AGRICULTURAL AND HISTORICAL/THEOLOGICAL MEANINGS OF HOLIDAYS

Many Jewish holidays have both agricultural and historical/theological meanings.  This blog post is motivated by a conversation I had at Wilderness Torah’s Sukkot on the Farm program who was interested in the interaction of these two approaches to creating meaning.

I’m going to explain what I mean by the terms.  Then I am going to examine how they play out in Pesach as an example.  They also play out in Shavuot and Sukkot, but I will focus just on Pesach as an example because this is an overlong blog post.   Then I offer a speculation about how these two sets of interpretations developed and the purpose of them.

Historical/theological meanings are where we are given the historical context of a holiday in our ancient past along with a theological meaning.  The agricultural interpretation is one that is tied to the agricultural cycle of ancient Israel.  The historical/theological meanings are far more familiar to us because it is what most of us have been taught, given our lack of connection with the land.  This lack of connection manifests even if we are in Israel or a comparable ecosystem such as Northern California because very, very, very few of us are farmers, and even fewer of us are farmers working within anything akin to the priorities/confines of ancient Israeli agriculture.  We should note that often the historical meanings are actually mythical meanings presented as history.  This is the case as I have argued elsewhere about the exodus from Egypt.  The exodus never actually happened; it is a myth that is presented as history.

We’re all familiar with the historical/theological meaning of Pesach.  The divine saw our struggles as slaves in Egypt and remembered his covenant with the people.  He sent Moses and Aaron to Pharoah to demand the release of the people, Pharoah resisted, and the plagues were visited upon the Egyptians. Finally he relented after the killing of the first born, the people left, Pharoah pursued and his army got drownded, in the words of the Negro Spiritual. The theological meaning is a message of hope and freedom for the oppressed along with a show of the great power of YHVH that bears witness to his strength to all the other nations.

The agricultural meaning of Pesach is a core pleading for the rains to cease so that the grains can dry out and not rot on the vine.  Here’s what I wrote on my commentary on Parshat Bo. 

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 that in this parsha (Exodus 12:34,39).  But this simply makes no sense in the story. 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? (11:2-3). Further, our ancestors were given four days notice of the ritual. 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 go 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.  Passover marks the transition from the wet season to the dry season and that is crucial for the ripening of first the barley and then the wheat.  If it rains too much during the 50 days of the grain harvest aka the Omer to modern Jews, the grain will sprout and then can’t be stored for the winter. Given that grain is an absolute mainstay of the diet, a wet spring when it is supposed to turn dry was absolutely crucial to our ancestors who would do whatever they could to ensure the needed dryness—including afflicting us with matzah.  For a wonderful book on ancient Israel agriculture see Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel.  

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 it isn’t harvesting corn and putting it in enormous grain elevators and frying the planet with natural gas to dry the harvested corn which is not dry enough to store.

This is a really different meaning of the holiday and the core practice of eating matzah than the historical/theological presentation of the holiday as about freedom from slavery and matzah as a function of fleeing quickly.  And it is not one that is well known.

I believe, and this is the start of my speculation, that the agricultural meanings came first. The historical/theological meanings are added onto the agricultural ones.  Why?  I believe that the agricultural meanings were associated with the Goddess.  The proponents of YHVH were part of a move towards more and more patriarchal orientation and pushed hard for what scholars call monolatry, the worship of only one God, YHVH.   So how do we suppress the Goddess and elevate YHVH?  One answer is to create historical/theological meanings associated with YHVH that supersede the agricultural ones associated with the Goddess.  This is speculation, but I think informed speculation.

I’m interested in an earth based Judaism that reclaims the agricultural meanings of our holidays as ways to be connected with the more than human world.  This means returning to our ancestors’ worship of the Goddess and the agricultural meanings of our holidays.