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A FEAST OF HISTORY
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fit is a privilege to be invited to give- yet another Passover sermon. But
having already done so 52 times, and explored every aspect of the Festival, I
had at first some difficulty in thinking of a new angle. Then it came to me. It
had been sitting on my shelf for 24 years. I mean a book by Chaim Raglael/L.-:_’——j
entitled
A
Feast of History]
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evolution of Passover and especially of the Haggadah, which is what the book
is chiefly about, is an intellectual feast. But then it occurred to mit
t the
could
alo
be understood in another sense: that Passover isla
istory
essentially about.
And in that sense Chaim Raphael could have called his book ’The Feast of
History‘, for Passover is in that respect unique among the major Jewish
festivals. Admittedly, all of them began as nature festivals, and all of them
were eventually associated with historical events, but, except for Passover,
never convincingly. And though Passover, too, was originally a nature
festival, celebrating the lambing season and the barley harvest, nevertheless,
once it became connected with the Exodus from Egypt, that motif became the
title
festival, that history is
what
it is
dominant one.
‘
Passover, then, celebrates a historical event. That is the single most
important fact about it. Whether the event happened exactly as the Bible tells
No doubt the story was embellished as it
it, doesn't matter for our purpose.
was told and retold from generation to generation. Most probably the reality
was more modest in scale. Quite possibly there was more than one exodus.
But that there were Hebrew slaves in Egypt who escaped to re—establish
themselves in the land where their Patriarchal ancestors had once lived, is
not to be doubted.
We can even be pretty sure when it happened. Recently two Cambridge
professors have suggested that the volcanic eruption of the Greek island of
Santorini in 1628 BCE may very well have caused the seven years of famine
in the land of Egypt of the Joseph story, and if the Israelites stayed in Egypt, as
the Bible tells us, for 400 years, that would place the Exodus, as scholars have
long thought, squarely in the 13th century.
So Passover celebrates in essence, a real historical event, not a fictional one.
And not only a historical event but the historical event: the one that our
ancestors regarded as the most significant of all, illuminating the entire
historical process in a unique way.
For one of the greatest achievements of our Israelite ancestors was that they
evolved a sense of history. By that I don't mean only that they were intensely
interested in their own past. That was true of other peoples. They each had
their folklore, mostly fanciful, about their remote origins, and some of them,
like the Greeks, developed serious historiography, though not before the 5th
century BCE, with Herodotus, commonly known as the 'father of history‘.
What I mean is that our ancestors discerned a pattern, a plan, a purpose, a
plot, in history. For as they saw it, it was under the guidance of a divine
Scriptwriter
whose righteous
will
must ultimately
prevail.
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Nothing like that is to be found elsewhere in the ancient world. At best,
one encounters a cyclical view of history, as an endless succession of ups and
downs which, like a Samuel Richardson novel, leads nowhere. But mostly
there was little interest in history, and little inclination to see any great
significance in it.
Even today it is fashionable to pooh-pooh the whole idea of teleology - that
is, of purposiveness - in history, and to make cynical remarks about it. What
is history? Many will answer, with Macbeth: ‘...it is a tale / Told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing‘ (Act V, Scene 5).
Or with
Voltaire: ‘Nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes‘ (L’lngénu,
Chapter 10). Or with Ambrose Bierce: ‘An account, mostly false, of events
unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers
mostly fools' (Bentley & Esar, The Treasury of Humorous Quotations, p. 34).
‘Even the gneat historian H.A.L. Fisher wrote: 'I_can see only one emergency
following upon another as wave follows upon wave...only one safe rule for
the historian: that he should recognise in the development of human
destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen‘ A History of Europe,
(p. vii).
But Judaism has always insisted that history is not 'just one darned thing
after another'; that it is going somewhere; that it is leading, however slowly
and painfully, with many a retrogression, towards a grand finale. Admittedly,
there is no way of proving it: not, at least, conclusively. Like the belief in
God, it is a matter of faith; a hunch, an intuition, a way of seeing reality which
can't be forced on those who don't see it but which to those who do see it is,
like the 'eureka experience' illuminating and compelling. At any rate, Jews
have seen it that way ever since the days of the Prophets. And the festival of
Passover is the most dramatic expression of it; it is 'The Feast of History'.
The mere fact that on it we remember, re-tell and re-live an event that
happened so long ago shows an intense interest in history. But it is not the
interest of an antiquarian. We celebrate the Exodus, not as an intriguing
episode of ancient Near Eastern history, but for what it reveals beyond itself.
And what does it reveal? It reveals that there is, or at least that there can be,
movement from worse to better - or, as the Haggadah puts it, ‘from bondage
to freedom, from sadness to joy, from mourning to celebration, from
darkness to light, from servitude to redemption.‘
Because it has happened once, it can happen again. Indeed, it has happened
many times in human history. The liberation of South Africa from white
most momentous of recent instances. And therefore the
liberation of every people from every kind of oppression is at least a
possibility. But it is more than that: because God wills it, therefore, at least to
the extent to which human beings learn to co—operate with the Divine Plan, it
must ultimately happen. That is the Jewish Messianic Hope.
Admittedly, the hope has expressed itself in several different ways. There is
the belief that it will all come about through a descendant of King David,
Isaiah's 'shoot from the stump of Jesse' (11:1), later to be known as the
Messiah. There is the belief that the Messiah will come when things are at
their worst, to deliver us from catastrophe. There is the belief that he will
come when things are at their best, to clinch what has been achieved already.
supremacy
is
the
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There is even the belief, more characteristic of Christianity than of Judaism,
but now entertained by some of the more incorrigible Lubavitchers, that he
has come already. And there, is the belief, favoured by Progressive Judaism,
that it will happen gradually, without need of a personal Messiah, through
the triumph of good over evil as human beings turn to their Creator and the
earth becomes ’full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea' (Isa.
11:9).
But whichever form it takes, it suffuses our understanding of the historic
process with hope: a hope expressed again and again in the Seder: when we
drink the four cups and fill the fifth; when we eat the Matzah and hide away
the Afikoman; when we open the door for Elijah; when we recite the Great
Hallel; when we sing in the Chad Gadya how the Holy One, ever to be blessed,
will ultimately slay the Angel of Death; and when we wish each other 'Next
year in Jerusalem! Next year in a world redeemed!‘
Passover is a messianic festival. To fail to appreciate that is to miss the
whole point of it. It celebrates the past, but only as a pointer to the future.
And therefore it reminds us that all of us, standing as we do between the past
and the future, have a responsibility.
Now I think it needs to be admitted that this messianic consciousness can be
overdone. It can become obsessive. For we don‘t live only in history; we also
live in nature. We are not only travellers from past to future; we also live in
the present. We should enjoy the legitimate pleasures of every day, and carry
out our daily tasks, without always having to think where we have come
from and where we are going. And if the thought sometimes crosses our
minds that the hope for a golden age which we shall never experience is little
consolation for the troubles of the present, it cannot be denied that there is
more than a little truth in it.
And yet the greater danger, surely, is the opposite: that we shall ‘eat, drink
and be merry‘, and live from day to day with too little rather than too much
thought for the part we are playing in a process that transcends our life-span.
That is why Passover, the Feast of History, is so important. It reminds us that
we are, among other things, agents of history; that, whether we like it or not,
we are actors on a stage, and the only question is whether we play our part
well or badly; that every day matters - what we do and what we say, how we
behave and how we bring up our children - because we are members of a
generation which is the sole link between the generations of the past and the
generations of the future; because everything we do either hastens or delays
the coming of the Messianic Age, 01', in kabbalistic language, either repairs the
broken vessels of the world or fragments them further.
By all means, therefore, let us lead carefree lives to the extent to which our
circumstances and our temperaments permit; but let the consciousness never
be far from our minds that we are also engaged on a journey to a messianic
destination which, though we shall never see it, nevertheless makes all our
efforts and all our sufferings worthwhile; and let the Feast of Passover renew
that consciousness within us.
.
Liberal Jewish swago'gue, First
Day of Passover,
4th April, 1996