JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN PASSOVER
A Dialogue with Rabbi David Stern of Temple Emanu-El
Fr. Roch Kereszty, O. Cist

This week, instead of continuing the series of commentaries on the parts of The Mass, I insert the main points of my Dialogue with Rabbi Stern on the Jewish and Christian Understanding of Passover, a dialogue that took place at the University of Dallas on March 23, 2005. I would like to approach this topic with a mind and heart as fully tuned in to my Jewish brothers and sisters as is possible for me, but at the same time I try to avoid the trap of many so called ecumenical dialogues, in which we tell nice things to each other and shove under the rug our differences. In my view the direct purpose of a dialogue is not to convince our dialogue partner about the truth of our own faith. Rather, while remaining faithful to our respective faiths, we should try to remove obstacles of mutual misunderstandings; moreover, by studying at depth the other’s faith, we hope to discover the half-way or fully forgotten dimensions of our own faith by means of the faith of the other. In this way we strengthen the bond that unites us even in our separation, the separation that only the grace of the Almighty can and, in the Christian view, will in fact remove at the end of times.

In this spirit first I would like to outline what unites us, then highlight what divides us and finally I would like to articulate the challenge that the study of the other’s faith may pose for both Jews and Christians,

A. What unites us in the celebration of the Passover

1. Literary Links

There are obvious literary links: On Holy Thursday in the Catholic Liturgy that commemorates the Last Supper of Jesus, the first reading of the Mass is Ex 12:1-8, 11-14: the ritual of the Passover Supper. During the Catholic Easter Vigil celebration, seven out of the nine readings are from what we call the Old Testament, the responses to the readings are all taken from the Psalms, and the central image that foreshadows and explains what we celebrate is the Passing Over of Israel from Egypt through the Red Sea into becoming a free people, a people dedicated to the worship of God. In the solemn Hymn of the Easter Candle the deacon sings: “This is the night when first you saved our fathers: you freed the people of Israel from their slavery and led them dry-shod through the sea.” After the last reading before the Gospel the celebrant intones three times the Alleluia: “Praise God” in Hebrew. The Alleluia is the word that most succinctly expresses the joy of our Easter season. And perhaps most shocking for the average Catholic ear, in the prayer after the account of the Exodus the priest prays in this way: “praesta , ut in Abrahae filios et in Israeliticam dignitatem totius mundi transeat plenitudo.” This petition may have seemed so unusual to the translators of the Latin text that they toned it down. The official English translation simply says, “May the peoples of the world become true sons of Abraham and prove worthy of the heritage of Israel.” A more faithful translation might be, “May the whole world become sons of Abraham and be raised to the dignity of the people of Israel.”

The use of so many texts from the Hebrew Bible in the Catholic Triduum shows that the Catholic Liturgy includes the Jewish Passover in its celebration of Easter. However, by this inclusion it also provides its own interpretation of the Passover that discloses amazing analogies but also the undeniable differences between the Jewish Passover and the Christian Easter.

2. The Analogy of Liturgical Time

As Rabbi Stern has put it in his essay “Re-Membering and Redemption, ”It was ancient Israel that first assigned a decisive significance to history, and thereby created a new view of the world, a view carried on into Christianity and Islam. . . . The drama of redemption takes place in time and over time.” The liturgical celebrations of this drama of redemption are not simple psychological acts of recalling past events that are irretrievably lost in their reality. Nor are they a theatrical reenacting of past events as Civil War fans like to re-enact the battle of Gettysburg. Both Jews and Christians believe that in the liturgical celebration the mighty deeds of the Lord become contemporaneous to us. Again, quoting Rabbi Stern: “ As Hoffman writes, ‘the rabbis saw zekher as anamnesis” making the past present.’. . .The Haggadah teaches: ‘In every generation, we are required to see ourselves as if we ourselves went forth from Egypt.’ Who is termed wicked by the Haggadah? The one who insists on declaring the story [of Exodus] to be someone else’s and not his own.” The Christian theology of liturgical time is analogous to that of Judaism. We also believe that the whole of Salvation History becomes present to us in the celebration.

3. Thematic Analogy

Regardless of the position one takes concerning the much discussed etymology of the word “pesah” or “pasah,” both Jews and Christians celebrate Passover as a twofold event: a) The first born of Israel are saved as the angel of the Lord passes over the houses of Israel because of the blood of the Lamb that was smeared on their lintels, and b) Israel passes over the Red Sea dry-shod from slavery to freedom, from being an oppressed people to becoming a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people set apart for the worship of the God of the universe. The connection between the Christian Easter and the Jewish Passover appears even more striking if we accept Jon D. Levenson’s theory according to which the Passover Lamb was believed in second Temple Judaism to have had a saving function since it represented the Akedah, (literally “the binding” but in reality) the sacrifice of Isaac. In the blood of this lamb the Israelites were saved, and in the memory of it a Passover Lamb was sacrificed every year that came to be identified with Isaac. It is important for us to realize that for Judaism the archetype of the Paschal sacrifice (and of the whole sacrificial system, as Levenson has convinced me) is the Akedah, which is the sign of Abraham’s willingness to offer to God his beloved son who is dearer to him than his own life. This implies that the animal sacrifices are in principle not an aberration. What the prophets criticized was a distortion of its original meaning: instead of offering to God all that we are and possess, the sacrificial act was turned into a dirty trick to buy God’s favor while refusing him a willing obedience.

By meditating on the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb (especially if identified with Isaac) and on God’s mighty deliverance of Israel into becoming God’s own people, Christians can better understand their own history and thus deepen their spiritual lives. Only recently did I begin to understand that Moses’ words to Pharaoh were not a transparent lie but the summing up of the very destiny of Israel:

The God of the Hebrews sent us word. Let us go a three days’ journey in the desert that we may offer sacrifice to the Lord our God” (Ex 5:3).

The climax of their journey in the desert is in fact the concluding of the Covenant with the Lord at Mount Sinai. God liberates them from slavery not just to become any sovereign and free nation but to become a people consecrated to Him whose very existence is based on worshipping God, offering sacrifices to him, keeping his commandments and thereby sanctifying his name. At the foot of Sinai the whole assembly of Israel, the qe’hal of the Lord, stands before God, and Moses sprinkles the blood of the sacrificed animals upon the people and upon the altar and thereby establishes a sacred bond between God and the people. “This is the blood of the Covenant” – Moses says to them. Christians see in that Covenant the first stage of the Covenant that was fulfilled in Jesus. For them the New Covenant, especially if they take seriously the Gospel of Matthew, does not consist in superseding the Covenant at Sinai but in its consummation.

We look at the Exodus as the story of ourselves because (and here Rabbi Stern may disagree with me) we believe with Paul that we are the wild olive branches inserted into the noble olive tree of Israel and that therefore Israel’s history is also ours. Thus, in our Easter liturgy the Exodus becomes contemporaneous also to us.

If we see in the Passover Lamb the symbol of Isaac, its story speaks to us even more powerfully. We learn that we must hand over to God our lives just as Abraham did and that our whole life must become a living sacrifice, a gift to God. In this we again find parallels in Rabbinic literature. According to some Talmudic texts the whole life of the faithful Jews should be a constant sanctification of the divine name, they themselves should become a gift to God by keeping his commandments.

Not only do we consider the Passover sacrifice and Exodus as historical events that become present to us in order to enrich and deepen our spiritual lives. We also look at these events as an anticipation of the fullness of redemption. Both Jews and Christians share the belief that God’s mighty deeds disclose a pattern: the return from exile is foretold by the prophets as a new Exodus, and a new creation. Both Jews and Christians, even though they disagree on its concrete shape, are unanimous in waiting for a final redemptive Passover when both the believing Jews and the righteous among the Gentiles will share in the world to come.

Martin Buber expressed this waiting together of both Jews and Christians most eloquently:

Your expectation is directed toward a second coming, ours to a coming which has not been anticipated by a first. To you the phrasing of world history is determined by one absolute midpoint, the year one; to us, it is an unbroken flow of tones following each other without a pause from their origin to their consummation. But we can wait for the advent of the One together, and there are moments when we may prepare the way before Him together.

B) What Divides Us.

As indicated above, Christians see in the liberation of the Israelites’ firstborn through the Lamb’s blood the type, the foreshadowing, of Jesus the Lamb of God and the foreshadowing of their own liberation from eternal death; moreover, they see in the passing through the Red Sea the type, the foreshadowing, of Jesus’ passing through death to the Father and of their own passing from the state of sin to becoming God’s children in Jesus Christ.

In this distinctively Christian interpretation of the Passover, we Christians acknowledge that we rely on further revelation, that our interpretation is not simply deduced from the Old Testament texts alone. In particular, belief in the Incarnation that underlies our belief in the Easter mystery cannot be directly found in the Hebrew Scriptures. But we also believe that precisely by discovering the Jewish roots of our Christian faith, we can gain a deeper understanding of it, an understanding that discovers in our Christian faith the consummation of Israel’s faith which exalts rather than rejects Israel.

What I mean is this: in Jesus of Nazareth, in our Paschal Lamb, in our Isaac, God himself has accepted such radical solidarity with his people that he himself chose to carry all its burdens and that he himself in his humanity became the atoning and thanksgiving sacrifice. In order to offer himself in sacrifice he became man not in an abstract sense but by becoming a first century Jew; and not just any Jew, but a son of David so that he may fulfill and surpass all his promises. Moreover, he became not simply a Jew and a son of David, but, provided that we take seriously both the corporate and individual dimensions of the figure of the Suffering Servant and the Son of God prophecies, he became the embodiment of Israel, the Israel of God, so that Israel in him might become God’s beloved Son in the full sense of the word. Thus, we cannot exalt Jesus without exalting Israel and we cannot celebrate God’s fidelity to his promises without celebrating God’s fidelity to Israel. In Jesus God “like a shepherd he feeds his flock; in his arms he gathers the lambs, carrying them in his bosom and leading the ewes with care” (Is 40:11). He takes us, believing Jews and Christians, into his arms and carries us over from this world into the world to come, into his new creation, which is the ultimate meaning of the Christian Passover.

Here, a clarification of our belief in the Incarnation might be helpful. Christian faith does not abolish the infinite qualitative difference between God and his creation, nor does it claim a mixture or a fusion of divine and human natures; it rather affirms that God himself in his Word, his Son, accepted to take into himself a full human nature along with all the burdens of human existence. We accept the fulfillment of what Psalm 68:20 says so simply and so eloquently: “God bears our burdens;” He bears Israel’s burdens directly and the burdens of all human beings through Israel, the representative of all humankind.

This brief exposition of the difference between our respective understandings of the Passover, I hope, helps to eliminate some misunderstandings and restores a half-way forgotten dimension of our Christian faith: when Jesus passes over from this world to the Father and is exalted at God’ s right hand, he does so as the eschatological Israel. His glory is the glory of Israel. Out of this renewed understanding of our Christian faith I offer a request, or a challenge if you wish, to the faith of our Jewish brothers and sisters. Afterwards I will try to articulate the challenge or question what I suspect our Jewish brothers and sisters would ask from us. At the end I would like to ask Rabbi Stern to what extent he would agree or disagree with this mutual challenge.

C) The Reciprocal Challenge

1. The Christian Challenge to our Jewish Brothers and Sisters

My request is, if, as Buber said, we want to wait together for the first or second, coming of the Messiah, consider the possibility of re-evaluating the role the Prophets have in Jewish worship and theology. This may sound like an impertinent request, but my suspicion is that the preponderant emphasis on the Torah began in rabbinical Judaism when Judaism defined itself against Christianity. My plea would be for you to read and accept all your Sacred Scriptures with all its promises. Do not believe that God has abandoned you. Believe firmly in your election, in your special place in the History of Salvation. Do not reduce the Messianic Age to a merely higher level of human civilization. In other words, continue to keep the door open during the Passover Seder so that the Prophet Elijah mayusher in the Messiah. Continue to believe in the son of David, the shoot sprung from the stump of Jesse, in the Emmanuel, the Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father-Forever and Prince of Peace” (Is 9:5). Continue to believe that at the end of history “there shall be no harm or ruin on God’s holy mountain for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as water covers the sea” (Is 11:9). I would also plead with you that you continue reading the Suffering Servant prophecies and recognize some of his features in your martyrs who went to the gas chambers with the shema Jizrael on their lips. Without belief in the value of martyrdom and without faith in the resurrection of the dead the Shoah might become an insurmountable stumbling block for faith in the God of Israel. Do not expunge the apocalyptic vision of Daniel. Believe that the holy ones of the Most High shall receive kingship, dominion and glory from the Ancient of Days (Dan 7: 14, 18), a kingship they will use not for exploitation but for the service of all nations. Finally, wait for the new heaven and earth promised to us by Isaiah (66:22). After two days he will revive us and we will live forever in his presence (Hos 6:2).

As mentioned before, while we Christians wait for the glorious manifestation of our Lord and Savior, we also wait in him for the exaltation of the eternal Israel, the Israel of God.

2. The Jewish Challenge to the Christian Faith in Redemption

Christians must take seriously the Jewish “no” to the Messianic claim of Jesus. As Rabbi Stern has put it so candidly two years ago at our last Panel Discussion, “Jesus does not fit the job description of the Messiah.” Indeed, all the prophecies agree that the Messiah will bring peace to Israel and to the nations. And indeed where is that peace? It seems that violence has only increased throughout the two thousand years after his birth. In the Middle Ages Christ’s followers put the Jews into ghettoes, prescribed for them a special garb, banished them from public office, levied church taxes on them. How can Jesus be the Prince of Peace if his followers behave in this manner? Enlightened Jews, of course, do not attribute the Shoah to Christians and they acknowledge the fact that the official Catholic Church always opposed violence to the Jews and that Pope Pius and many other bishops and priests saved hundred of thousands of Jews during WW II. But this does not change the fact that Jesus did not bring political peace. How should Christians evaluate this challenge of “no peace—no Messiah”?

The risen Lord greets his disciples with “shalom – peace” (Lk 24:36, Jn 20: 19-21). In John he repeats this greeting twice. We believe that the words of Jesus are more than a customary Jewish greeting. He not only wishes peace but bestows the Messianic peace on his disciples, a peace that comes from his pierced hands and side. He shows us that the price he paid for our peace, our peace with God, peace with ourselves and peace with all human beings was his sacrifice on the cross. But the peace he obtained for us is a gift we need actively to appropriate. Peace in this world always derives from embracing the cross. Everyone must in some way suffer in this world even though we should strive to alleviate the sufferings of our fellow human beings. But peace, ever new life and energy, even unconquerable love come to us from uniting our small crosses to the sufferings of Christ. The water and blood flowing from Jesus’ wounds and the Spirit he breathed upon us enable us to overcome our craving to kill our brother as Cain did and even love our enemies.

However, we must acknowledge with our older brothers and sisters that Jesus did not bring us a universal political peace. Universal cosmic peace will be the fruit of what Jews consider the first coming of the Messiah and what Christians see as His glorious manifestation. Even though universal peace will only be achieved at the end of history, it does not dispense us from working for it with all our energies, together with our older brothers and with every man and woman of good will. And here we Christians must confess with John Paul II our share of guilt. Throughout our 2000 years history we have not cooperated as we should have with the almighty power of God’s Holy Spirit that the risen Christ has always offered to us. There were and there are pockets of true peace (with God and with each other wherever a Christian community lives the teachings of Jesus. In fact even where we find just one individual who radiates the peace of Jesus, the world changes around him. But a huge number of Christians haven’t allowed the leaven of Jesus’ Spirit to permeate and change them. At such times God humbles us by showing us examples of Jesus’ peace and sacrificial attitude among our Jewish brothers and sisters who do not even truly know him.

I would like to illustrate this last point with a real story that formed the basis of a short story by Franz Werfel, the famous German Jewish writer:

It took place when Hitler began to “cleanse” Austria from “non-Aryan elements.” SS commandos brought a group of Austrian Jews to the Hungarian border with their rabbi and with their village’s Catholic priest who, out of solidarity, chose to go with his friend the rabbi and the rest of the Jews. The SS wanted to expel the Jews into Hungary, but the major of the Hungarian border guard refused to allow them in since they had no visa or Hungarian passport. So the SS were getting ready to slaughter the stranded group. But before he gave the order to shoot, the SS. commandant tore down a metal cross from a grave in the nearby cemetery and created a swastika out of it. Then he told the rabbi to kiss it. The rabbi did not say a word, he just took the cross that had been distorted into a swastika and slowly began to straighten out its bent edges. Once he restored it to its original shape of a cross, he gave it over to the priest and began to run toward the border. In a minute he was gunned down by the SS. But the Hungarian major heard the shooting and ordered his men to rescue the Jews and to allow them into Hungary. The SS were scared and ran away. Thus the Jewish group was saved on that day through the sacrifice of their rabbi and made it through Hungary to the West and eventually to America, where Franz Werfel heard their story. For me the moral is: T his rabbi, like so many believing and suffering Jews, became conformed to Jesus and through sharing in his cross he became a source of peace for others and an example for us Christians.