Passover traditions explained by area scholars

While many in the area are preparing for Easter, for others, springtime means celebrating the season with a Passover seder.

“Passover commemorates the story of the ancient Israelites' journey from slavery to freedom,” said Beth Friedman-Romell, Ph.D., cantor and spiritual leader of Knesseth Israel Temple.

Each year Jewish people gather at a special meal called a seder, which means “order” in Hebrew, to retell the story of the exodus from Egypt, eat symbolic foods including matzah (unleavened bread), sing and share a festive meal.

Rabbi Joan S. Friedman, Ph.D., a Lincoln professor of religion and professor of history emerita at The College of Wooster, said the exodus from Egypt is the biblical story of the ancient Israelites being freed by God from slavery and led out of Egypt to freedom by Moses.

“It’s a joyous time for extended families to gather and celebrate,” she said.

During all eight days of Passover, no leavened foods are eaten to recall that when the Israelites left Egypt, there was no time to let their bread dough rise.

“We call leavened food chametz,” Friedman-Romell said, “which may symbolize elements of our lives that are puffed up, excessive and/or weighing us down.”

Although Passover seems to occur on a different date every year, it actually does not.

“It begins on the same day of the Jewish calendar every year,” Friedman said, “the 15th day of the month of Nisan. But the calendar most widely used today, the Gregorian calendar, is a 12-month solar calendar based on the rotation of the Earth around the sun. The Jewish calendar is a lunisolar calendar, balancing the solar year of 365 days with 12 lunar months that add up to 354 days. To even them out, the Jewish calendar adds an extra winter month every few years. As a result every Jewish holiday can fall within a range of 28-30 days (one lunar month) on the solar calendar.”

Friedman explained why Passover and Easter always occur around the same time each year.

“The Gospel story is that Jesus was crucified by the Romans either on the day before Passover or on the first day of Passover and resurrected three days later, so the early Christians would necessarily have celebrated that event during Passover," Friedman said. "In the year 325, the Council of Nicaea, an important gathering of church leaders throughout the Roman Empire, decided that this celebration, the holiday of Easter, would always take place on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox (March 21). This was part of the larger trend in the early church of establishing norms and practices without regard to Jewish practices including the Jewish calendar.”

Additionally, Friedman said the manner in which Jesus celebrated Passover was not the same as the way it is celebrated at a Jewish seder.

“It’s important to realize,” she said, “that Jesus did not celebrate Passover the way Jews do now and have done for centuries. In Jesus’ lifetime the temple still stood in Jerusalem, and Jews who could do so made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover there. That’s why he and his followers traveled from Galilee to Jerusalem. This involved bringing a lamb to the temple courtyard on the afternoon prior to the holiday eve, where it was slaughtered and butchered by the priests, and certain parts were taken to be burned on the temple altar. The bulk of the animal was taken by the individual pilgrim back to wherever in Jerusalem they and their household had gathered for the festival.

"There they roasted the lamb, ate it with unleavened bread and bitter herbs (the biblically mandated meal), and in some way or another told the story of the holiday’s meaning. The Jerusalem Temple was destroyed in the year 70, after which the ritual of offering the lamb was discontinued. Consequently, after the temple’s destruction, the meal and the telling of the story became the focus of the evening, and over subsequent centuries they were elaborated and expanded."