Your Humble Blogger will likely have little time for posting in the next week and a half or so. Sorry about that. I will likely post a few times, but I doubt I’ll do any real research and analysis. We’ll see.
This is roughly the same time frame as Passover, which as noted before in this space, is my favorite holiday. Seder was lovely, and involved telling the story to children, which is nice, and a fair amount of singing and laughing, which was nice, too. Oh, and eating. A lot of eating. Which was nice.
One thing I like about Passover is that the celebration of the holiday is so closely tied to the reason for the holiday. Yes, there are lots of extraneous elements, but it’s hard to imagine anybody having anything like a seder without talking about the exodus. It’s easy to imagine a Purim party where nobody talks about Esther, or a Sukkot party where nobody talks about, um, the harvest? Or the Mishkan? Or the wanderings? Or the Temple? What is Sukkot about, exactly? Anyway, Passover is Passover, and is more the thing itself than any other holiday.
Except, of course, for the four or five days before Passover, during which it appears to be a holiday about cleaning.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
Maybe. My boyfriend’s family are nominally jewish, but more as a cultural matter (jewish ancestors) than as an active religious matter.
They have a seder. The seder involves reading from a Haggadah and going through the motions … but there’s no religious impetus to it at all, and *outside of the reading of the Haggadah*, there was no discussion of the exodus.
*As an agnostic*, I found it frustrating; the group can’t even maintain the traditional ritual *form*, let alone the content.
Well, and I suppose my point was that even if people don’t discuss the exodus outside the readings in the Haggadah, they do read at least part of the Haggadah. I compare this to Christmas, during which at least some Christians I know neither go to church nor mention Jesus (unless accidentally singing one of those old-fashioned carols). Or, really, I compare it to other Jewish holidays such as Sukkot, or Shavuous, or Hanukkah (or Chanukah), or Purim; Passover maintains much more of a tie to the thing celebrated than the others.
My Best Reader points out that the Haggadah itself is fairly fluid, and that the traditional ritual form is not necessarily the same, generation to generation. We feel free to add and leave out. The obligations are to explain three symbols: the matzhahs, the pesach (or passover offering in the form of a shankbone), and the maror (or bitter herbs). Other than that, we’re free. And almost everybody I’ve chatted with at least did those things, and also went through the plagues and the four questions. Still, I understand the frustration; I suppose I could phrase it that I find Passover less frustrating than other holidays in that regard.
Thanks,
-V.