It would have been enough

Fireworks, Haggadot and charity

As we gather around our seder tables, here are a few fun facts to consider while we celebrate our liberation.

Passover fireworks
The always vivid and somewhat shocking midrashim that imagine God donning tefillin or conscientiously adding decorative crowns to the Hebrew letters are matched by a similar story surrounding Passover. According to the Zohar, “On the night of Passover, while Jews around the world read from the Haggadah, God gathers His household together, and says, ‘Come and listen to the recital of My praises as My children rejoice in their redemption from slavery in Egypt.’ And all of heaven assembles and hears Israel praise God for all the miracles He had performed.”

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern writes that in early 19th-century Belorussia, the Christian authorities complained that the Jews among them were “extremely noisy during Passover, arranging fireworks and shooting their rifles in celebration of their redemption from Egyptian bondage.” One wonders if there isn’t a midrash somewhere in which God has some fireworks on hand, too.

Sumptuous Haggadot
Historians have written of the gorgeously illustrated Haggadot that began appearing in Europe during the Middle Ages. Overcoming the usual reticence when it came to depicting figures from the Bible (see the second commandment), wealthy patrons suddenly vied among themselves for the most sumptuous Haggadah.

From Spain to Germany, Simon Schama writes, “it was through the Passover Haggadah that the Jews took back their sense of who they were … it was no coincidence then that it was exactly at the time they were most hard-pressed by conversionary campaigns, urban slaughters and rabid paranoia, that they responded with their own imagery.”

Constantly hounded with sermons and imagery surrounding the life and death of Jesus, suddenly Haggadot were unafraid to celebrate, in full illumination, the life of Moses, the story of Joseph, or the revelation at Sinai.

Passover charity
The dietary requirements of Passover can be especially challenging for many people. One report from eastern Europe in the late 19th century stresses the Jewish need for assistance, “particularly during the Passover week.” And so it is no surprise that this holiday has a long tradition of charity behind it. In his classic study on the Hasidic community of Williamsburg, Solomon Poll writes that, “The author himself witnessed how, when an immigrant family moved into their new apartment around Passover, the organization sent fifty pounds of potatoes, ten dozen eggs, eight pounds of matzah, one basket of apples, one can of oil, and a big carton full of vegetables to the apartment before the family arrived.”

From the wonderful archives of the Bintel Brief, there is a brief note from a recent immigrant to New York from Russia in 1906. It took him three weeks, he says, but he finally found a job that pays $8 a week. Now that he has a little bit of money he asks, “Shall I send my father a few dollars for Passover, or should I keep the little money for myself?” While he worries that he may be out of a job soon, he is advised that even the pittance he makes in America is easier to come by than for “his blind father in Russia.”

Passover during war
Passover was observed by Jewish soldiers serving on both sides of the American Civil War. During 1862, Confederate Jews got their matzah and kosher beef in Charleston, while their northern counterparts, stationed in West Virginia, received their requisite supplies from Cincinnati. As one Union soldier wrote after the war, “There is no occasion in my life that gives me more pleasure and satisfaction than when I remember the celebration of Passover of 1862.”

Eighty years later, the Jewish Welfare Board supplied American Jews serving overseas during World War II with prayer books and kosher food for soldiers and chaplains whether Orthodox, Conservative or Reform. As Jonathan Sarna writes, in 1945 the JWB also organized “a memorable Passover seder held in the abandoned castle of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.”

Only three years earlier, in 1942, Samuel Puterman wrote of Passover in the Warsaw Ghetto. When thousands were dying and being replaced by new arrivals soon to perish themselves, Puterman writes that, “Mechanically, they repeat the words of the Haggadah. What do they care about the fate of their brothers thousands of years ago? Just last year there was a father, a mother, brothers, sisters, husbands. The Traubes take their tablecloth, still spotlessly white, large enough for twenty-four guests, and fold it in half.”

In one of her memoirs, Anne Roiphe recalls an Auschwitz survivor she met, Anna Ornstein, who said: “Each Passover I write another short story to be read at the table about my experiences in the camp. I want the children to know. Numbness is the danger; talking about, feeling it, that is part of the healing.”

Rarely is there a better stage for talking and feeling (and eating and drinking), for expounding on the deep past and the closer distance of our own lifetimes to the listening ears of the next generation, than Passover.

The Israelite difference
Among his many lucid comments on Passover, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put it quite simply: “We will understand more of Judaism the more we know about what it was a reaction against.” In this vein, it has been pointed out how much of the surviving literature from ancient Egypt focuses on the afterlife while the Tanakh has very little to say about it at all.

Ancient Egypt is usually characterized as being obsessed with death, when in reality it was obsessed (an important distinction) with the afterlife, and whether it developed as a specific reaction against Egyptian mores or not, Jews have almost always been obsessed with life itself, here and now. And when it comes to Passover, we see this more clearly than ever: Rather mourning the generation that left Egypt, and instead of surrounding them with prayers and imagining an elaborate afterlife for them, we are instead instructed to imagine ourselves among that generation. As the Talmud later put it: “Every person in every generation must regard himself as having been personally freed from Egypt.” PJC

Tim Miller is a freelance writer living in Pittsburgh.