Each Passover, for the past three years, we've shared this piece of writing with our friends. We offer it again, along with our best wishes for a very happy Passover season.
Will, Paula & Ben
Americans are used to having their holidays shifted around for the sake of mercantilism, convenience, and three-day weekends. We have gone for movable feasts in a big way. FDR started it by playing around with Thanksgiving. Now even the presidents' birthdays are not sacrosanct. We have come a long way from the days when people protested the change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, demanding eleven days of their lives back. We have lost our awe of time since then.
The Jewish calendar, on the other hand, which moves in tandem with the moon, reminds us to look up at the sky, to notice its changes and our smallness. Since the Jewish lunar year is about 354 days long, eleven days shorter than the solar year, it must be adjusted on a regular basis to stay in alignment with the solar year. Otherwise Passover would sometimes be in the wrong season. This adjustment is done by intercalating a leap month on a regular basis. This constant shifting of the fifteenth of Nisan in relation to the solar year means that Passover can begin at any time from March 26 through April 23. Obviously, it neither falls on the same day of the week every year, nor even at the exact same time of the solar year. It will often fall on an inconvenient day, maybe the middle of the week instead of Saturday night or the day you are supposed to meet with your accountant to file your taxes.
Some people find that having a seder on a Wednesday, for instance, is difficult. They postpone their seder until the closest weekend evening or the night when everyone can most easily get together. They find it arduous to do all the elaborate things necessary to have a seder--shopping, cleaning, cooking, table preparation--in the middle of a work week. If that is true for you, it is better to have a seder on the wrong night than to have no seder at all.
The book of moonlight is not written yet.
--Wallace Stevens
We say we observe, rather than celebrate, our holidays, and in terms of the moon, that is true. We observe the phases of the moon in order to have our festivals on the right day. Our lunar, change- able, feminine calendar is a sacred cycle of days that pierces or intersects with the profane, rigid, male solar line of days:
We jews fix our years by the moon, other nations by the sun Those who depend on the sun are strong and fight for their survival and existence as long as fortune shines on them, but as soon as their sun sets, they vanish from the pages of history. Not so the People of Israel who live on and shine during the darkest stretches of the night, just like the moon, that sends forth its light in night's darkest hours.
- -Aryeh Leib, the second Gerrer Rebbe
Of course, we invent the structuring of time, but the solar calendar is the epitome of convenience for the sake of work, mammon, and the machine, while the Jewish lunar calendar goes against the grain of that efficient, streamlined sense of time. It was the Jewish calendar that first introduced the day of rest into the week. The pagans thought the ancient Jews were lazy in refusing to work one out of seven days.
The Jewish calendar imposes a kind of time that is in step with nature, the agricultural year, heavenly bodies, and human rhythms. Even the beginning and ending of the day is fluxional. Every new day begins at the actual moment of the sun's going down. By putting ourselves in tune with the ancient Jewish sense of time, we break the solar caiendar's monopoly on time: "Sorry, I can't work Tuesday. It's Passover." We free ourselves from the slavery of repeating another tedious week, from rolling the rock of Sisyphus up that same hill again.
From the magical point of view, our ceremony is done at the right astronomical moment. Our being in tune with the universe means performing our human rituals in congruity with the operations of the rest of the universe. The arrival of, first, spring, the vernal equinox, and then the first full moon after that, is the time of Aries, the ram, and so our ancestors sacrificed their spring lamb, their pesacb, at this time. In every generation we have added on to the meanings of the day, giving it renewed religious, political, cultural, even military content. On the fifteenth of Nisan in 73 C.E., the defenders of Masada committed suicide rather than submit to Rome. Almost two millennia later, the Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto began on the night of the first seder of 1943. Even if we reject magic and tradition, we might consider keeping faith at our sederim with those Freedom Fighters by observing the night on which they chose to rise up against a twentieth-century Pharaoh.
So there is something to be said for observing Passover at the correct time. For a few moments, we can live in an entirely other time, a cyclical time that begins for us when we open our Haggadot, our once-upon-a-time story that is our passport to mythic time and our 4,000 years of history. We touch immortality:
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.
-- William Blake
from:
Keeping Passover
by Ira Steingroot, 1995