JEWISH CULTURE: Part 3

The Origins and Meaning of the Seder

March 9, 2016

Kiddush

Jews celebrate holy time as more significant than both holy people and holy space.

Certainly you have experienced differences in sensing time. Birthdays don't feel the same as school or work days. Funerals and illnesses engender different emotions than family celebrations. We experience time variably, depending on its emotional quality and depth of meaning.

What  does holy mean? We describe God as Ultimate Reality, and the locus of all power. God is, therefore, Absolute Holiness. Although God is wholly other than humanity, of an entirely different existential quality, nonetheless we intuit access to God and say that certain people, places and times make God's presence more available. When we encounter holy people, places or times we gain greater awareness of Ultimate Holiness, the holiness of the Divine.

The Torah proclaims that certain times are intrinsically holier than other times. Whether we participate in intrinsic holiness or cause the holiness  is a matter of debate. But certainly part of human life is experiencing ultimate moments we call holy.

We Jews ritually bookend holy time, designating both the beginning and the end. But not all holy time is the same!

The 3 pilgrimage festivals: Passover (Pesah), the Feast of Weeks (Shavuot) and the Feast of Booths (Sukkot) are all called holy by the Torah. We initiate holy times in several ways: candle lighting, a blessing for wine that marks the time and a blessing for the holy day itself. The last we call kiddush, meaning "sanctification: to make holy." The blessing acknowledges the special nature of the time, like the difference between foothills and the Rockies.

Shabbat and the High Holy Days are also sacred times, but of a higher degree of sacrality. Therefore, when Shabbat coincides with Passover Eve it adds sacred to sacred. Just to complicate things, the intermediate days of Sukkot and Pesah, days 2 through 6, are also holy, but to a lesser degree. Therefore sacred times vary in their magnitude of holiness, some more serious with deeper holiness than others, the Chesapeake Bay versus the Atlantic Ocean in depth.

Sometimes sacred times coincide, as this year of 5776 when the first seder is on the Eve of Sabbath. The degrees of holiness will be mentioned in prayers so that we can understand the level of holy time we are experiencing and act accordingly.  We will see how that can be used to enhance the experience of the holy and to fit the different circumstances of our lives.  Just as we dress differently for various holy times, depending upon solemnity and theme, so the time differs depending on the occasion.

During extremely holy times, we dedicate the entire day to our relationship with God and family. Yom Kippur is the Mariana Trench of holiness. On lesser times, we may work some, and combine work with holy thoughts and experiences. Jewish tradition grants myriad opportunities for holiness, and a variety of experiences depending upon the degree of holiness, the intention of the holy time, and the theme of the holiday.  The type of holy time may well set up the experience of that time and its content.

Kiddush recognizes 3 different times for the start of Passover: a weekday evening, the Eve of the Sabbath (Erev Shabbat), and Saturday night after the Sabbath (Motza'ei Shabbat). 

Let's look at the themes of the basic kiddush, the prayer ushering in the holiness of the day.

On any Passover eve, at the seder, we recite these words, without the words in parentheses [  ]:

We praise You, God, Sovereign of Existence! You have called us for service from among the peoples, and have sanctified our lives with commandments. In love You have given us [Sabbaths of rest,] festivals for rejoicing, seasons of celebration, this Festival of Unleavened Bread, the time of our freedom, a commemoration of the Exodus from Egypt. Praised are You, Adonai our God, Who gave us this joyful heritage and Who sanctifies [the Sabbath,] Israel, and the festivals.

What themes appear here?

1.    Chosenness: we are a people special to God. Different Jewish theologies think of chosenness differently. The Reconstructionists historically rejected it outright. Orthodox Jews believe that God has one special people among all humanity, and uniquely gave us God's commandments. Reform Jews most often believe that we are the "choosing people," meaning that we choose to be God's hands and feet in the world. Anyone choosing God is therefore chosen.

2.    God gave us special times for rejoicing, and specifically this holy time of unleavened bread, as the Bible calls the 15th of the first Hebrew month, Nisan. It's a sacred time, and commemorates the exodus from Egypt. Jews mention the exodus most frequently in prayers. It constitutes the root experience of the Jewish people, the time when we became bound to God forever. Passover celebrates the most important event in Jewish history, and that event is mentioned multiple times daily in prayer.

3.    God sanctifies both Israel and the holy times, a people and a time, both of which have been set aside by God and have special access to God: the people through performing God's commandments and the time by celebrating God's appointed times.

When seder occurs on Friday night, the kiddush above not only includes the sabbath commemoration in the parentheses, we also precede the kiddush with the same words as we regularly sing on Friday night before kiddush, taken from Genesis 2:1-3, the creation of the Sabbath in the Torah. Thus we add the sabbath feeling to Passover: rest, study, prayer and family.

When the seder occurs at sabbath's departure, we add the spices of the havdalah, "separation," ceremony. While traditionally we say that future redemption will occur in Nisan, just as this first redemption from slavery occurred in Nisan, we also have the mythos that the messiah will appear on the sabbath. Thus, we let go of the sabbath with reluctance, as the messiah again has failed to come, and we relinquish the "taste of heaven" that shabbat feeds us.

But when the seder follows shabbat, we go from "holy to holy," from sabbath and its messianic expectations to the time of redemption. It's a different set of sensations from a normal sabbath departure.

In a future post we will also see how the art of medieval haggadahs complicated this transition even more.