newly won freedom. They do not have the advantage of a 40 year journey to their own Promised Land, a journey that allows them to get used to the joys and challenges of freedom. Nor are they likely to create a home-based ritual that retells the story of their triumph and preserves its memory for millennia. But that is what our ancestors did. And even though archaeologists can find no evidence to support the Bible’s account of the exodus, we perpetuate its memory through the festival of Pesakh, learning important lessons from the story regardless of its historicity, or lack thereof. In fact, the story of the exodus has been appropriated by many different groups because it is a great paradigm for the rise from oppression and humiliation to freedom, independence and dignity. One can almost imagine the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and even Iran, taking inspiration from the Biblical narrative; ok, maybe that’s a stretch, but the model still fits! The home-based ritual we participate in every year, the seder, does not go back in origin to the exodus itself. It appears that, until the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, the celebration of Passover centred on the offering of the Pesakh sacrifice of a young lamb. FamiFrom the Rabbi’s Desk Service Schedule Next Month’s Oneg Hosts President’s Message JiFTY Early Childhood Center The Religious School Donations to JFC Second Seder Information Social Action Committee
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lies would gather to eat the meat, with bitter herbs and matzah on what we now consider the first night of Passover. That was the entire Festival of Passover; it was followed by a separate festival called Matzah, which they observed for seven days, eating no leavened foods for that whole time. If there was more to the observance, we don’t know much about it. When the Temple was destroyed, the earliest of the rabbis ruled that the sacrifices could no longer be offered. Therefore, they created the seder ritual to give the festival a new focus. As they did with other commandments in the Torah, the rabbis created rituals to concretize the obligation to remember the exodus from Egypt. The focus shifted from the sacrifice to telling the story, beginning with a recollection that “we were slaves in Egypt”, and culminating with the freedom to enter into a covenant with God at Mt Sinai. The telling emphasized God’s redeeming power, and the miracles of the plagues (that bothered the Egyptians but not the Israelites living right there), the parting of the Sea of Reeds (resulting in the drowning of the pursuing Egyptians), and the revelation at Sinai (with the commandments that define our relationship to God). The seder may have been the first instance of “show and tell”...the ritual foods, the four cups of wine, the cup for Elijah, the reclining at table: these are the “show” part, and the words of the haggadah are the “tell” part. At first, it seems that the seder followed the form of the Greek and/or Roman custom of a symposium, at which a meal was served and then a discussion was held. But over time, the “telling” at the seder was begun before the meal, perhaps to keep the children involved. The practice of asking questions to stimulate the “telling” was originally freeform, but again, over time, the questions became formalized, ultimately becoming the ones that are asked at seders all over the world today.
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