Holidays

The time between Purim and Pesach is anticipatory, designed in various ways to heighten expectation. Special Torah selections lead us up to Shabbat Hagadol (the "Big Sabbath") that precedes Passover, and in traditional communities of yore, the Rabbi sermonized only twice a year, once on Shabbat Shuva, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and again on Shabbat Hagadol. On the first of these occasions, the community's spiritual leader reviewed the laws of repentance in their details so that everyone might have their best chance before the gates closed. On Shabbat Hagadol, the Rabbi reviewed the laws of kashrut in their details so that everyone's Pesach kitchen would be kosher.

When I was growing up, conversation about Passover food shopping and cleaning began at Purim. My grandmother, until her last days, schlepped cartons of Pesach dishes up from the basement, and assigned us all our Pesach duties. She was terribly exacting, and she religiously supervised our going through our coat pockets for gum wrappers.
 
The Seders were, of course, the main event, but as an adult, I now realize how much those family experiences around the dining room table felt important precisely because there was so much anticipatory preparation. The readying behind the scenes, the cooking, and the learning for the Seders in the weeks before created the necessary atmosphere for a momentous week. The Seders loom large in my memory now because the devoted labors of advanced planning –l ike the planning before a bar-mitzvah or a wedding – sanctify the occasion and make it awesome.

Often it is the behind-the-scenes work, that which we are likely to take for granted, that is especially important. The cliché tells us that God is in the details. At no season is that more apparent than in Spring, and Passover is the holiday of Spring. It is now, when we see the crocuses determinedly rising from ground so recently snow covered, when we see buds on the branches and we know that we are in transition between winter's barren landscape and what will soon be a lush green world, that we are most inclined to be hopeful, to believe in a power for good in the world, a generous lifegiving force, a force that liberates Nature from the cold and human beings from slavery.
 
All of which is to say that God and grandmothers have a good deal in common. Their work is often done so reliably that unless we pause to take notice we might forget to appreciate the greatness in the details. If we have been lucky in our lives, we have found comfort in an infinity of detailed loving attentions, from mittens to hot lunches, blessings that are blessings precisely because they were given naturally and unconditionally.  Many of the regular Shabbat readings during these weeks come from a section of Torah that reads like a how-to manual, a recipe describing how the Priests are to perform particular sacrifices in divine service. We read these descriptions year after year, though we have no more sacrifices and no more Priests. As a Victorianist, I like these readings for the richness of their description. The Torah paints the rituals of ancient Temple life with the loving detail of an Austen novel, thereby preserving on parchment for us the rules and practices of holiness.

In these readings, we learn what exactly Aaron and his sons wear–special linen garments that are reserved for holy occasions – elaborate breastplates and miter, and I like to imagine the weaving women and craftsmen who did the preparatory labor. We learn how each sacrifice is performed and the rituals of blood that purify both the sacrificial space and the priest himself, whose ears, hands, and feet are dotted with blood, symbolically sanctifying the whole body of the holy man.

I see a connection between these details and the Passover holiday: Blood creates holiness. Jews enter the Abrahamic covenant through circumcision, through brit milah, and another Talmudic passage connects the blood of circumcision to the blood on the doorposts in the Exodus that marked Jewish homes so that the angel of death would know to pass over the Hebrews during the tenth, deadly, definitive plague. The Talmud explains that blood marks Jewish identity. Another rabbi goes on to assert that women enter the covenant without a blood ritual because they are naturally connected to life blood.
 
By contrast with Torah readings replete with ritual details, the Haftarah for Shabbat Hagadol is messianic and points to a world at peace. The prophet Malachi gives us God's promise that the hearts of children will turn to their parents and the hearts of parents will turn towards their children, and then Elijah the prophet will come. Malachi's prophesy recognizes that inter-generational understanding is the kind of great miracle required to bring the Messiah.

The weaving women who worked across cultural divides, and Miriam and Yocheved, working together with bat pharaoh, pharaoh's daughter, remind us that it is possible to achieve such miraculous understandings. After all, women's work, weaving technology – colors, dyes, styles – is among our strongest evidence for cultural exchange in the ancient world. And the baby Moses is saved because of an astonishing conspiracy among women that crosses racial, religious, generational, and class boundaries for the sake of saving the life of a baby. Behind the central liberation myth of our people, the drama of Moses pleading with Pharaoh, the plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, and the fulfillment of the dream of nationhood in the Promised Land is the bravery of a slave mother, her daughter, and the Egyptian princess who was moved by the sight of a slave baby in a basket.
 
At an even earlier moment, we are told that though the Pharaoh ordered the midwives to see to it that there would be no babies, Shifra and Puah, the Hebrew midwives, defied these orders and bravely did their work. In this small way, the Passover story recognizes women's work and courage. And the Talmud acknowledges the centrality of midwives, mothers, and sisters in this liberation story. One tradition insists that it is because of the merit of the women that God freed us from bondage. This story elaborates that it was women's faith and hopefulness that allowed the miracles to occur. When it came time to construct the Tabernacle, Moses was ready to reject the jewelry and mirrors of women as gifts out of which to make holy ritual items because he worried that they symbolized vanity. But the story goes that he was prevailed upon to accept these items and that they were particularly pleasing to God because they were the signs of the vitality and hope of the people. When the Hebrew men, desperate because of Pharaoh's order to destroy their sons, decided it would be better not to have children at all, their wives and daughters, tradition tells us, maintained their attractiveness and persuaded them to change their minds and not give up on the Jewish future.
 
Every year at my family's seder we make my mother tell us about Passover when she was a little girl in Siberia. My mother's family are Hasidim, and when she was a child, and Hitler was invading Poland, her family, along with many others (but tragically not with enough others) willingly abandoned all of their possessions, were packed into cattlecars, and were deported to Siberia to live out the war years in the safety of Stalinist Russia. Though practicing religion was strictly forbidden, the first thing they did when they got to Siberia was reconstruct from memory the Jewish calendar. These Jews, who gave up everything they had, risked it all to bake matzoh. My mother remembers that they made matzoh in the middle of the night and that the children stood watch to sound warning in case someone might be coming. As in the Exodus of old, in Russia in the 1940s, the courage of women and children was intimately connected to the preservation of a Jewish way of life. What is so moving here are the Jewish priorities. They saved their lives before their things but understood that it was only worth it if they did not lose their identity in the process.

Our tradition, in saying that it is because of the merit of women that the people were freed, hints at an understanding of the value of the intricate work behind the scenes and the importance of details in a Jewish life and community. Pesach especially invites us to take notice of every crumb. Such attention makes us mindful of and grateful for not only the grand miracles of liberation but also for the small miracles of our everyday lives.