Passover, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the Exodus from slavery in Egypt and the emergence of the Jewish People as a free nation under Mosaic Law, is now upon us. The tradition of the Passover seder, the traditional feast and storytelling during the first two nights of the holiday, has much in common with scholarly law: discussion and debate, often over fine points of scripture and their interpretation. The Passover seder includes the telling, year after year, of the story of the Exodus. It also includes many short narratives of rabbinic discussions during the millennia since. While these short narratives themselves offer bits of wisdom, it could be surmised that their inclusion is in order to inspire similar discussion, and, one hopes, discovery.
Discovery comes in the form of novel applications of symbols from the rituals. Another way of looking at it is this: We have a static document – passed through both written and oral traditions – that is the set of rituals and stories. But we have a tradition that is a living document. The tradition is our mutual connection within the global Jewish community, and our shared connection to our history.
It is no secret that many Jews are attracted to the practice of law. It is also no stunning revelation that it is the similarity between our rabbinic tradition of debate and the interpretation and application of law in our modern world that attracts us.
The seders this year had some debate over interpretation, application, etc. These discussions, while not actively joined by everyone, were at least open to everyone. What I want to share was not, as it occurred to me during the preparation.
My wife and I each helped our mothers prepare for the seders. On Saturday afternoon, I was in my parents’ kitchen, manually chopping a dozen or more apples into tiny morsels to be mixed with crushed walnuts, cinnamon, honey, and eventually wine. I was making the charoseth, a traditional dish required by the Passover tradition to represent the mortar used to make the pyramids. When our ancestors were slaves in Egypt, their primary task was the construction of cities and pyramids. I discovered two things while making the charoseth. Not that it was delicious – I’ve known that my whole life. I discovered that there is a subtle shift that occurs during its preparation that is at once analogous on the largest scale to our history as a people, and I discovered that this wonderful bit of symbolism can only be known to those who actually prepare the food. In very traditional families where the mother prepares the food and the father leads the seder and thus the discussions, the person leading the discussion is missing a very key analogy.
As each ingredient was added to the charoseth, it became closer and closer in consistency to the mortar it represented. By the time the honey was added, it stuck together so well I was convinced I really could build pyramids from it. As I held mounds of it in my hands, not a crumb of wet walnut budged. I had never realized how thick it was at this stage before, because this was one of the preparatory tasks I hadn’t done before.
One ingredient was missing, and it made all the difference in the world. It added flavour, colour, ritual, and spirituality; it also collapsed the mortar. Once the kosher wine – that key ingredient – was added, nothing could be built of the charoseth.
Kosher wine has a special place in Jewish tradition, and here it spoke the following: The rituals of kashrut and sanctification are the Mosaic Law – the law brought to us by Moses that made us a disciplined and culturally rich people who have survived for four thousand years. The kosher wine liquefied the mortar; law freed us from bondage.
Our freedom is due to our choice to be bound by law instead of by the whips of our taskmasters.
Law – the consensual discipline and ethics code of a society – when it is applied equally to all and when it is also a living document, interpreted and discussed from generation to generation, frees us from chaos, from injustice, from might-makes-right, and in the end, from slavery. Perhaps we should all spend some time in the kitchen to discover this.
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