Culture

Resurrecting Passover?

Charlton Heston as Moses
Charlton Heston as Moses

This is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.

Does Passover have an afterlife – life after permanently oppressing another people?

I doubt it.

If we aren’t play acting Passover – fried artichoke hearts, gefilte fish, vintage wine and alike – and if the Passover inversion as a biting indictment of Israeli empowerment and Jewish enablement of injustice is simply too much for Passover gatherers to bear, perhaps its best to simply abandon Passover. Why not eat leavened bread galore and enjoy the fruits of Israeli and American power with a clear conscience?

Like everyone else Jews want our power and our innocence, too. Thus our glossy invites to the endless and empty interfaith gatherings that offer mutual self-congratulation as the hors d’oeuvres. The main course that follows is equally self-congratulatory.

Isn’t it swell that Christians finally learned that Jesus’ love offers a mutual embrace rather enslavement and ethnic cleansing! Congratulations Christians!

No doubt when the permanent ghettoization of the Palestinians is signed and delivered, Jews will likewise relish the innocence that other conquerors find so pleasing to claim. Congratulations Jews!

I doubt it will be so easy for Jews in the long run. Christians rest easy in their salvation – at least that is their public claim. Christians solved the instability Jews – and the Jewish God – represent. Salvation (conveniently) ends the prophetic. Justice becomes an item on the Christian bucket-list.

With Easter on the Passover horizon, I know the dispute within the Christian community via liberation theology continues. But as some Christians have noticed, liberation theology is based on the Exodus story, the primordial prophetic stirrings of ancient Israel. If Christians adopt the Passover as their origins, fine and good. Whatever the Christian spin, welcome back to the (Jewish) fold.

Here’s the irony: Jews need Passover today like Christians need salvation – to be diverted from the injustice we are enabling. Has Passover become our (Christian) salvation? A faux prophetic trope to banish the unstable Jewish prophetic?

Using Passover as our salvation doesn’t work. Too many Jews work through the hypocrisy represented in the slave narratives as we raise our wine glasses when others are being enslaved by us – at this very moment!

The Passover Seder as we know it was formulated when Jews were the down-and-outs of Christian empire. It’s only in the post-Holocaust era that Jews, as a collective, have been empowered as we recall the Exodus story. Getting tipsy at Passover is supposed to be struggling for liberation. It isn’t about forgetting who we have become.

Like the difference of Christians believing in salvation when they were being persecuted and when they are empire leaders, the Passover power-equation means everything. Maybe we Jews no longer deserve the Passover story. Or do we simply need to learn its real meaning again – from others?

The prospects of resurrecting Passover seem dim. Mostly Passover will continue to exist in the Constantinian Jewish halls of economic and political power, in our Holocaust sanctuaries and in our narrow-minded Hillel’s. For Jews of Conscience only Passover fragments will remain.

To be found alongside the Eucharistic fragments that were born in Occupied Palestine so long ago?

Passover afterlife. Even an Easter resurrection won’t do.

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Isn’t it swell that Christians finally learned that Jesus’ love offers a mutual embrace rather enslavement and ethnic cleansing! Congratulations Christians!
That’s nice, except that I don’t remember Christians generally learning that Jesus’ love offers ethnic cleansing.

I don’t even think the Puritans who ethnically cleansed the Indians thought that Jesus’ love offered ethnic cleansing, but maybe I am wrong about that. Fortunately, that was not a belief of the Church Fathers.

I had similar feelings at this year’s passover (though I generally do). It seemed completely stupid to repeat lines like “next year in Jerusalem”. We got Jerusalem back, mission accomplished. If it is any consolation the Haggadah we used had a big disclaimer about the prayer where we ask God to pour out his wrath on the nations who won’t do his will as inapplicable now that we aren’t victims anymore.

As for your analogy with Christians your history could use some work. The imagery of Jesus as King standing over his vice regent (the emperor and/or pope depending) came from this period. Look at the change in Christian art between the 3rd and 5th century in how Jesus is depicted. The focus shifted from the crucifixion as a symbol of hope to the resurrection as a symbol of triumph over satan. I suspect the same thing will happen to passover. Just add a lot of Joshua into the mix and the story becomes one of God freeing us from bondage and identifying with slavery to one of the slaves being freed and doing his will in subjugated Canaan.

The ethical tradition shifts a bit “remember you too were once a slave and treat your slaves well”… Sort of like how Thomas Jefferson struggled with the morality of slavery while working out ways to make the Virginia slavery system more profitable for masters and thus helping to institutionalize it before freeing his slaves. Lots of grey, lots of moral hypocrisy.

MARC ELLIS- I feel the need to comment, but am unsure of what to say or how to say it. Is it your fate to now feel the need to drive the money lenders from the temple? Is that even possible? You have a fierce moral clarity and my respect, yet I fear that your verbal bludgeon will win you no friends. Take care.

Passovers, like birthday parties, are a good time to get together with friends. But, as to Passovers, don’t read the minutiae of the (food) label too closely. Agri-poisons, over-used antibiotics, palm kernel oil, all disguised with “natural” labels. Feel-good while doing ill.

The overall sense of your essay is correct.

Feel good while doing evil (for those who do evil in Palestine). Feel good while enabling evil (for those who actively support Zionism from afar). Feel good while ignoring evil (for those who refuse to know, refuse to hear, demand to be left to old dreams).

The Ultimate Disastrous Feel-Good

BTW, I’d say that I/P and the “Fate of the Jews”, the truths and falsities of Christianity and Judaism, and almost any other traditional concerns are of minuscule importance in the greater scheme of things wherein all of daily life, when carried on without active concern and action to divert climate change (the on-rushing whole-earth holocaust), is like a feel-good Passover Seder. But the angel of the lord is not going to pass over the earth or its inhabitants if we don’t divert that angel. The signs are not good.

True enough. But causing the deaths of all the first-born sons was a serious enough matter.

In any case, Passover is the current festival.

Both stories serve to justify abominable treatment of people that do not happen to enjoy the favor of God.