PESACH

Apr 15

PESACH 5784

Pesach is one of the core ancestral religious holidays that was celebrated from our earliest days as a people. It has both highly significant historical/theological meaning and agricultural importance. I’ve a lot to say, so let’s get to it.

I will discuss the following themes:

· Historical/theological view of the holiday compared to agricultural meanings.
· The role of magic in the holiday
· Exodus as myth, not history
· How do we reclaim the agricultural meaning of the holiday?
· Incorporating the Goddess and the God

A number of holidays have both agricultural and historical/theological significance. We haven’t had a holiday since Sukkot that had agricultural significance. Let me first outline the difference between the historical/theological and agricultural views of any holiday, then talk about the specifics of each as they apply to Pesach.

Every holiday we currently celebrate has an historical/theological meaning. I use the term historical/theological because all the holidays are presented with an historical origin and a meaning about the Jewish people’s relationship with the divine. The term historical/theological isn’t mine, but I can’t find/recall the origin of it.

The historical story of the Exodus is well known. We know the story because we recite it every year. We were slaves to Pharoah in Egypt and he made our lives miserable. The divine heard our prayers, revealed himself to Moses at the burning bush and sent Moses with his brother Aaron to free his people. Pharoah resisted, God sent the plagues in a back and forth where the Pharoah would say yes and then renege on his deal. Finally the angel of death visited every Egyptian house and inflicted on them the death of every first born son. Pharoah relents, the people leave, supposedly not having enough time to let the bread rise, hence our eating of matzah, and then Pharoah reneges yet again and this time his army, in the words of the great Negro spiritual “Mary Don’t You Weep”, is drownded.

The historical/theological meaning is all about being liberated from external oppression, from the narrow place of Egypt (the literal meaning of mitzrayim, the Hebrew name for Egypt). The theme of liberation is indigenously and contemporaneously extended to internal oppression. Our ancient texts tell us of the slave mentality of the people that led the divine to force them to all die in the desert and not enter the promised land, except for Joshua and Caleb. The liberation from Egypt is effected by the strong arm of the divine who literally overpowers the Pharoah.

This meaning of the holiday, annually reenacted and codified in our Passover Seders has been a very powerful message for many oppressed people, not just we Jews. Deliverance from slavery is something we all need. It is a message that bears repeating. It is a message that bears regular investigation. Who/what are the pharaohs in my life? Where am I being a Pharoah?

The agricultural meaning of the holiday is all about praying for the rain to cease. Our ancestors needed the rain to cease so that the grain could dry out and be safely harvested and stored. Our ancestors grew two main types of grain; barley which was harvested immediately after Pesach and then wheat. The wheat harvest was finished at Shavuot. We’ll discuss that when we get to the month of Sivan.

If it rained, the grain would not be sufficiently dry and would rot or mold during the winter. This would lead to much hardship. Grain provided at least 50% of the calories of the people of ancient Israel. A wet period grain harvesting period meant hunger and even starvation. Israel is a somewhat brittle ecosystem, where both drought and too much rain at a certain time could be very destructive. So Passover was all about praying that the rains would cease so that there could be a successful grain harvest.

What if anything does the distinction between agricultural meanings and historical/theological meanings open up for you? Who/what are the pharaohs in my life? Where am I being a Pharoah?

How did we pray for the rains to cease? We did acts of magic. I’m going to do an excursus on magic because magic is such a loaded term.

Magic is really hard to define. There’s a long history of scholarly debate that I’m not going to recapitulate here. Much of it is highly connected to how indigenous societies are viewed and reeks of the assumptions of modernity. Most views of magic emphasize it as a kind of technology to accomplish certain “this worldly” goals such as health, successful harvests, protections from evil etc. There are two major problems with most views of magic.

The first problem is that magic is viewed as a kind of primitive science which we no longer need now that we have the TRUTH of science. This perspective denigrates the scientific abilities of indigenous people who were incredible careful and diligent observers of their environment and constantly experimented and improved hunting, gathering, planting and breeding methods. It also assumes that all the miracles we read about can and should be given a scientific explanation and basically be explained away.

The second problem is the tension between “this worldly” and “other worldly” or “salvation” goals. The basic idea is that magic is oriented towards things like better crops, health, fertility etc compared to the more lofty goals of following the divine word and meriting a place in heaven or more mystical aims of merging with the divine. The theological assumption is that these other worldly goals are “higher” or better than this worldly goals. I basically completely disagree with this assumption. I think that we merit the benefits of better crops, health, fertility etc if to the extent that we are aligned with the divine and living rightly. Thus this worldly goals are actually tightly connected with the divine. Second, I certainly don’t believe in any of these other worldly goals. I don’t think there’s some kind of heaven where we hang out learning Torah until the Messiah comes (the traditional Jewish view of heaven). I don’t believe in a kind of mystical practice that is disengaged from the doings of the world.

What’s your view about the relationship between this worldly and other worldly goals?

Magic, of course, gets a bad rap in our modern world. The folks committed to the faith of science routinely tell us that if we only understood everything, we wouldn’t resort to magic. But we are never going to understand everything. I believe that there are powers in the world that cannot be intellectually captured by science and can be called upon through magic. And, that doesn’t mean, don’t lock your doors.

I think it is possibly easier to know when something is magical than it is to define it. This is a core point made by the great Israeli scholar of Jewish magic Yuval Harari (a different Yuval Harari than the guy who wrote Sapiens) I’m going to use the word “magic” in the sense of something that is designed to have an impact on the world and works because it creates an alignment with cosmic forces—it doesn’t work in the way that cause and effect science does. The magic connected to the Pesach story includes sympathetic magic of matzah and roasted meat. The protective magic of Pesach lies in the blood used on both the doorposts of the Hebrew dwellings in Egypt and in Zipporah’s saving Moses and their sons on the journey from Midian to Egypt. I’m going to start with sympathetic magic.

Sympathetic magic is the idea of like influencing like. In our crude idea of “voodoo,” a practitioner sticks pins in a representation of someone and they will feel like pins have actually been stuck in them because they are like their representation of them.

We’ve all learned that we eat matzah on Passover because we didn’t have enough time to let the dough rise. We are even told this in Exodus (12:34,39). However, a close reading of the text puts the lie to this explanation. First, the Israelites are given time to shake down their neighbors. You are about to flee your house because a wildfire is coming. What’s more important, making bread ready for your journey or knocking on your neighbor’s door and asking to borrow their silver and gold? (Exodus 11:2-3). Further, our ancestors were given four days notice of the ritual. Exodus 12:3 has the Israelites choosing a lamb or a goat without blemish for the sacrifice on the 10th of the month, and keeping watch over it until the 14th of the month when the sacrifice was slaughtered. Time enough to make bread. Then Chapter 12 verses 8 and 9 tell us about how we can eat the meat and goes out of the way to say that it can only be roasted, not cooked with water, and consumed that very night (I don’t have a theory for why it has to be eaten that night.)

What matzah and this direction for how to cook the meat have in common is that both are dry. Dry is super important because of what is happening ecologically in the land of Israel, as we’ve talked about above. Eating dry foods is a way of praying for dry weather and a way of aligning ourselves with what we hope will happen in the more than human world. It’s magic because eating matzah is a prayer for the rains to cease through alignment with the divine, rather than using some kind of purely technological approach such as the antithesis of cloud seeding. For a wonderful book on ancient Israel agriculture see Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel.

Wet and dry can be difficult metaphors for us to grasp if we come from an eco system where precipitation is a year round phenomenon, though we do talk about droughts and going through dry spells when it comes to creativity or romantic partners. It’s perhaps more common for us to talk about hot and cold, as in someone with a temper runs too hot or someone who hides or suppresses too much of their emotions is cold. The advantage of the unfamiliarity of the metaphor for those of us who have grown up in Continental Ecosystems is that dwelling with it might open up some new horizons precisely because of its unfamiliarity.

The sympathetic magic performed for the rains to cease during Passover has its counterpart with the sympathetic magic of the pouring of water each day during Sukkot when we pray for the rains to start. The ongoing concern is for the proper balance—rains in season and dryness in season.

What in your life needs to dry out, like matzah? What needs to be wetter? What kinds of actions can you take to be more aligned with the divine, however you define that. What impact would that alignment have on the more than human world?

Protective magic is a major and frequent kind of magic. Think of a mezuzah. I hang mezuzot on the doorposts of my house because it is a traditional thing to do and I even know where it comes from—the v’ahavta, the first paragraph after the Sh’ma. Mezuzot are protection devices, as demonstrated by Joshua Trachtenberg in Jewish Magic and Superstition (a terrible title). The mezuzah is supposed to magically protect the house—it isn’t an alarm system that notifies a company about an unauthorized entrance. What about T’fillat Haderech, the prayer for safe journeying? It isn’t a warning system that notifies you when you are about to be robbed. What about amulets for traffic safety that hang from rear view mirrors and are popular throughout the world? They aren’t sophisticated accident avoidance software that we are starting to see in cars.

The blood on the two doorposts and the lintel of the doorway (12:22) is basically the same idea. You might argue that the blood isn’t protective magic, but is rather a sign. The argument would be that the blood it is the equivalent of a stop sign, telling YHVH and his destroyer to pass over this house and go on to the next one. (12:21:-23). There are two reasons why I think the blood is protective magic, not just a simple sign.

First, the word “Pesach” can be translated as protective offering. This translation dates as far back as the Septuagint, the original translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek in the mid-3rd Century BCE. If that translation is correct, the logic is that the sacrificed lamb, the pesach, is protecting us through the lamb’s blood. And where is that lambs blood that it is protecting us? On the doorposts of our houses, just like mezuzot later on are.

Second, we’ve already seen blood as having magical protective properties when Zipporah circumcises her son and saves Moses’ life. The Zipporah fragment (4:24-6) is one of the most confusing set of verses in the Hebrew Bible. “At a night encampment on the way, YHVH encountered him and sought to kill him. So Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched his legs with it, saying “You are truly a bridegroom of blood to me.” And when he [YHVH] left him [Moses] alone, she added “A bridegroom of blood because of the circumcision.” Leaving aside all the confusing elements of the story—why does the divine seek to kill Moses, why isn’t the son already circumcised, why does Zipporah do the circumcising, what’s at least somewhat clear is that the blood acts to protect the family, in the same way that the blood of lambs will protect the Hebrews from the killing of the first born. I think the logic is that a donation of a minimal amount of blood to the divine offers protection against the taking of all of the blood through death.

The blood on the doorposts doesn’t literally stop the “destroyer” who killed the first born of the Egyptians—the blood isn’t some kind of lock that mechanically keeps beings out. It’s protection magic. The blood on Moses’ leg doesn’t literally stop the divine from killing Moses. It’s protection magic.

What things would you want to be magically protected against?

The exodus from Egypt, in all likelihood never happened historically. Why do I say this? Two core reasons. First, if the Israelites sojourned in Egypt for 430 years as the text tells us (Exodus 12:40), and then came to Canaan in a mere 40 years, then Israelite culture should reflect that sojourn in Egypt through material artifacts like pottery, agricultural implements, baskets and altars. But we see no archaeological evidence of any Egyptian influence on material culture.

Second, if Pharoah and his army indeed drowned, you’d think that would be a prominent enough thing to merit mention in the Egyptian histories of Egypt. But there simply is no mention of anything remotely like this in Egyptian sources. My view of the lack of historical accuracy of the Exodus the common position of archaeologists.

Does it matter?

One of the most fascinating characteristics of the Hebrew Bible is that it presents myths as if they were history. What do I mean by this? Myths, in my use of the term following Mircea Eliade, a preeminent scholar of the history of religions, are stories about Gods, heroes or revered ancestors woven with symbols which cannot be fully explained, following Paul Ricoeur’s view of symbols in The Symbolism of Evil. These stories are beyond our human ability to replicate even while we seek to emulate the God, heroes or revered ancestors and thus draw closer to the sacred.

History, on the other hand, is an attempt to recount stories in factual ways to inform us about what happened. Writing history, contrary to our popular image, isn’t simply a recital of facts. Every historian chooses what s/he will include and exclude and tells their stories based on who they are and their own purposes in being an historian.

Yet there has been general agreement that you can’t simply ignore inconvenient facts and pretend that they don’t exist (though this agreement is breaking down as we see in our politics). If you are writing about the American Civil War, even if you think Robert E. Lee is the greatest general ever to walk the face of the earth, you still discuss his decision to send Picket’s brigade straight up an open hill into the face of a well prepared, numerically stronger and dug in Union army that led to the destruction of Picket’s force.

But the writer of myth could ignore this inconvenient fact because his/her purpose is not to describe what happened using some kind of general consensus about what is a fact and what is not. No, the mythologist writes, or almost always speaks, to describe how the presence of the sacred unfolds in our profane world and how we imperfect humans might more closely align ourselves with the sacred.

Eliade writes somewhere that myth is truer than history. I take this to mean that myth speaks to us more deeply than history. It connects us to the realm of the sacred or to spirit in a way that mere history can never do. Evaluating a myth by asking how historically accurate it is e.g. was the world really created in six days, did the Red Sea really part and swallow Pharoah’s army, is completely missing the point. It is asking the wrong question. The right question is whether the myth draws us closer to the sacred.

The myth we retell in our seders, it seems to me, is an absolute model for what it takes to address oppression. There’s an external component, the Pharoahs of evil rulers, bad bosses, the capitalist patriarchal system etc., but defeating that external component isn’t enough without internal transformation. The necessity for our inner spiritual work is given to us by the portrayal of our ancestors who were forced to wander and die in the desert because they brought their internalized Egypt with them. Inner and external transformation are both necessary, we are being taught. They go together. We have to change the world and change ourselves. And most of us are drawn one way or the other.

What, if anything, opens up for you in thinking about this distinction between myth and history and the elevation of myth as a path? Are you more drawn to internal or external transformation?

How might we reclaim the agricultural meaning of the holiday? We have to address at least two things that distance many of us from the original agricultural sense of the holiday. First, and above all, the vast majority of us don’t depend upon local rain and the cessation of rain in order to have enough to eat. If there is a drought in Iowa, that will certainly impact the farmers who live in Iowa, but most of us won’t even know about it and we’ll continue to merrily buy our groceries at the grocery store with nary an idea of the contribution or lack thereof by Iowan farmers to what we are eating. Second, many of us live in a radically different kind of ecosystem where we want it to rain between Pesach and Shavuot so that the corn, the dominant grain crop of the places in the United States where most of the population lives, can grow.

How might we bridge some small part of the gap that exists between most of us and the growing of food? Here are some suggestions. For more on this, see Wendell Berry’s essay “The pleasures of Eating” in What are People For. Berry writes that he is often asked what can city people do about agricultural problems, and he responds “eat responsibly” The essay is an expansion of this idea which starts with growing whatever small part of your food you can and includes knowing about how and where the food you consume is produced.

So start with planting something during Pesach. Or visiting a farmer’s market and buying local produce or animal products. Or reading about the animal concentration camps in which most of the animal products we eat are produced. Or visiting a farm. There’s this whole thing call agritainment (agricultural entertainment) which is one of the ways that farms are surviving economically—think pumpkin patches in the fall, but maybe there’s a farm store or tour. If you really want to be radical, root out all the products grown in ways you would disapprove of with the vigor that our ancestors rooted out hametz (leavening). You get the idea.

What about those of us who live in a Continental climate where it rains year round, and the prayers for dryness don’t make any ecological sense? I live in such a climate in the mid-Atlantic. So first, I grow a garden and Pesach usually falls around when I start doing a decent amount of planting. So I intend to pray beseeching that we be blessed with all the conditions we need to grow a good crop of lettuce, peas, beans, arugula, squash, carrots etc that I will plant. I will recite this prayer before I plant the first seeds, and then again at the start of Passover. The second thing I intend to do is to circumambulate my garden both clockwise and counterclockwise. Maybe I will do it seven times, I’m not sure. But definitely both clockwise and counterclockwise because a successful garden is a marriage of the earth and the sky. Because I want to bring down the rain (counterclockwise) and have my plants grow up towards the heavens (clockwise)

This, or something like this, is a ritual to be enacted at the beginning of the growing season, rather than at the beginning of the harvest season. That core difference is a difference in the ecosystem in which I and many others live, compared to the ecosystem of our ancestors’.

What, if any, steps will you take to reclaim the agricultural meaning of the holiday?

The Goddess and the God or female and male divine energies for Pesach. Obviously, it is possible to tell the story and even reclaim the agricultural origins of the holiday without venturing into this territory. When we tell the traditional story, there are women with significant roles—Shifrah, Puah, Miriam, Yocheved and the Pharoah’s daughter. The name of the divine is YHVH and male pronouns are used. We can easily acknowledge the decisive role of women, add a cup of Miriam to accompany Elijah’s cup, sing Debbie Friedman’s Miriam the prophetess, put an orange on the seder plate-- and feel like we are paying attention to the importance of female energy in the story.

But part of my personal spiritual journey is to find ways to acknowledge and worship both the Goddess and the God, both male and female sacred energy. Male sacred energy permeates our ancestral texts, but there’s a female layer that is often hidden in the shadows. I want to bring that out into the daylight and then find ways to worship both male and female Gods and Goddesses.

I see two ways in which we can uplift the divine female within this story. These are the presence of El Shaddai and a way of interpreting why we are told that matzah is because we didn’t have enough time to let the dough rise, rather than the sympathetic magic motivation I discussed above.

Here’s how the parshat Vaeira begins. “God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am YHVH. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by the name of YHVH. I also established my covenant with them, to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they lived as sojourners. I have now heard the moaning of the Israelites, because they are holding them in bondage, and I have remembered my covenant. Say therefore to the Israelite people: I am YHVH. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptian. (6:2-7)

This sounds a lot like the people might know who El Shaddai is, but not know who this new guy YHVH is. We are readers of a text where El Shaddai and YHVH as proper names of the divine have already been blended together in Genesis, and YHVH is the predominant name of the divine. But as I read Shemot 6:2-7, there is a felt need to make sure that the hearers/readers of this text understand that El Shaddai and YHVH are one and the same. That means that the listeners/readers of this text might well think, or might even be predisposed to think, that El Shaddai and YHVH are different beings. After 3,000 years, we’ve mostly lost this ability to think they are different beings, having had monotheism drummed into our brains from our early days in Sunday schools through any advanced study we’ve done. But put aside your predispositions, what Gadamer calls your pre-judgments, and just read the text I’ve retyped. “God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am YHVH. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El Shaddai, but I did not make Myself known to them by the name of YHVH.”

Doesn’t that read like this character YHVH is attempting to persuade the listener/reader that YHVH and El Shaddai are actually the same, even though they have different names? Please remember that the Hebrew Bible unambiguously knows and acknowledges the possibility of other divine beings besides the ones it claims as the one God—think of the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal as one example or think of the ten commandments “you shall have no other Gods besides me.”

So who might El Shaddai be? El means “God.” It’s grammatically male. Then what do we mean by Shaddai? This is not at all clear. Hebrew is a kind of language that lends itself to this kind of ambiguity. This provides great grist for creating midrash, a both ancient and current core kind of Jewish sacred literature. Midrash are stories that address ambiguities in our inherited texts. This built in ambiguity also frustrates people who want one clear truth. Fortunately, that’s not me and I hope it isn’t you. Let me share a few theories from scholars about “Shaddai.”

One theory is that “Shaddai” refers to wilderness, mountain or an uncultivated field, as the Hebrew word “sadeh” means field. My Hebrew/ancient Semitic languages aren’t good enough to follow the details of the argument for why this isn’t the God of the fields rather than the God of the wilderness, but that’s the argument of a scholar named Ernst Knauf. This ties nicely into the demand to go worship in the wilderness that is prominent in this parsha.

A second theory is that the term means plunder, overpower or make desolate. This is based on the Hebrew shin, dalet, dalet root. So this would mean something like the destroyer God, which calls to mind Kali of Hindu fame. This also fits with later usages of the “El Shaddai” in other parts of the Hebrew Bible.

A third theory is that Shaddai refers to breasts. Shin dalet means breasts. Thus El Shaddai might mean “the many breasted God” and might indeed be female. David Biale, a contemporary scholar at Berkeley, argues that of the six times that El Shaddai is mentioned in Genesis, five of them have to do with fertility blessings for the patriarchs. Biale then continues to say that later on this meaning was “forgotten” (more likely repressed in my view) and then the meaning of the word as related to power or destruction was adopted. Biale, David (February 1982). "The God with Breasts: El Shaddai in the Bible"

I strongly believe that it is authentic Jewish/Hebrew practice to reclaim any of these three meanings of El Shaddai as indigenously Jewish/Hebrew views of the divine.

Why we are told this story of the matzah being because we were in a hurry, rather than because we needed to be aligned with the divine to participate in the cessation of rain so we could have a grain harvest? This is pure speculation on my part, but it seems to me that the editors of our text deliberately wanted to elevate the historical/theological meaning of the holiday and diminish the agricultural meaning. Sure, they might have done that because they were relatively speaking urbanities, but the total population of Jerusalem during the period of the editing of the Bible seems to have been less than 10,000 people, (https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-sites-places/jerusalem/ancient-jerusalem/) so there’s just no way they were that divorced from or ignorant of agricultural reality the way we are today.

Here's my speculation. The grain harvest reminds everyone of the union of male and female. We are literally eating the babies of the barley and wheat plants, babies that were formed through sexual union of male and female. If your project is to elevate a male God and diminish any female Goddesses, if your project is to have only one God, agriculture is simply not your friend. Worshipping YHVH only is like having a rooster, no chickens and expecting eggs. Or a bull without any cows and expecting calves. Not going to happen. On the other hand, talk of Pharoahs and magical combat and then revelation at a mountain and laws upon laws—for all that we can pretend that this is possible without much female input and certainly without any Goddesses.

The way I read the Hebrew Bible, one core purpose of the people who wrote and edited it is to elevate the worship of YHVH and denigrate and diminish the worship of any other God or Goddess. Agriculture is a fundamentally non monotheistic activity because it is all about an equal relationship amongst male and female plants, humans and the land, rain and sun, warmth and cold. There’s just nothing one sided about agriculture. Thus, if I want to promote monolatry (worshipping only one God while recognizing the existence of others—this was the Biblical view of God) and then monotheism (belief in only one God existing) decreasing the importance of agriculture is a really logical strategy.

Does the view of El Shaddai as the many breasted God speak to you? What about the idea of the decreasing the importance of grain harvest as a strategy to promote monolatry and monotheism?

QUESTIONS