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| SEDER |
| March 31, 2015 |
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Tell an Anglican liturgist you're doing a Seder at your church during Holy Week and he may react as if you'd said you were planning a human sacrifice. He will tell you that churches should NEVER do these things, that it is by no means certain that the Last Supper was a Seder, that it is criminally tone-deaf, after centuries of violent Christian anti-Semitism, now to co-opt the central feast of Jewish observance, pretending that Moses and all the prophets were bit players in a drama whose real star was Jesus.
Okay.
But I have several intermarried couples in my parish, and the Jewish partners -- who probably don't need me to instruct them about anti-Semitism -- look forward to sharing this meal and teaching about it, to singing the sings they learned as children. They know Hebrew and most of us don't. They have childhood memories of this ancient feast and we do not. Their Jewishness is not a quaint backdrop for our Christianity: it is alive within them. It is half of the heritage their children carry forward. They have married into Christmas trees and Easter bunnies, attended their children's choir performances, listened quietly as the congregation melts over an angelic treble "Pie Jesu." It is time for them to share with us, and it is time for their children to see the two faiths meet and kiss.
The belief that intermarried Jews don't care about their heritage is a mistaken one. It is hard to be a mixed couple. Before there are children, there are in-laws, and the negotiation the new pair must conduct is sensitive and often deeply painful. This is often true even if the Jewish partner's family is not particularly observant -- Why, someone asks, if they don't even go to temple? Why should they care? Why? It might have something to do with the fact that nobody ever rounded up six million Episcopalians and put them to death. Why? Because antiSemitism is not in the past; like all bigotry, it lurks everywhere in the here and now.
What's the Seder about? It's not about the Jews waiting for a messiah they were too dim to recognize when he came. Messianic hope had yet to be born in Judaism when the Passover was established; it was a thousand years away. Like all Jewish feasts, the Seder is about a deliverance that happens again and again in history, a deliverance longed for from age to age and celebrated with an utterly human joy when it comes.
Or as the Jews put it, arguing vigorously over who gets credit for originating this epigram: "They tried to kill us.They failed. Let's eat."
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| Copyright © 2024 Barbara Crafton |
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