It was one of those sudden shifts in perspective, like when you think you have been looking at two black faces on a white background and suddenly all you can see is a white vase on a black background. I had always thought of Shabbos as a twenty-five hour prison of petty regulation, enlivened by a bit of religion. Suddenly I saw why my friends spoke of it with such love, why they thought of the day not as a prison but as a queen, why Ahuva insists that her children spend the day in homes where Shabbos is observed. “There’s an atmosphere in a Shabbos house that’s not like anything else,” she says. It’s not just that Ahuva was getting a break from her hectic life, but that she was at the epicenter of a place where restfulness was absolutely palpable: not just an absence of activity but a real presence. Had there been royalty in the house, the atmosphere could not have been more different from the other days of the week.
Of course, we have a holy day too. From the very beginning, Christians met to worship not on the last day of the week, when God rested, but on the first, when Christ rose from the dead. In the fourth century, Sunday was declared to be a day not only of worship but also of rest, and this has been observed in a variety of forms by different bits of Christianity since then. In our family we do try to make it a special day. We go to Mass, and in theory I don’t “work” on Sunday. In practice all that means is I don’t do the sort of things I do for my job, the one I get paid for. But the break from reading for class, writing lectures, editing articles, and grading papers gives me time to write letters or weed or sew on buttons or pay bills or do some cooking to ease the week ahead or do all the things I put off during the week knowing that Sunday will give me a chance to “catch up.” If we ever do get “caught up” and “on top of things” so we can “afford” to take a “day off,” it generally involves either preparing a big roast dinner (with Yorkshire pudding, three veggies, and homemade pies as compensation for a week of pasta) or packing lunches, diapers, and changes of clothes and loading the car to head out to do something a lot less restful than sitting in my nice quiet office “working.” Really, our Sunday “rest” is not much more than a minor reshuffling of work—a break from routine but still a calculated part of accomplishing everything that my life demands I accomplish.
Why, exactly, do I have so much to do? The easiest answer is that I am acceding to the demands of a high-paced, competitive, technological, efficiency-obsessed culture and allowing it to drown out my need for spiritual tranquility. Now there’s a lot in that, and it is quite bad enough. But high-paced efficiency-obsessed cultures do not create themselves. David Dawson suggests a challenging and rather sinister answer to the question of why we are so busy.“Though we say that we yearn for more free time,” he says,
we avoid it like the plague, preferring instead to seek out periods of leisure time, during which we can pursue leisure activities. And if we are successful, if we can keep the calendar full and time moving under our control, we can continue to live as though we believed our greatest illusion—that we are immortal.1
If Dawson is right—and I’m rather afraid he is, at least in my case—then our obsessive busyness is a way of distracting ourselves from our mortality, our contingency, from the fact that our world and our lives are not our own. He suggests that simply paying attention to life as it is, rather than striving to maintain the illusion of mastery over it, would be transformative. I know that he is right. I had a spiritual director once who made me spend half an hour a day sitting. Not reading or praying or meditating on a Bible passage—just sitting. I hated it. I was bored and anxious all at once, and I probably snuck a look at the clock forty times in thirty minutes. But somehow during the short months I actually kept up the discipline, the rest of my life really was different: I was calmer,my mind clearer, less cluttered by anxieties and resentments and fantasies. Then something minor—I can’t remember what—changed in the circumstances of my life, and I seized on it as an excuse to stop the tedious discipline of freeing time and sitting with it.
Now, of course, I have myriad excuses, which I recite to myself like a mantra (a full-time job, a marriage, four kids, a house that is a perpetual work in progress, and at present a book to write), and I am no closer to taking half an hour to let time be free than I am to training for a marathon. I even multitask prayer, folding it into the kids’ bedtime, so I can cross “Provide positive spiritual role model,” “Spend quality time with children,” and “Cultivate relationship with my Lord and Savior” off my “things to do” list with one efficient sweep of the pen. This, of course, is blatant cheating: quite staggeringly dishonest, really, but I have such good excuses, such a lot I have to get done.
Ahuva’s life places just as many demands on her and then some, but the commandment to honor the Sabbath and keep it holy trumps everything else. And the commandment means that she, all her family, the four other Orthodox families on our block, and all Shabbos-observant Jews everywhere spend the time from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday inhabiting time and space in a way that is quite unique. The job of the Shabbos laws is to prevent Jews from making any changes to the world, from tinkering with what God made for the space of one day. For one day they simply have to live in the world as it is and cede control to God. All the laws, the thirty-nine acts that generations of rabbis have multiplied into hundreds of prohibitions on the most trivial everyday activities, are an adamantine edge to chisel holiness into the week in a way that cannot be ignored or evaded by distraction and must therefore be welcomed and embraced and celebrated. There is no way to cheat, catch up, get ahead, achieve, manage, accomplish, or do anything at all except experience time as creatures whom God has made in his own image and blessed and chosen and called.
It would be nice, wouldn’t it, if at this point I could write that we have embraced a sort of Shabbos of our own: that after my revelation about the beauty of a holy day, I have led the family into allowing Sunday to be a day of real rest and beauty. If we had, I have no doubt it would be wonderful. If three hours a week of getting-nothing-done turned down the flame under my compulsion to fret and nag and accomplish, I can only imagine what twenty-five hours might do. It hasn’t happened. I am still a dedicated fretter and nagger and accomplisher. But nowadays I am drawn to Shabbos houses, to time that is truly free, to space that, under the guidance of Torah, is set apart to welcome holiness.
I still feel awkward about hanging around on Shabbos, mind you. No longer because I think that my friends will be embarrassed by having me around to see what a pain in the neck Shabbos is, but because I am embarrassed to bring my usual compulsive self into a space that is not usual. Nonetheless, I am drawn to Shabbos houses; I look for excuses to drop round and angle for invitations to go over to play Scrabble. (Scrabble doesn’t violate the prohibition on writing because all you are doing is rearranging tiles. Keeping score would be a problem, however, because writing down numbers on paper would involve making permanent marks, thus creating something new, and even God did not create on the seventh day. But as Shabbos was made for man and not man for Shabbos,we don’t let that stop us; we each get a book and keep score by putting bookmarks in the pages.) Maybe something of it will rub off on me, and in a few years—when everyone is out of diapers, and I’ve finished those syllabi on missiology and science and religion I’ve been toying with for years, and I’ve finally written my book on Victorian religious historiography—I’ll get the point, learn to stop being efficient and overachieving, and, for a few hours, simply be God’s creature.
6
Why Is This Night
Unlike All Other Nights?
My family is welcome in the sacred space and time of Shabbos.We can eat in sukkahs and go to brissim and bar mitzvahs and shalom zachors and parties for Purim or Hanukkah. The only place our neighbors will never invite us, for complicated halakhic reasons, is the Seder on the first night of Pesach.
The story of Passover, in Exodus, is familiar to Christians. The glory days when Joseph was Pharaoh’s right-hand man and his brothers were honored guest
s in Egypt are four hundred years in the past, as far distant from their descendants as Shakespeare and the Mayflower are from us. The children of Israel have been slaves for generations, and now they are subject to a ghastly policy of state-ordered infanticide. In the midst of brutal oppression, they have somehow kept alive the old stories; they remember Abraham and the God who called him and gave him a new name and the promise of a land of his own. But the promises seem to be going nowhere fast, and Abraham’s God must seem about as real and powerful as the tooth fairy compared to the huge and haughty gods of the Egyptians, who gave their followers wealth and power, who look down from massive pillars at the suffering Hebrews. But God is waiting. He sees and hears and bides his time. And then a fugitive in the desert, who before he was a fugitive was a prince in Egypt, and before that was the child of a slave, comes across a burning bush and is transformed yet again. This time he is a prophet, changed by the voice of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who has come blasting out of the old stories to rescue his people.
It’s a dark and dreadful story, one of burning pride and icy stubbornness, of violence, terror, and destruction. It is also a joyful story of fidelity and salvation and freedom. The darkness and the joy come together at Pesach, when the Angel of Death kills the firstborn of every Egyptian family and passes over the houses—their doors smeared with blood—where the slaves are eating a meal of lamb and unleavened bread. They come together again on the shores of the Red Sea, where the Israelites look back at the waters closing over their pursuers and sing a hymn praising God for his steadfast love and guidance and for his terrifying power. He is a mighty warrior: his fury consumes his enemies like fire burning stubble.
Jews remember this dark, triumphant, painful, joyful story every spring. The preparation starts weeks earlier with a housecleaning of mind-blowing thoroughness. The Israelites ate unleavened bread at the meal of Passover for the simple reason that they were in a hurry and there was no time for the bread to rise. Now, in remembrance, my friends track down every trace of yeast, not just the obvious stuff in the pantry and the remainders of the sandwich that the eight-year-old snuck upstairs when nobody was looking, but every last speck of anything in corners and carpets that might possibly have been in contact with leavening of any sort. All the plates and pots and knives and forks have to be sealed up and put in the basement, and plates and pots and knives and forks that have never touched anything leavened are taken out and put into freshly scrubbed kitchen cabinets. During the eight days of Pesach, a whole extra layer of food laws comes into play. Everything has to be not only kosher, but kosher for Pesach, which means that it is certified to have not an atom of yeast in it. Apart from anything else, this gets awfully expensive as it eliminates most of the supermarket foods that are all right the rest of the year; corn syrup, for instance, is kosher, but not for Pesach.
When everything is cleaner than my house has ever been, at least since I’ve lived in it, the Seder comes—the reenactment of the Hebrews’ last meal as slaves. Everything is prescribed down to the smallest detail. Although it is a festive meal, cooked at home and eaten around the family table, the ritual element is so strong that it is more like a liturgical celebration than like, say, Thanksgiving. By and large on Thanksgiving one eats turkey and green bean casserole and that strange concoction with sweet potatoes and marshmallows. But if you don’t care for turkey, there’s no real reason you can’t have sushi. At a Seder, not only the six symbolic dishes, but even the way they are arranged on the table and the order in which they are eaten, are prescribed by both time-honored tradition and law. At Thanksgiving, again, it is generally regarded as a good idea for someone to take a few minutes to quiz the little ones on the story of the Pilgrims and the Indians, and if you come from a certain sort of family, you may well take turns talking about what you are thankful for. But if you prefer to talk about sports or politics or books, then there’s nothing to stop you. At a Seder there’s a little book by every seat with the script for the conversation, which is a theological commentary on the meal itself. As they eat, they read, question, discuss. The aim is for those present to identify so completely with the experience of their ancestors that the thousands of years between them vanish and they feel as if they are there, in Egypt, on the brink of freedom. The Seder, then, is thoroughly ritualized and deeply regular; it links the Jews to a story that is in the past and, therefore, cannot change.
Jesus’s disciples must have looked forward eagerly to their Seder. It had been a rough week. Jerusalem was swarming with pilgrims at the holidays. The authorities were on alert, and the usual tensions were raised to a heightened pitch. There were a lot of tensions in Roman-occupied Judea. The Romans cultivated a public image of liberalism and tolerance, but everybody knew that the image was a thin veneer over the brutal realities of imperial expansion and military power. If they felt that their dominance was being challenged in any way, they turned very ugly very quickly. Too much public grumbling about taxes, rumors of subversive groups, urban guerillas plotting rebellion, and out came the crosses and nails.
Jews responded to this situation in different ways. The priestly classes had the task of trying to maintain the integrity of Temple worship, offering pure sacrifices and prayer to a jealous God who tolerated no rivals, while staying on the right side of an empire so arrogant that they were on the verge of honoring their emperor as a god. The Pharisees worked among the common people, trying to help them to observe the Law scrupulously and to maintain absolute fidelity to God while staying under the radar of the Romans. Others were less ready to be patient; some denounced the whole structure, priests and Pharisees, as hopelessly contaminated by their compromises with the Romans, so they took off to the desert to worship in purity. Others dreamed of rising up and forcibly taking back their land from the hands of the Romans. All watched and hoped for Moshiach, the one whom God had promised through the prophets to send them.
This is why, when Jesus and the disciples arrived in Jerusalem earlier that week to the kind of welcome generally reserved for military conquerors, the Pharisees had pleaded with him to get the crowd to simmer down and go home before the Romans decided they needed to deal with the disruption themselves. Jesus calmly ignored them. Then, on their first visit to the Temple, he lost his temper, raging about thievery and smashing things. Next he established himself in the Temple, as if it were his own house, and publicly accused the religious authorities of being hypocrites, of acting out of love for their own status rather than love for God and Torah. Small wonder that the priests’ and Pharisees’ nervous suspicions quickly hardened into deadly hostility. They decided that Jesus had to be killed. He knew it, and let them know that he knew it, but it didn’t slow him down.
It must have been very frightening for the disciples. After three years with Jesus, of course, they were no strangers to controversy. But this was on an altogether different scale from dinner table debates with irritated Pharisees in fishing villages. Besides, Jesus had been saying weird and disturbing things recently. He had more or less admitted that he was the Messiah, and their hearts leapt and their minds filled with visions of fame and glory. But he dumped ice water on their fantasies. “Yes, I’m the Messiah. And it’s not what you think. It’s going to get really ugly, and I’m going to die. Do you get this, guys? Are you even listening? You need to be ready for this. They’re going to kill me. And you know what else? They’re going to kill you too.”
So they must have looked forward eagerly to Pesach. They found an upstairs room somewhere and made arrangements for the Seder. At least that one evening would be safe and calm and predictable. It would be just them, and they all had their parts to play, their familiar lines to say. Even Jesus, even as strange as he had been recently, couldn’t mess with Pesach, could he?
But, of course, Jesus does mess with Pesach. In his hands the unleavened bread is no longer just a reminder that their ancestors had to leave in a hurry. It is his body, he tells them, and it will be broken. The wine is no longer the blood of
the lamb that kept the Angel of Death at bay. It is his blood, and it will be spilled, and they have to drink it. This Seder is no longer a story that is familiar and safe and comforting. This Seder is about the present, the turbulent, unpredictable present, and even more frightening, it is about a strange new future in which people will do what the disciples are doing and will remember this evening and reenact this meal in catacombs and palaces and barns and fields and living rooms and soaring cathedrals and tiny whitewashed Churches. All moments, past and future, are centered on this moment and on Jesus himself. And then Judas dips his bread in the cup and leaves, and Jesus goes out to the garden, and over the next three days the story of Passover and the freeing of the Jews is turned inside out, into the story of Easter and the redemption of all creation.
The situation is, of course, more complicated than that. Christianity is built on the foundation of the Jewish covenant, but it is not just slapped on top of it like a trailer home onto a concrete lot. Christian theology draws freely, indeed rather cavalierly, on the whole of the Old Testament, and while the links between Jewish and Christian festivals are a good place to start, they do not tell the whole story. At that strange, frightening Seder, when Jesus said that the bread and wine were his body and blood for the forgiveness of sins, he was putting himself in the place not only of the lambs of the first Passover, but also of the scapegoats that were driven out to the desert every year bearing the sins of Israel, and of the lambs, doves, bulls, grain, and oil that were offered in the Temple in accordance with the Law, and of the ram caught in the thicket by its horns that God provided to take the place of Isaac. The days that follow this strange new Seder, days the Church keeps as its holiest days, echo the themes of Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement (the holiest day in the Jewish year), and Pesach. When Christians think about the story of Jesus and then look back at the Old Testament, we see shadows and glimpses and hints—the technical term is types—everywhere we turn.
Strangers and Neighbors Page 5