If Passover is ultimately about freedom, why do we place restrictions on what we eat?

It’s ironic, but the traditions are ancient and biblically symbolic. Freedom: from slavery (and then 40 years in the desert!) and the restrictions on the food, well there are many interpretations of cooking a goat in it’s mother’s milk, etcetera. But the two aren’t, of course, related.

Don’t look for intellectual consistency in religious holidays.

Passover is also a celebration of freedom from slavery… of a people who were then told by their god that they could and should own slaves.

On a high level, Passover is about the liberation from oppression not the freedom to do whatever one wants. The restrictions about what to eat make perfect sense in context of a tribe of people wandering the desert for 40 years. Some foods are just not safe to eat in that environment.

I was talking about this last night with someone and it is interesting to note that Passover is the only holiday that the Bible seems to proscribe as necessary year after year, century after century. The Last Supper was Passover and it was there Jesus drank the cup of Elijah thus proclaiming his divinity and return.

This year, both Holy Thursday and Passover fell on the same day which is the same as it was in Christ’s time and only happens every 19 years when the solar and lunar based calendars coincide.

The wine symbolizes the blood, but also is a representation of the cup that was offered to Abraham (then Abrahm). The unleavened bread is the same in both cultures as well.

I enjoy looking for consistencies in religious holidays

@Qingu Where is that written?

Allowance of slavery? Lev. 25:45, Deuteronomy 20:10, 1 Tim 6:1.

Also, after the Exodus, Moses orders his men to attack the Midianites (who, ironically, sheltered him as an Egyptian exile beforehand). In Numbers 31, he instructs his soldiers, invoking God’s orders, to kill all the Midianite men and non-virgin women, but to keep the young virgin girls for themselves as “booty.”

Kind of makes you not want to celebrate a holiday about the dude.

To prove your “faith” and obedience.

@Qingu OIC. Like almost all conquering nations and tribes of yester-yore. It was part of the process, back then.

@Qingu You are quite right that slavery is both assumed and therefore “allowed” in the Bible. A couple of points though. First, and this is relatively minor, you cite 1 Timothy 6:1, which is not in the “Old Testament.” For Jews, that book has no relevance. More to your point, that book was not included in the “revelation at Sinai.”

Second, I think it is worth noting that celebration of Passover does not necessarily require one to take the stories in the Bible as literal truth. Indeed, one of the Seders that I attended this year began with the question, “Is this story true?” Perhaps the Passover story, and indeed the Bible as a whole, is best understood as a literary and cultural product of its time and place (or more appropriately, its times and places). Does this invalidate the themes and lessons of the holiday? Not in my opinion. A three thousand year old celebration of freedom and resistance to tyranny and oppression seems like a worthwhile tradition to uphold.

I don’t know. I’m extremely uncomfortable celebrating the “resistance” of a group of people—who were probably fictional, as it turns out; there’s no evidence of mass Hebrew slaves or an exodus in Egypt—when those people went on to practice slavery and genocide themselves.

It’s like celebrating the Taliban’s resistance to the Soviets. Yeah, the Soviets were assholes… but I don’t really want to celebrate the Taliban.

To me it’s just a reminder that I’m Jewish and part of a community.

@Qingu Yikes. I don’t know that I’d be comparing the whole history of the Jewish people to the Taliban.

Moreover, if the Passover story isn’t literally true, then neither, probably is the story of the mass killings of the Midianites (I assume that is the “genocide” that you are referring to). As for the practice of slavery, all ancient peoples practice some form of slavery. That doesn’t justify if of course, but the Hebrews are the only ones (that we know of) that both deliberately freed their own slaves every seven years and also had an institutionalized celebration of freedom from slavery.

@Qingu Your logic if full of inconsistencies. On the one hand, you claim that the people are “fictional”, yet on the other hand take the stories of slavery and genocide in the Bible to be “true” (i.e. you cite a bunch of biblical references as the basis for your arguments). Are the stories true, but the people fictional? Or, are the stories false, but the people “true”? Is it all false? All true?
Finally, on balance, “real” history has shown that the Jewish people have been targeted and oppressed significantly more than they have been the oppressors (The Romans, The Inquisition, European Pogroms, The Holocaust). Thus, it seems that your argument ignores real history at the expense of Biblical “history”.

@Michael, I doubt that the genocides in the Bible actually happened either. Most cultures exaggerate their own military accomplishments. Where the Bible stands out in this regard is that it actually codifies genocide as a worthwhile, God-directed moral. It is the only religious text to do so.

As for freeing slaves, those are Hebrew slaves. You got to keep your foreign slaves forever as inherited property. (Lev. 25:45). But you are right, the Bible is more progressive than the Code of Hammurabi when it comes to its own culture’s slaves. (Similarly, the Quran is more progressive than the Bible when it comes to slavery.)

@shilolo, I think most of it is false or exaggerated legend. But I don’t see how my logic is full of inconsistencies. Whether or not the genocides happened (and they probably didn’t), the problem I have is that they are codified in this book and held up as moral examples. Moses and Joshua are considered heroes of the Bible. Fictional or not, it is wrong for the book and the religion to advocate such behavior as moral.

@Qingu I see. So, you would be aghast at the deification of Abraham Lincoln then too? He freed the slaves and led the North in the Civil War against the South. However, the Northern armies also did some terrible things during the war. That makes him no better or worse than Moses.

Passover is a celebration of freedom. Moreover, it is a potent cultural symbol of the persistence of Jews in the face of millenia of oppression. The rational for eating matzah is so that Jews do not forget their past, and act as if they too were slaves freed from religious persecution and oppression. This never forget attitude is also a painful reminder of the more recent persecution during the Holocaust, and the prevalent threat from other outside forces.

@shilolo, first of all, I’m not sure Moses existed. So that limits my criticism to the possibly-legendary, possibly-fictional character of Moses as told in the Bible.

Secondly, I would indeed be aghast at the deification of Abraham Lincoln. I don’t think anyone should be deified. Lincoln had some great qualities but he was also completely racist. And I am extremely ambivalent about the need for the Civil War (as well as suspending habeus corpus during it). I’m not convinced that the war made lives significantly better for the slaves, as they still had zero rights for nearly a hundred years afterwards, all at the cost of 600,000 dead people. I think slavery would have probably died a natural death as an obselete economic system. End tangent.

Thirdly, the Northern armies did do terrible things during the war. But as far as I know Lincoln never told his generals to keep the young virgin girls for themselves as “booty.” That is beyond the pale, and would invalidate any respect I had for Lincoln.

And finally, I come from a Jewish family, and I find the whole attitude of “never forget” provincial and tribal. I don’t believe that history belongs to any one people. The story of Exodus is not anymore the Jews’ history than it is the Romans’ or the Chinese’ history. (Actually, I wouldn’t call it a “history” so much as “legend,” so perhaps a better example would be the Holocaust.) This is part of the reason I don’t identify myself as a Jew—apart from the obvious reason of not believing in God. I don’t feel like I “own” my ethnicity’s history anymore than I “own” the history of the Greeks and the Romans, which have probably influenced who I am a lot more anyway.

So yes—let’s all never forget. But let’s also not celebrate legends as facts, and let’s not treat characters who advocate slavery and genocide as heroes.

@Qingu Ah…someone else doesn’t believe that Moses existed! I thought I was the only one! I celebrate Passover, but only as an allegorical story.

@Qingu How quaint of you to divorce yourself from your own history. Had you lost entire branches of your family in the Holocaust like I (and many other did), you might feel differently. Furthermore, if another despot takes over wherever you live, they may not really care about your ambivalence. Having to wear a Jewish star and being deported to concentration camps for extermination occurred to lots of people who were only “partially” Jewish according to birth records (and who didn’t identify as such). I hope that this never happens again (thus, the never forget slogan), but sadly, history has this eerie characteristic of repeating itself.

Some of my family did die in the Holocaust.

And again, that is a tribal mentality. If a despot takes over America and starts executing Jews, I can assure you I would not be ambivalent. Similarly, if a despot started executing Muslims, or Hindus, or conservatives or liberals, I would not be ambivalent. My empathy is not limited to my tribe. Neither is my history.

And you are correct, Hitler believed Jews were a “race” and not a “religion.” It is truly unfortunate that so many Jews share this opinion with him.

@Benny, I think someone named Moses may have existed. Though I find it a lot more likely that he was simply an Egyptian exile. It’s extremely interesting that the Amarna cult arose in Egypt a century or so before the Hebrew religion originated in Mesopotamia. The “real” Moses could have simply been an Egyptian dude who transmitted the idea of monotheism from Egypt to Mesopotamia, and formed a cult following along the way. We’ll probably never know for sure, though.

@Qingu I understand your ambivalence toward (perhaps even rejection of) your religious/cultural/ethnic(?) background. No group of people that has been around as long as “The Jews” could have a history, culture or tradition that is spotless. As a result, there are things about Jewish history, culture and tradition that give many contemporary people pause, or more than pause. I guess the question is do you throw the baby out with the bathwater? Yes, there are troubling things in the 4,000 year history of “Jewish Civilization,” but there are inspiring, uplifting, and extraordinary things too (much like all of human history).

I will also say that I think you are ignoring a very important aspect of Jewish religious and cultural practice, namely the Talmud. While the “Bible” is the founding document of Judaism, in practice the Rabbinic discussions, arguments, and exegeses are the real drivers of Jewish practice. I think you’ll find that the Rabbis were just as troubled by many of the same stories in the Bible as you are.

@Qingu Actually, as far as I know, there is no documented evidence that the Jews were ever slaves in Egypt. I’d be interested to know if there is any (non Biblical) evidence to that supposition.

That said, I still celebrate Passover and eat matzoh, maror, charoset, sing the songs, with as much gusto as everybody else.

@Michael, on throwing the baby out with the bathwater—do you think that modern-day Greeks should still worship Zeus? Is their lack of identification with ancient pagan religion “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”? Judaism, like the ancient Greek religion, was incredibly important to human civilization, and it should certainly not be forgotten. But I don’t see any reason to continue believing in or identifying with either.

I am familiar with the Talmud and I find much of it wildly dishonest. Yes, the rabbis were troubled by the unsavory aspects of the Bible—but then they just made shit up in an attempt to justify it. The Bible is what it is—it’s an ancient text that should be read in its proper context, and the kind of freewheeling interpretation in the Talmud really bothers me. It’s certainly not a tradition I identify with.

@Benny, there isn’t any that I know of. The earliest archaeological evidence of the Hebrews is actually on an Egyptian stele from the 1200’s that brags about wiping them off the face of the earth, along with a bunch of other tribes. (It’s quite sad, really, that the first mention of Judaism in the historical record brags about killing them all.)

That said, my approach to history is basically to look for “grains of truth” that might start legends, like the Exodus legend. This story is so important and central to the identity of the Hebrews that I have trouble believing it was invented out of thin air. “Moses” is an Egyptian name—why would a Mesopotamian tribe make up an Egyptian exile leader in their history? And again, I am doubtful that it’s a coincidence that the emergence of the Hebrews came right after the brief rise of the Amarna cult in Egypt. We already know, from studying Babylonian religion, that the Hebrews’ religion was highly syncretistic. I think it’s entirely plausible that some exiled Amarna cultists from Egypt got into the mix as well.

@qingu Here is an interesting little tidbit about Jewish syncrenism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism#Judaism

@Qingu It’s interesting to me to read your perspective. One thing that strikes me is that you seem to be very well-educated about Jewish history. Did your distaste (if that’s a good word for it) for Judaism come after your education? I’m just curious.

@Trustinglife, nah. It came after I first started reading the Bible during my bar mitzvah studies. Also, my “distaste” is by no means limited to Judaism!

Judaism, imho, like Christianity and Islam (monos) or Budhism, shamanism or satanism: It’s how you feel, what you do (or don’t) and that’s pretty much it.

It is almost impossible, from my experience, to relate to someone exactly what you believe in, what you do about it, how you feel (today, yesterday, after your Bar Mitzvah, Good Friday).

It’s a free world, and we enjoy freedom of speech and religion.

As soon as we start talking about it, it’s lost a bit of, je ne cest quoi… and I don’t have to know, because it’s between me and God. (And it isn’t about the mind; it’s about the soul, right?

Souls don’t exist.