Reflections on a Paschal Goat

 

I remember well the year I spent the weeks before Pesach in Dimona, a development town in Israel’s Negev desert founded during the great immigration of Jews from Morocco in the 1950s. It was a diverse place, as well as Jews from across North Africa, there were Indians and Ethiopians, just not many Ashkenazim. On Rosh Chodesh a sheep appeared, tethered to a tree on the front lawn of the next-door apartment block. For a couple of weeks, it mooched around, nibbling the lawn and looking bored. And then on the eve of Pesach it was gone – with a red daub of blood marking the doorpost where, hours earlier, the sheep had mooched.

It was shocking for me, a nice genteel Anglo-Jewish eighteen-year-old, to witness this most corporeal preparation for Pesach. It’s not that I wasn’t thinking about Pesach myself. It’s not that I haven’t done a whole bunch of strange stuff to prepare for Pesach my entire life. But … a sheep, really a true-life Paschal sheep?

Actually, I wasn’t a vegetarian back then, but even then I distrusted meat-eaters who worried about meat while still walking around with fur or feathers, yet didn’t worry about meat in polystyrene packs or on plates.

But, even as a non-meat eater now, I felt I should Modeh this proud tradition I had witnessed, peering out from my own flat across the street, looking down on the sheep next door. Modeh as in doff my kippah, acknowledge and even feel grateful for the opportunity to see something that connected me so profoundly to the sacrificial heart of our faith.

In the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple, and the abandonment of the sacrificial system, two different parts of the Jewish diaspora developed in related, but differing ways.

In Ashkenaz – northern Europe – the place where my family comes from – the abandonment of the sacrificial system is observed more actively. If we can’t offer a Paschal sacrifice, there shall be no lamb served at Seder night at all. We replace the lamb with … something else. We read the story and recite the practice of Hillel, ‘at the time the Temple stood who would eat the sacrificial offering together with Matzah Marror.’ But we’re done with all that. Growing up, for me, that meant some kind of chicken cooked in a sauce – no roast meat.

But in Sepharad, the response to the destruction of the Temple with the possibility of offering a real Paschal sacrifice was more nostalgic – lamb would be served, of course, lamb is served at Seder, how else are you supposed to remember leaving Egypt?

In some ways it’s a bit like Jews and Christians when it comes to head coverings and places of worship. Jews put a Kippah on, and Christians take a cap off. I’m not making a claim that one is right and the other is wrong. There are different ways to achieve the same thing – remember that God is around us and above us. It works, on a good day, for me.

But there is something profound to be realised about a real death, of a real sheep that I, in my nice Anglo-Ashkenaz experience of Judaism, had missed up to that point in my life.

It’s real, it matters, it’s corporeal. The sense that we are supposed to really feel as if we ourselves went forth from Egypt, is easier to experience when there’s a real sheep at stake – literally, at the stake.

But when there’s a real sheep you can feel the things you are supposed to feel.

I remember too the year I spent Yom Kippur. And on the eve of Yom Kippur I went to Machane Yehuda to see the much-discredited tradition of Kappores. It’s a post-talmudic, but still 1400-year-old tradition of taking a chicken, holding it above the head of a person and, sort of, expiating the sins of the Gever – man onto the Gever – rooster. I was prepared to hate it, I was prepared to find it crude and ridiculous. I mean, I don’t believe you can be relieved of the suffering due your sins by swinging a chicken above your head. But then I noticed that after each chicken was waved, it would go off to the Shochet and end up in a bag being carried away by one of the scores of poor people who turned up knowing there would be free chicken on offer. I realised watching what was going on that it was all, really, being driven by the desire to give Tzedakah. And it felt, watching these Jews dressed as 18C Polish nobles, that Kappores had been driven by the desire to do Tzedakah for some time, several hundred years, you know.

It’s too easy, in these days, to abstract everything, everything becomes a thinner version of what once was, and stripped back of their corporeal reality Jewish rituals that once upon a time felt so vibrant and true can be left feeling just out-of-date.

I’ve also been thinking about the one thing left, the one really literal ritual that is the thing itself, still, rather than a Zecher L’Mikdash – a memory of what once was. Brit Milah – the covenant of circumcision. It’s literal and immediate and to be in the room for a Brit Milah is to feel a very stark connection to the covenant that was given to Abraham. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that even despite its visceral immediacy Brit Milah is still hanging on in there as an observance even among those who don’t keep Kosher, or don’t keep Shabbat. Maybe the strength of Brit Milah is its visceral immediacy.

What I’m saying is that part of me is nostalgic for the sacrificial system. I get it. I mean, there is another part of me that thinks, literally, thank God I don’t need to do Jewish that way, but I wonder what I would understand if I did.

Here’s the first thing;

I think I would understand gratitude more profoundly. These days, when I feel grateful I say Modeh Ani, or perhaps log into a website and press ‘donate – and don’t forget to send me a Gift Aid receipt.’ I don’t even donate cash any more, there are just numbers on the screen that go down when I give Tzedakah. Bac in the time of the Temple, I would have offered an animal, literally taking an animal from my flock and acknowledged it as no longer mine – as a transfer from my jurisdiction to the department of God.

Moshe Halbertal in his terrific book, Sacrifice, makes a brilliant point about prepositions. The Biblical sacrificial system isn’t, he says, sacrificing for something, it’s sacrificing to something. Biblical sacrifices weren’t offered to get something back from God. They were offered as a gift of love, as a coming closer – literally, a Korban – the word for sacrifice and the word for coming closer are the same word. The rabbis say that there was a fire lit on the sacrificial altar and the smoke rose from the altar towards the heavens, and there was a flame that would descend from the heavens and come close to the flame rising from the people and there would be in that moment, a point of meeting. I miss that.

 

I think I would have understood sin more profoundly. These days, I don’t tend to think about sin very much at all. I mean, on Yom Kippur I’ll give it some thought and tap my chest as I roll through the language of our liturgy. But back then it would have been an animal, each time I messed up. I wonder how much more it would have held me to the straight and narrow; calculating carefully aware with so much more a concrete sense of what wrongdoing would cost, not even in financial terms, but in terms of the loss of life of an animal. I like to think I would have been moved by that knowledge, bettered by that system.

What’s the point?

I’m not advocating for a return to the sacrificial system. I’m not religio-luddite. I’m also not blind to the challenges and failings of a sacrificial-based Judaism. It’s hard enough for our caretaking staff with kiddush. Can you imagine having to ask for assistance scrubbing sacrificial blood off the carpet on a weekly basis? I digress.

The point is, it’s too easy to look at the history of Judaism, with its immediate visceral rituals and mock, or think we know so much better than those fools of ancient times. The truth is always going to be more complex. We would be better off suspending judgement and foregoing arrogance and focusing instead on curiosity and the possibilities of learning more than we knew yesterday. For the great truth of the sacrificial system, whether we are considering the sacrifices of our weekly reading or the remembrance of the Paschal sacrifice we will consider in less than two weeks’ time, is that immediacy and visceral observance have a power that talks and shadow observance cannot match.

The point is, don’t throw out any more of the baby with the bathwater. There are visceral observances left in Judaism, and they are absolutely worth tending to, performing and, literally, observing – watching how they change us, for they do, far more than we would imagine. That goes from the visceral observances of Shabbat to Tefilin to Kashrut to … almost anything. We’ve an incredible trove of treasure left, still, even despite the end of temple-based Judaism. We would do well to tend them well.

To get Judaism properly, to get Passover properly, it’s not enough to talk about it and say you feel it. You have to do it, you have to get your hands dirty – clean, cook, cook differently, eat differently. Give the physical, practical, visceral vestiges of Judaism that we have left the space to do their work on our soul. and in our hearts. Opening to the power of these rituals, and submitting to the power of these rituals will allow us to understand more profoundly, more deeply who we are and what it is to be standing here today, less than two weeks away from Zman Cheruteinu – the time of our Freedom.

Shabbat Shalom

On Freedom - Looking Backwards and Forwards

On Wednesday night, at the Passover Seder Table, we will read from the Haggadah, ‘Remember that you were slaves to Pharoah in Egypt.’ We are called to see ourselves as if we personally were there, and left. The memory is painted starkly and in binary terms. We went;

Me’Avdut LeHerut – from slavery to freedom

MeYagon L’Simchah – from misery to joy

UMeEvel L’Yom Tov – from mourning to festivity

UMeAfela Le Or Gadol – and from darkness to great light

What I want to do today, on this last Shabbat before Passover, is suggest some problems and a hope, when it comes to this way of looking at our history of enslavement.

And, in this, I’m hugely indebted to a remarkable article by the academic and journalist, Gary Younge.[1]

Younge tells a story from the 1860s, a time when Britain really did rule the waves and Manchester was the largest processor of cotton in the world. The largest producer of cotton, at the time, was the American slave-holding South, locked in a civil war with the American North. Lincoln, hoping to isolate and economically cripple the south, implemented a naval blockade of its cotton. But that brought hardship on the mill workers of Manchester.

The British government [Younge writes] was officially neutral. Many merchants in Liverpool, prioritising wealth at home over freedom abroad, backed the Confederate south and organised warships to support the enslavers. But in Manchester, a coalition of liberals, cotton workers and abolitionists came together to back the north. After a famous public meeting at the Free Trade Hall on 31 December 1862, Manchester’s workers resolved to endure the privations of the blockade and lend their weight to the fight against slavery. [writing in the Guardian, Younge states] (The Guardian did not support them: its leader on that day warned that “English working men” should “know better than to allow the organised expression of their opinion as a class to be thrown into one scale or the other in a foreign civil war”.)

Months later, Lincoln wrote a letter of thanks to the “working-men of Manchester”. “I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working-men of Manchester, and in all Europe, are called to endure in this crisis,” he wrote. “Under the circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.”

That letter is now carved into the pedestal of a statue of Lincoln, in Manchester. Here’s the problem that emerges when we look back, carefully.

We see that not everyone got it. There have been merchants, kings and Pharaohs “who didn’t want to let my people go” in every liberation narrative of humanity. God help us, there were even Jews among the slave traders and slavers. There were even black Africans who traded other black Africans across the Atlantic Sea. In the rabbinic imagination there were Jews who, even as the entire edifice of Egpyt crumbled, refused to leave Egypt. When the Torah says that the Israelites crossed the Red Sea BHamushim, Rashi suggests that this strange untranslatable word connected to the Hebrew word for five, could mean that only one-in-five left. The rest, Shemot Rabba suggests, “had Egyptian patrons, and they had wealth and honor there, [so] they didn’t want to leave.” It might seem so obvious to us, descendants of the Hebrew slaves who left, that slavery was awful and we should have been freed, but that wasn’t everyone’s perspective. It never has been in any liberation struggle.

The journey from darkness to light and from slavery to freedom, it isn’t perfectly binary. It wasn’t then, it isn’t now. The real problem, it’s always the real problem, are the bystanders, not the most immediately oppressive, but those of us whose comfort depends on the enslavement of others. It’s hard to put more importance on the freedom of others, far away and unseen – slaves are always unseen – than our own immediate levels of comfort.

Writing about how we do and don’t remember the trans-Atlantic slave trade of black men and women into this country, Younge argues there has been a kind of aphasia. He cites the anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler who suggested a similarity between the way we, in Britain, treat the memory of British enslavement and the condition in which a person has difficulty with their language or speech, usually after a stroke.

“It is not a matter of ignorance or absence,” writes Stoler. “Aphasia is a dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things.”

It’s certainly not, Younge argues, an;

accidental, absent-minded misplacement of a fact. [he writes] The transatlantic trade in human beings for profit doesn’t slip one’s mind, momentarily, like an elusive name or date. A nation does not forget centuries of slavery as a person might forget an umbrella.   

This mental inability to see the reality of enslavement, or any appalling mistreatment of an entire class of human beings, as truly awful runs deep in the human condition, God help us. As Jews we’ve suffered from it many times over many centuries.

As humans, we simply don’t see the things that make us uncomfortable and when these things are pointed out to us, we balk and recoil and find it so much easier to critique the messenger than listen to their message, simply never connecting our experience of living in a society in which human beings are enslaved with the great clear-cut binaries of the Haggadah narrative.

That’s the problem with this kind of memorialisation of the Passover narrative – it locks the past into the past so we miss the nuances of how what happened and how it’s still happening. It’s too binary and misses the importance of seeing mistreatment of humanity as appalling.

Towards the end of his article Younge says this;

But the more pluralistic a society, the greater the likelihood that not everyone will subscribe to the same agreement. This “forgetting” about the people who were massacred, enslaved, subjugated, tortured or otherwise oppressed is a privilege of the powerful. Those from the communities who were massacred, enslaved, subjugated and tortured simply don’t have that luxury.

I’m sure that’s right. But making space for the plurality of voices is about more than ensuring we hear voices that we evade or ephase. It’s about recognising the possibility of the human condition. If we can truly hear other people speak of their pain we can learn how to address it. Pain can’t be smothered. It doesn’t, unaddressed, go away. But hearing, holding and addressing the pain of others is, frankly, the apex of the human condition - empathy. We don’t get any better than that.

Making space for the plurality of humanity in its diversity and even in its pain, anger or bitterness, allows us to appreciate quite how miraculous humanity is. And the other thing – to limit the voices to be heard in society because of one kind of descriptor or another – is truly appalling.

Speaking at Conference on Religion and Race in 1963, in the States, introducing the conference’s keynote speaker, Martin Luther King, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught this;

 To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child. To act in the spirit of race is to sunder, to slash, to dismember the flesh of living humanity. Is this the way to honor a father: to torture his child? How can we hear the word “race” and feel no self-reproach?

Few of us seem to realize how insidious, how radical, how universal an evil racism is. Few of us realize that racism is man’s gravest threat to man, the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason, the maximum of cruelty for a minimum of thinking.

The redeeming quality of [the human being] lies in [their] ability to sense kinship with all [humanity].

How many disasters do we have to go through in order to realize that all of humanity has a stake in the liberty of one person; whenever one person is offended, we are all hurt. What begins as inequality of some inevitably ends as inequality of all.

Amen to that.

That’s the problem that comes from this very binary relationship to our journey from darkness to light, what about hope?

My sense of hope is based on the very same thing is at the heart of our problem – the viewing of historic liberation struggles in binary terms – darkness v light, slavery v freedom. Viewed from the perspective of today, the oppression of our people by the Egyptians is just obviously awful, so obviously awful that the big thing we struggle with, around the Seder table, is why didn’t Pharaoh realise it then and let the Israelites go. The future judges differently than the present. In the present, our justifications and semi-wilful blindnesses might make perfect sense. But the future won’t care that we prioritised our immediate comfort over our commitment to do good, fight prejudice, combat mis-treatment. The future will be a stark judge of the decisions we make, and the decisions we duck because facing difficult decisions feels, right now, too difficult.

What if we developed the ability to think like historians of the future looking back on the decisions of our present. What if, at school, there would be compulsory units in imagining what it would be like to look back on our decisions today from the perspective of a hundred years, or five hundred. I know, a little loose for a strictly academic discipline, but wouldn’t it help? Wouldn’t it shape us? Maybe it’s really us, of course, the middle aged, who should really be doing this work. I think our children already know the way the future will consider our treatment of this planet and its inhabitants. That’s a chilling thought.

I want to suggest a two-fold approach to history, properly understood. We need to turn to the past with the knowledge that it’s complex and almost certainly still unfolding. And we need to learn to look back, with a historian’s eye, on our present from an imagined distant future.

It would have us celebrating the Passover with gratitude, humility and purpose, and it would make us better citizens of today,

Shabbat Shalom,

Chag Pesach Sameach,

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[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2023/mar/29/lest-we-remember-how-britain-buried-its-history-of-slavery?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other