Shabbat Haggadol: What holiday are we celebrating this week? 5774/2014

When we sit at the Seder table, and when we take our matzah to work, maybe even to school, in the spring, what holiday are we celebrating?

Passover, Pesach, Zeman Cheruteinu, Chag Ha’Aviv, Chag Ha’matzot – While this holiday is not the only one with more than one name, it is a defining holiday for us as the Jewish people.  Without the events that this holiday remembers, we would not even be a people, and so the confusion of its identity is a challenge to us. 

Are we celebrating ‘Passover’, the Anglicized name of the holiday based on a loose translation of the way God seems to ‘skip over’, lifsoach, the homes of the Israelites in Egypt and carry out the 10^th plague against the homes of the Egyptians.  We should be clear here that the ‘skip over’ translation is not the primary way to translate this verb.  A better translation is ‘to protect’, after all, God knows who lives in the house whether there is blood on the lintel or not. 

Are we celebrating Pesach? – the name of the holiday connected to a springtime sacrifice of a lamb to be eaten by a group of people.  In the spring lambing season, a sacrifice made to God that expresses thankfulness for the new life and bounty?  We no longer make this sacrifice.  We memorialize it with the Zeroa, the bone, that we put on our Seder plate.  The days of Jewish throngs making their Pesach sacrifices on the Temple Mount are long gone.

Are we celebrating Zeman Cheruteinu, the time of our freedom, appreciation to God for letting us go from Egypt?  We celebrate this freedom in the Torah with song and dance and immediately in the Torah we begin to regress into complaints, murmuring, and wishing we were back in Egypt where everything was “better”.

Are we celebrating ‘Chag Ha’Aviv’, the Holiday of Spring, the renewal of nature in connection with renewal of the people.  The egg (and green vegetable) on the Seder plate are symbols new life and the circle of life and time.  And yet this meaning carries a pastoral or peaceful sense of nature and its rhythm, rather than the harried and hurried way we leave Egypt.

Chag Ha’matzot – The matzah holiday, a feast of unleavened bread that reminds us of leaving Egypt, that connects with the harvest of new grain and throwing away the old sourdough leavening agent as we welcome the new crop, as we hold off on baking the new crop into bread.  Today, most of us are not farmers anymore, and waiting to eat from the new grain crop, chadash, instead of the old, yashon, is more an issue of whether our kosher bakery or restaurant advertises yashon.

These reflections on each name of the holiday suggest that each name tells part of the story, not the whole story.  We can observe a holiday with all these parts, maybe not in equal measure given who we are, but in proportions that are meaningful to us even though the conditions of the first Passover, and of the ancient Israelites, have morphed into the Jewish life we live today.

To the traditional names of the holiday we can add others that are meaningful – I would add Chag Ha’Haggadah, the Holiday of the Storybook, a holiday that celebrates the gift of joining together to tell our stories, to exchanges ideas, ask questions.  Or Zman Ha’Achdut, in the 1990s, statistics suggested that some 90% of American Jews participated in a Seder, now the numbers may be closer to 70%, still, that is a very good showing.  There is a sense of achdut, unity, that well more than half of Jews of all backgrounds will be participating in the event.

Any other ideas of what we might call this holiday?

Whatever name or names we use, may it be a happy, healthy, and meaningful holiday for us all.  Shabbat Shalom and Chag Same’ach.