Torah and Tradition, Calendar and Community

Why is the ending of this holiday different from all other endings? 
Reflections on the end of Pesach and the choice of reading this Shabbat

        The twin dilemma facing thinking, caring liberal Jews this weekend is not merely a matter of laziness and convenience.  Instead, the issues of how long to observe Passover, and which Torah portion to read this Saturday morning, are actually about values, beliefs, and deep attitudes towards science, knowledge, affinity, loyalty, custom and community.

         First, on the question of calendar.  I have written elsewhere about the basic mechanism of how the Jewish calendar works.  In that essay “Why are the Jewish Holidays Never on Time? (And Other Quirks of the Jewish Calendar),” I explain the tradition of adding an “additional” day to some holidays in the Diaspora, outside the land of Israel,  in order to cover all of the possibilities of when a holiday might fall, based on whether the previous lunar month had been one of 29-days or 30-days.

         But we know, now, how long the months are.  The lunar calendar has been calculated scientifically, and accurately, for nearly 2000 years.  We do not need to depend on two witnesses, huffing and puffing and running with their reported sightings of the sliver of a new moon, before an official tribunal in the Jerusalem Temple. 

In some ways, observing the “extra” day is a slap in the face of science.  It declares human knowledge to be less a part of our experience than custom and the way we have always done things.

I can understand, often, the impulse to choose metaphor and myth and mystery over a strictly scientific and mechanistic view of the world, in storytelling and ritual in general.  I understand the pull and power of tradition.  But adding a day was done because of uncertainty.  When the ritual decision is about human knowledge (finding out when the new month really begins), it seems to me not merely silly, but… certainly stubborn, and almost defiant… to just keep using the corrective mechanism, even when it is clearly no longer needed. 

I do observe seven days of Pesach, as Biblically mandated, and as it is observed in Israel.  I will happily have challah after Shabbat services tomorrow night, and bread and other leavened food during the day on Saturday.  I do so with no qualms or reservations… none… save one.

It is this, as I have also written about in the past.  It is… increasingly difficult… to find liberal Jews who actually and carefully observe seven days of Passover.  When I was growing up, even unaffiliated and otherwise barely observant Jews avoided leaven on Passover.  We learned who else was Jewish at school not only from who went to any synagogue, but also who showed up with a matza sandwich for lunch, those years when Pesach did not overlap with Spring Break.  It was a unifying, widespread experience of solidarity.

But now, it seems, more and more people view the whole setting aside of chametz for the entire holiday as an option, and they opt out.  I am shocked by few things, certainly not by gambling going on in this establishment.  But I am shocked – shocked – when I see Jews eating bread during Passover.  For all that Reform Judaism stands for freedom of choice… this was not one of those things we meant!

So the question of community looms large for me here.  Is there, then, still a seven-day observant critical mass sufficiently large enough to create that sense of… well… community.  There is something to the… buzz and excitement… of that moment of breaking Pesach, that first bite of bread.  It is meant, I think, to be a shared experience. 

If your observance of Passover lasts a day and a half, you don’t get that feeling, that longing, that… true satisfaction of the return to bread after a full week. It is, actually, a pretty powerful moment. The only thing that could get me to observe Passover for eight days… would be the complete lack of others to share the solidarity of that ending with me, after seven.

This is a dilemma I face every year.  So far, I am hanging on, to the liberal and, in my view, more rational observance, in support of science and knowledge and the idea that a religion can grow and adapt and change.

But then there is the question that comes up only some years, only when the first evening of Passover begins… on a Friday night.  And that is: what Torah portion do we liberal Jews read… the following Saturday morning?

So here is the issue.  If Passover is eight days, then the last day of the holiday is a special reading.  As it happens, traditionally, when the eighth day of Pesach falls on Shabbat, that reading is Deuteronomy 14:22-16:17.  The end of this section (Chapter 16) refers to the three Pilgrimage Festivals, including Shavuot and Sukkot, but beginning with the observance of Passover.

If Passover is only seven days long, however, then we have a challenge.  For Jews in Israel, and for Reform Jews outside Israel, this Saturday is a “regular” Shabbat.  (Note that we face the same issue when Shavuot begins on a Thursday night.  Since Reform Jews and Jews in Israel observe Shavuot for only one day, the following day and day after are also a “regular” Shabbat.)

So what’s a liberal Jew to do? We don’t think this Saturday is a holiday.  We do think it is a bit odd that the Torah reading cycle is “out of sync” for up to a month and a half, between Israel and the Diaspora.  We want to follow what we think is right.  But we also think it is weird if a Bar or Bat Mitzvah in our synagogue is reading a different Torah portion that someone in a Conservative synagogue down the street.

Here, I believe the usual practice (and certainly mine) has been a kind of split decision.  To maintain what we believe, we might well read the “next” weekly Torah portion this Saturday (which happens to be Acharei Mot, Leviticus 16:1-18:30).  And then we would read Acharei Mot again the following Shabbat.  We choose, by doing this, to reflect our beliefs – but also to remain in the same rhythm and flow of readings with other Jews around us. 

Or, we might read part of Acharei Mot this week, and choose to study part of the traditional reading, or even other readings associated with the holiday that we have not had a chance to tackle (Song of Songs, for example, which is traditionally read on the Shabbat in the middle of Passover or, in years such as this one when there is no intermediate Shabbat, on the morning of the seventh day of Pesach).

All of these things seem like arcane details and insanely ritualistic decisions of interest only to rabbis and a few pious perfectionists in our communities.  As I said at the outset, though, these choices really do reflect something deeper.  What is our attitude towards knowledge?  How do we weight that against the call of custom?  Do we feel the tradition as inertia or a comfort?  What choices do we make out of a rational spirit, and which ones are influenced socially, by a desire for cohesion, or under perhaps out of peer pressure?

And, finally, who is our “community?”  Who are our “fellow” Jews, and how much do their choices matter to us?  Do we do what we want, or are we constrained even to some degree, by that sense of solidarity.

Which comes down to: who am I, in the world?  With whom do I stand?  And how, and why?

Seen in that light, these are not trivial considerations at all.

Happy Pesach.  And a good end to Passover – whenever you break it!