Ivan Ciment’s Passover Sermonette 2000 — 17 April 2000 God’s Place at the Seder Table

This month in Phoenix I sat at a dinner next to the head of a rabbinical cemetery (I meant seminary — just wanted to be sure you’re listening). She wanted to talk about the Bar Mitzvah ceremony. She took her son to the Canadian Rockies and was at a museum for Native Americans. A teenager there asked her son to explain what they heard was some type of puberty-initiation rite among the Jewish Tribe. He went on to tell her son that in their tribe they pass 3 things to their children as a heritage — their songs, stories and their masks. At our Bar Mitzvah, the boy sings a song — the parsha — and makes a speech, but in their culture the boy has to write his own song. But overall, we have lots in common with these people.

The Seder is the most observed ritual we Jews have to transmit our heritage — we sing songs, read stories and our masks are the roles we play at the Seder where everyone has a certain thing to do and is assumed to be part of a category — the wise son, the wicked, the simple, the ignorant, the one who holds the washing cup, the one who finds the afikoman. We try every year to explain the origins of the things we do but have long learned that the question is more the point than the answer. If we knew all the answers (especially since we already know how the story ends), it’d be real boring. And the point of the Seder is to raise questions.

Rabbi Soloveitchik said that in our time the Seder brings out the conflict of the Jew living in modernity. One night a year we retreat from our world to relive a sort of fantasy we never personally experienced. We engage in conflicts — dip bitter herbs into sweet haroseth — we extricate freedom from slavery in a spiritual sense as we struggle with religion and the world at large. It’s appropriate to reflect on Big Questions at the Seder.

* * *

Last November, our family had an interesting shabbat table discussion. I mentioned all the articles being printed in the Israeli papers about the biblical archeologists who were saying there was no proof of any Jewish slavery in Egypt and no Exodus. I just checked and even the history book I read at Yeshiva University for my undergraduate course says so. The opposing experts said — well, you can’t prove something didn’t happen just because there’s no evidence that it DID happen. That’s not exactly a proof either. So I asked the question — what would you do if it turned out with absolute certainty that there was no slavery in Egypt, no Exodus, no Mount Sinai, and basically, we’re just walking around with this great story called the Torah with lots of good ideas for the world and the family that have lasted these 3,000 years? Some people said, “I’d stop keeping the mitzvahs, because what’s the point?” Well, I continued to ask other people the same question during the year and the survey says that the less religiously observant the person, the more likely they were to say that their belief and observance level within Judaism would NOT be affected just because the Bible wasn’t as divine as originally thought. Now, of course, one who is not Orthodox doesn’t believe that God wrote every word of the Bible in the first place, so it makes sense that it wouldn’t make much of a difference to almost 90% of the Jews that you might ask. This is a relevant question at the Seder since new Haggadahs are being written that take God out of the story of the Exodus and people are having Seders with these Haggadahs.

There is reason enough to be concerned to want to analyze a bigger question — Is there intrinsic value to 3,000 years of Jewish heritage — our stories, our songs and our masks — apart from the question of the divinity of the Bible, or are the 2 so interconnected that God is vital to the essence of the tribe? This is a fundamental issue that everyone has to deal with because everyone who is Jewish believes in God to a certain degree and does things based on what they believe. Everybody here believes what they believe and does what they do.

* * *

Now, What does an observant Jew do that makes a person call him or her observant? Shabbos and Kosher are the biggies. The Bible is not clear why we do kosher but there are hints. You either believe or you don’t. Shabbos is a bit more clear. The Bible says we keep Shabbos because God created the world and rested on the seventh day. The kiddush [prayer sanctifying the shabbat] also says that God gave shabbat as a heritage to all the generations of Jews, the first of all timely observances such as our holidays, when we left Egypt. That’s what the Shabbat Kiddush says. The Bible, written a good thousand years earlier, only talks about creation of the world and says nothing about the Exodus.

The Haggadah, as you know, was written about the same time as the Siddur and the Kiddush. The Haggadah is a bit different from the Bible in the way it tells the story of the Exodus — in the Bible, Moses is a central character. In the Haggadah, it’s all God and no Moses. There’s a connection here.

We know, when the rabbis wrote the liturgy, they did so because Judaism was in danger of becoming lost if the stories, songs and rituals didn’t get written down and formalized. There had to be a standard and people were splitting up, going into exile and — we know for a fact — observance of ritual was not uniform. There may not have been conservative or reform but not everyone was observant. So, when they wrote the kiddish, it wasn’t enough of a legacy to tell people to sanctify the sabbath just because god created the world — besides, that’s the same reason for christians and moslems — they added the idea of it being a legacy from god who took us out of egypt and made us a nation, that same god who displaced Moses in the Haggadah they wrote. Today, if you are observant you keep shabbat as your covenant with the god who took you out of Egypt. Even if you’re not observant, you still come to the seder because you are member of a tribe that says god took us out of egypt and this is the annual meeting.

Now, you can go through Chanukah and Purim suspending your belief as to whether or not 5 macabees beat back the whole greek army, the lamp stayed lit for 8 days or whether the jews of persia slaughtered 75,000 persians in a day, took no plunder at all, and drove the persians to want to become jews. You might not want to be the one to say to your kid, There is no Jewish Santa Claus, particularly when all the other kids are having fun at Christmas. But God is not central to the Chanukah or Purim stories so there is no crisis in faith hinging on the outcome. Most Jews have nothing to do with Chanukah or Purim these days and in Israel Chanukah hardly exists as we know it, although I am told that 100 years ago in New York City the Purim Ball was the biggest social event of the year. But you’d have a hard time keeping shabbat and passover around for 3,000 years if you didn’t think that God had something to do with it.

So whether or not it turns out that the Rabbis who wrote the Kiddush and the Haggadah were keeping Biblical heritage alive or helping to create it in the first place when they fixed these leading rituals for posterity, the point is that if God didn’t exist, we would have had to create him. Because there is no staying power in a tribal story, song or mask/ritual that doesn’t put something greater than ourselves as a force at the center of everything. If you don’t believe the Bible is divine, you’d still want to keep the fiction alive because if you didn’t, sooner or later the Exodus is just another story with Charlton Heston or Moses as the lead. How many years would you watch the movie, no matter how good it is? Would the Wizard of Oz have survived 50 years without the magical special effects?

Now how does all this answer the question I raised earlier?

In the short term, the Jew who is not sure about God but thinks that Jewish ethnicity is cool and worth preserving is surviving in conflict with this modern world and at the seder, as Rabbi Soloveitchik said, but let’s see where this goes over the long haul. He thinks of Israel as a place to be with other Jews — most of them not observant — rather than as a God given promise. To him, religious day school education is an option but not a necessity because God said you must teach the Torah to your children. I just saw the Future Generation of Jewish Funders in Phoenix — not one of whom wanted to talk to me about Israel or day school education. They are saving the whales, helping migrant workers, building inner cities, helping feminist causes and feel they are doing Jewish things because they are Jews doing these things. They talk about being Jewish but God and religious observance are not in the picture. Where will these people be in 50 years?

The observant person who says that without God, I might as well stop everything — in the short term, he seems to place all his marbles on certainty of belief. Maybe the deck falls if it’s a fiction — but the point is that he will still be around in 100 years because as long as he doesn’t know otherwise, he can doubt, question and think, but he still fears the consequences of being wrong. So he will observe everything and teach his children the stories and the songs and everyone will wear their masks and perform the rituals — because everything counts on everything. If it turns out there is no Messiah and no God, we didn’t have as much fun as we should have. But if God is there, he is watching us.

The point is not so much whether or not you think our heritage has intrinsic value but whether or not it can survive the long term without God in the picture, even if you think it does have intrinsic value.

* * *

So this is the struggle we face at the Seder. Modernity, science, education vs. ritual, stories, songs. Bad things happen to good people. Free will of Pharohs, miracles, imageries in the Haggadah. More questions than answers. Truths stranger than fiction. What do we believe? What do you get out of the Seder? Is it an abstract story? Is it your heritage? Can you see yourself in the story? Can the story or the experience exist without God and, if it can, for how long? Do you find intrinsic value to continued membership in the Jewish tribe and its 3,000 years of heritage, even if you have no reason to believe? If you don’t believe, are you afraid to be proven wrong? And Finally, Think about this: For how long would you be at a Seder if you didn’t know someone who thought God was inseparable from the Jewish heritage?

My suggestion is that regardless of what you believe — because no one can tell you what to believe — God is central to the Jewish tribal experience, either as a fiction we have to maintain, or as something you believe in. Take it out of the story and the tribe will die in a few generations. The Native Americans have barely survived because of their belief in a spirit beyond themselves. So too must the Jews or any other ethnic religion when they consider their heritage at their Seder, if they believe their heritage has intrinsic value worth saving.

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