The Beginnings of Passover
Friday April 5, 2019
Congregation B’nai B’rith
Tonight is the new moon, the first night of the new month of Nisan, the month of Passover, which falls exactly two weeks from tonight, when the moon is full. Tonight, the moon is new, the tiniest sliver of light.
And in honor of the new moon, I would like to tell you a story tonight that is as close to the truth as I can possibly make it. It is a story that you may have never heard before. It is the story of how Pesach, that is Passover, how Pesach first came to be a festival of the Jewish people. This story may surprise or even disturb you, and you may wonder for one thing, why you have never heard this story before. Well, this is what happens if you live long enough. You hear new stories, new truths.
The festival of Pesach begins long, long before the beginnings of the Jewish people.
I know that sounds strange. Isn’t Pesach the holiday that was created to help us remember and retell a story that happened to the Jewish people? Yes. But the festival began long, long, long before there was a Jewish people. It began before Moses, long before Joseph, long before Jacob and Rachel, long long before Abraham and Sarah. In the earliest time of humans living in the region called Canaan....prehistoric times....there were human beings who at this time of year noticed exactly what we are noticing all around us right now, if our eyes are open. The earth has just woken up, with an explosion of color and blossoming trees and the songs of birds. The sun growing warmer, the days growing longer, and at night, the tiny sliver of the moon reborn in the night sky, beginning to grow slowly but steadily to fullness. There were no artificial lights, and a full moon lit up the night and was reason enough for a night of singing and drinking, eating and dancing. A full moon springtime festival.
Some of those early human beings learned to take control of the lives of the wild goats and the wild sheep. They became shepherds, taming and caring for, and drinking the milk of their animals, and shearing their wool. The flocks of those early shepherds, just like flocks of sheep and goats today, were all born at one time of year. Their reproductive cycle was tied completely to the cycle of the seasons, and just at the same time that the trees and flowers were exploding into color and blossom, the hills were suddenly covered with baby lambs. And those early shepherds would celebrate that explosion of new life by something they almost never did during the rest of the year, killing a baby lamb and roasting it over the fire and feasting on its meat.
That meat was delicious. And so they added to the full moon springtime festival a lamb barbecue. The entire family gathered around, and they sang, and they danced, and they drank fermented wine as they ate the meat under the springtime full moon. They called the roast lamb Pesach, and that came to be the name of that night of celebration of the re-awakening of the earth, the trees, and the perfect, new born baby lambs. All of this went on for thousands of years, in prehistoric times, long long before Egypt and Israel, Moses and Pharoah.
Also something else happened in prehistoric times in that region.
While some of the early humans were nomadic shepherds, others learned to cultivate the earth and to grow wheat and barley and rye. They would grind those grains into flour, and mix the flour with water, and bake it into bread. They called bread the staff of life. All year long, they would grind grain, mix the flour with water and make dough, and then keep the unbaked dough in their camp for days or weeks, ready to bake into bread. As that unbaked dough sat, it would begin to ferment, turning into sourdough, which when baked was especially delicious dipped in olive oil! That fermented sourdough was called chametz, which means sour. Once a year, as the earth was waking up from its winter sleep, those prehistoric humans...our earliest ancestors.... conducted a thorough spring cleaning. They cleaned out the entire camp, removing all the sourdough, and starting over with all fresh dough. They called the bread made from fresh, unfermented dough matzah. Like the lamb barbecue festival under the full moon, this spring cleaning also happened for thousands of years. It was called chag hamatzot, the festival of matzahs.
And then, far off to the south, in the ancient cradle of civilization on the Nile River....the Egyptian civilization arose, and developed the ability to construct buildings out of adobe clay. But the building projects required immense amounts of human labor....much more than any person would willingly perform freely. And so a building culture and civilization arose that required slave labor. Back breaking, soul crushing labor which held no concern for the lives of human slaves. And once it happened, in a stunning and unprecedented act of human courage, that a group of slaves rose up against their masters, in the middle of the night, and killed many of the Egyptians....killing in any house that they not marked ahead of time with a sign of blood. And they fled in the middle of the night....out into the wilderness of Sinai.
They walked on foot across the wilderness, for years, retelling the story of the miracle of their uprising, and how they had come out of slavery into freedom. There were moments in the wilderness when they were nearly starving, and nearly dying of thirst, and they wondered whether it might have been a terrible mistake to rise up and to kill the Egyptians, and to become free. But they journeyed forward, coming at last into a fertile land, a land of hills and rivers, of date palms and fig trees, and pomegranates and grapes. And they encountered shepherds, who knew how to care for and to live with sheep and goats. And they also encountered farmers who knew the secret of how to raise wheat and barley and to grind it and bake it into bread.
And the nomads who came into the fertile land, out of the wilderness, fought with the local inhabitants, and they lived together with them. They married their daughters with the sons and their sons with the daughters of the land. And in the spring, when the grain farmers conducted their spring cleaning and ate only matzah, and when the shepherds sang and danced and ate their lamb barbecue under the full moon, the nomadic children of the slave rebellion performed an act of religious genius. They wove the story of their own escape from slavery together with the festival of the pesach lamb barbecue and with the spring cleaning of the festival of matzah.
The baby lamb eaten under the full moon, they transformed into a reminder of the night of the bloody slave rebellion, and the sign of blood on the door. And the fresh baked matzah dough....that became a reminder of leaving in a hurry in the middle of the night.
They wove their own narrative of freedom together with the ancient prehistoric celebration of springtime, and blossoming and newborn lambs under the full moon.
And slowly the Jewish people came into being, made up of all the people who told the story of the slave uprising, and the journey into freedom, and who passed that story down to their children, while eating the roast lamb and matzah and cleaning out the chametz from their homes. And that is a true story of how Pesach began.
The evolution of Pesach continued unabated over the centuries. For one thousand years, the Jewish people gathered in the holy city of Jerusalem and held their Pesach barbecues on the hills of the city and told the story of the Exodus from slavery into freedom. Then when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in the year 70CE, and the lamb barbecue ended, together with all the other Temple sacrifices, our Jewish ancestors replaced the lamb barbecue with the Passover seder, while early Christians replaced the lamb with Jesus, who they referred to as the Paschal Lamb.
In this way our two religions emerged, out of our common beginnings in a single story. But we all are celebrating together the same miracle that gave birth to the earliest full moon springtime festival, the miracle which inspired King Solomon...or more likely, some prehistoric shepherd or farmer...to sing this song of springtime:
Kumi lach rayati yafati ulchi lach
Arise my love, my fair one and come away.
For the winter is past, the rains are over and gone,
the buds have appeared on the earth,
the time of singing has come
And the voice of the turtle dove is heard in our land
Arise my love, my fair one and come away.
Shabbat Shalom