Torah for Christians: The Rules of Passover
TORAH FOR CHRISTIANS
SEASON THREE EPISODE ELEVEN
PESACH I
If you were to ask me what the most widely observed Jewish holiday is, I would say Passover, in Hebrew: Pesach. Even more than Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, Pesach is the foundational holiday for the Jewish people.
We are going to find out why in this episode of Torah for Christians. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr. Let’s get started.
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Welcome to Torah for Christians. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr.
Pesach is the foundational holiday for the Jewish people. It is so important; we are going to spend four episodes discussing it. On this episode, we are going to talk about Passover in the literature: how the Torah speaks of Pesach and how Pesach grows and changes when the rabbis of late antiquity re-envision the holiday. On our next episode, we will discuss Passover foods, focusing on the strict and unique dietary rules for the holiday. Then, episode three of our series will discuss the Passover Seder, the wonderful home celebration of Pesach, a ritualized dinner when we eat symbolic foods symbolic while retelling the Exodus story. Finally, we will conclude our series with a comparison of Pesach and Easter, which as we know are closely linked through the Passion narrative.
The Jewish origin story begins with Abraham in the Book of Genesis. But the origin of the Israelite nation begins with Exodus 12. As Exodus begins, we learn of the Israelite enslavement and the birth of Moses. As we progress through the first 11 chapters of the book, God commands Moses to go to Pharaoh and demand that he frees the enslaved Israelites. There are nine plagues, each one more severe than the previous one, to convince Pharaoh to free the Israelites. Finally, as the 10th Plague approaches, God commands that the Israelites perform one mitzvah so that they can “earn” the privilege of being redeemed. God commands the Israelites to slaughter a ram and paint the doorposts and lintels of their houses with its blood so that the Angel of Death will “pass over” (Hebrew: pasach) their homes, sparing their first-born. The Angel of Death proceeds though to kill all of the first-born Egyptian males, forcing Pharaoh to finally free the Israelites.
But this is only the first part of the Mitzvah. The Torah also commands us to roast the ram whole and eat it. But that is still not enough. When we eat the entire ram, we might invite other Israelites to join us since there is a lot of meat on a ram; if any meat is left over in the morning, it is to be burned. Finally, we are also commanded to eat the ram with two undefined foods, matzah and maror. The Israelites ate these foods standing up, clothed in travel gear; after eating, they immediately set out for their journey towards freedom.
Eating Pesach, the ram, along with matzah and maror, is the fundamental mitzvah of Passover. Pesach is, of course, the Passover lamb. We define matzah as unleavened bread, a bread baked before the dough has had time to rise. Tradition says that the Israelite women did not have time to properly knead their dough and instead rushed to bake it. Today, matzah is a flat board, perforated so that air cannot expand within the dough while baking. But back then, it might have looked more like a common flat bread, like a pita or naan.
Maror is translated as “bitter herb” since the root word, “mar”, means bitter. This bitter herb can be anything from horseradish root to a turnip or radish, even the whites at the base of romaine lettuce. It doesn’t have to clear your sinuses like horseradish; it just has to have a bitter taste. But the exact food is not specified in Exodus.
The Israelites ate the Pesach, Matzah and Maror, as I said earlier, standing up, ready to leave Egypt. For centuries, this is probably how we celebrated Passover. Of course, Leviticus and Numbers detail any number of Pesach sacrifices, especially the lamb sacrifice to take place on the night of the 14th day of Nisan, the Biblical month of Aviv, the spring month. Pesach itself began the next evening, on the full moon. The Pesach sacrifice was the largest sacrifice of the year in both the First and Second Temples, when thousands of pilgrims would descend upon Jerusalem and hundreds of lambs were slaughtered. We also learn in the Torah that we must observe the food laws of Pesach for seven days, with the first and last days being Yom Tov, holy days during which no work can be done.
In addition to Pesach, Matzah and Maror, the Torah also commands us not to eat anything made with Chametz, leavened products, during the entirety of Pesach. This includes any products made from yeast, such as bread or beer, as well as a prohibition against non-kosher wine, which uses yeast in its fermentation, and vinegar that is derived from such wine. We are also forbidden to eat of the five grains of Israel. These grains are wheat, rye, spelt and two types of barley. There is controversy surrounding oats, legumes, rice, and corn – but we’ll get to that on the next episode.
After the fall of the Temple in 70 CE, the sacrificial system came to an abrupt halt. The question arose: how do we celebrate Pesach without the fundamental sacrifice of the ram, a remembrance of that first Pesach sacrifice in Egypt? Instead of the sacrifice, the Rabbis began to include the other aspects of Pesach, matzah and maror, in a ritualized meal, a home-based service called in Hebrew, the Seder.
Seder means order and is a dinner when food is eaten in a prescribed manner. The entire dinner is based upon the Greek symposium, when cultured Greeks, and later Romans, would lean on pillows, eating and drinking in a prescribed order, while debating a selected topic. For evidence of a symposium, we need look no further than Plato, who actually wrote a book called The Symposium, one of his many drinking-party discussions. The rabbis also might have looked at Petronius, a Latin writer whose work, Dinner at Tramalchio’s, found in the Satyricon, brilliantly satirizes the Roman excesses of the era.
Since Pesach celebrates freedom, the rabbis looked around and wondered: who are free people? Their answer: Roman citizens. For one night, Jews ate like Romans: with a prescribed order of the meal, a specific topic for discussion, the Exodus from Egypt, and a requirement to lean on pillows, since leaning on pillows was what free Romans did.
In just a minute, we will looker deeper into how the rabbis conceived of Pesach; it’s quite different from what the Torah says and, as we will learn in a few weeks, quite different than how Jesus celebrated Pesach. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this is Torah for Christians.
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Welcome back to Torah for Christians. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr. Before we return to our discussion of Pesach, I want to thank you for listening to this podcast. Please remember to review and rate this episode on Apple, Spotify, Facebook, or whatever service you are using. Also, please go back and listen to previous episodes if you have not done so already. A transcript is also available on our Buzzsprout feed. And now, this and many previous episodes are available on our brand-new YouTube channel. And if you would like to read my weekly Torah Study, please go to Bible Stories They (Never) Taught You in Religious School, available for free on www.Substack.com. I have also started another Substack page called Wednesday Torah, where I share random thoughts on the Jewish experience. Please subscribe to both.
Let’s look further into the Rabbinic reframing of Pesach. The Mishnah has an entire Tractate devoted to Passover, called appropriately Pesachim. Nine of the 10 chapters within Pesachim talk about the Passover sacrifice and the permitted and forbidden foods for the holiday. But in Chapter 10, we find the first description of what became the modern Passover Seder. While we will discuss the Seder in an upcoming episode, we can ask ourselves today why we had to make this severe change.
The first reason is that Jews could not offer sacrifices anymore; the Temple had just been destroyed. The Jews were adrift, not sure how they would worship their God or celebrate their holy days without the sacrificial system in place. Of course, Jews in Babylonia and in the Mediterranean Basin were long used to worshipping without sacrifices but still, devotion to the Jerusalem Temple was still a signal aspect of Jewish worship throughout the 1st Century, CE – and even beyond. After all, Jews believed then, and many still believe now, that when God sends the Messiah to earth – for the first time – the Temple will be rebuilt, and sacrificial worship will resume.
Rabbi Gamliel II, who was the leader of the Jerusalem Jewish community after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, instituted the Seder ceremony. The Mishnah details how he took certain foods, in a certain order, and told the story of the Exodus.
Along with the commandments to eat Pesach, Matzah and Maror, the Torah also commanded us to tell the story of the Exodus to our children every year. Rabbi Gamliel II began to tell the story of the Exodus, in a manner geared towards children. He turned a messy, bloody Temple ritual into a clean, optimistic experience: gathering around a table, leaning on pillows, drinking wine, eating symbolic foods, and telling a story – just like a Greco-Roman symposium. But instead of focusing on a philosophical abstract, the Seder told a story, the story of the Exodus.
The Gemara, the rabbinic commentary on the Mishnah which, when combined with Mishnah and other older literature, comprises the Talmud, expands upon the Seder and further defines which foods are permitted and forgiven. Later in our history, other legal scholars, such as Rashi in 12th Century Germany and Maimonides, in 13th Century Spain and later Egypt, each made special contributions. Others have added their input as well. In fact, the Passover Seder and its attending rituals and customs are the heart of Jewish creativity today. As we will learn soon, there has been constant debate over what foods are kosher for Passover, what should be in the Haggadah, the book we use for the Seder service, and how we should observe the entire 7 or 8 days of Passover, including the final days, when we celebrate the Crossing of the Sea of Reeds.
I want to thank you for listening to Torah for Christians. Please remember to rate and review this, and previous episodes on Apple, Spotify, or other streaming services. You can also like and hear us on Facebook and now, you can subscribe to the podcast on Youtube and read a transcript on Buzzsprout.
Next week, we will continue our discussion of Pesach when we talk about Passover foods. There are some foods that are specific to the holiday, such as matzah. But there are also some severe prohibitions, foods that we cannot eat during the week of Passover. In the next episode, we will learn the reasons for these rather complex rules.
Finally, I have begun to publish a weekly Torah Study, called Bible Stories They Never Taught You in Religious School. It’s available for free on www.substack.com. You can also sign up on Substack for the newsletter to appear every Friday in your Inbox. You can also find my new column, Wednesday Torah there, where I offer weekly musings about life, the universe and everything.
Have a wonderful week and remember; Hinei Mah Tov … L’hitra’ot, till we meet again. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this is Torah for Christians.
