![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Apr. 5th, 2012 09:15 amPesach is tomorrow night and I'm starting to get excited. I love Pesach for so many different reasons. My birthday is second seder night, to start with. I love my mother's seder cooking, as another, and I love my aunt's seder cooking, as a third. But let's pretend Pesach isn't just about food for a minute- I also love arguing about the Exodus story for a month before and a month after Pesach.
Maddie asked me to weigh in on the 10 Plagues masks that they're selling for you to put on your children, since I guess someone sent her a link. They're just one of many 10 Plagues toys that you can find if you know where to look. I've seen absurdly cute locusts and boils.
The problem with Pesach is that it's a holiday that has to offer fulfillment and meaning both to children and to adults, at the same time. Moreover, it's a holiday that's all about continuity and the transmission of values, but it's also about questioning why we have those values to begin with. It's a tough thing to balance. In my experience most Jews who find value in Pesach strike the balance through laughter. When we reach the absurdities and the contradictions, we laugh at ourselves for being so silly as to subscribe to these absurdities. The people who can't laugh find Passover dull, contrived, or even mean-spirited.
So what I told Maddie to start was that the way Jews think of Pesach for children is as building a buy-in to the stories. They're not old enough to be forced to struggle with the idea of genocide, of battles for the very existence of our society. But when they are, we want them to be ready. When they are, we want them to approach it from the perspective of "I was there when God took us Israelites out of Egypt... I sang songs of praise for my own salvation... Why did he do that?" And at the same time we're preparing the children to have that conversation later, we're having it ourselves. Hence the masks, and at the same time, the sharing of words of Torah.
I shared two famous Midrashim with Maddie in partial answer. The first says that when the Jews crossed the Sea of Reeds and the sea closed and drowned the Egyptian army behind them, the Jews broke into song, as the Torah tells us. But the Angels in heaven also broke into song, until God rebuked them, because the Egyptians were also God's creation. The message seems to be that even though we can't understand how God could punish the Egyptians so severely with the plagues, it isn't appropriate to celebrate that vengefulness. Only the Jews were entitled to sing, and their song wasn't for the death of the Egyptians, but for their own salvation.
Maddie asked me, if that was the case, if the Egyptians were just as much God's children, why did God Chose Israel for a special relationship? And so I told her a second Midrash, which says that God offered the covenant first to Egypt and other nations- who turned it down because it contained some moral restrictions they were unwilling to accept. And then God offered it to the Jews, and they accepted it without caveat. I don't know what this Midrash means, really. I told Maddie that at minimum the takeaway is that the ancient Israelites were aware that Chosenness is difficult to understand and were struggling with it. What I didn't tell her is that an old Jewish joke parodies this Midrash. It goes like this:
God approached the Philistines and asked if they would accept the Torah. They asked "What does it say?" God said "Thou shalt not steal." The Philistines said, "But we make our living by raiding other tribes. We can't accept the Torah."
God approached the Canaanites and asked if they would accept the Torah. They asked "What does it say?" God said "Thou shalt not murder." The Canaanites said, "But our whole worship is centered around ritualized killings. We can't accept the Torah."
God approached the Israelites and asked if they would accept the Torah. They asked "Is it free?"
So yeah... when Jews are faced with tough questions and doubts about doctrine, we laugh.
(Also, showing off a new icon here. I clipped it from the episode of Numb3rs where Don walks into a synagogue for the first time in years. It's a beautiful shot, of Don looking so small and the synagogue looking so big, so old, so terrifyingly overwhelming.)
Maddie asked me to weigh in on the 10 Plagues masks that they're selling for you to put on your children, since I guess someone sent her a link. They're just one of many 10 Plagues toys that you can find if you know where to look. I've seen absurdly cute locusts and boils.
The problem with Pesach is that it's a holiday that has to offer fulfillment and meaning both to children and to adults, at the same time. Moreover, it's a holiday that's all about continuity and the transmission of values, but it's also about questioning why we have those values to begin with. It's a tough thing to balance. In my experience most Jews who find value in Pesach strike the balance through laughter. When we reach the absurdities and the contradictions, we laugh at ourselves for being so silly as to subscribe to these absurdities. The people who can't laugh find Passover dull, contrived, or even mean-spirited.
So what I told Maddie to start was that the way Jews think of Pesach for children is as building a buy-in to the stories. They're not old enough to be forced to struggle with the idea of genocide, of battles for the very existence of our society. But when they are, we want them to be ready. When they are, we want them to approach it from the perspective of "I was there when God took us Israelites out of Egypt... I sang songs of praise for my own salvation... Why did he do that?" And at the same time we're preparing the children to have that conversation later, we're having it ourselves. Hence the masks, and at the same time, the sharing of words of Torah.
I shared two famous Midrashim with Maddie in partial answer. The first says that when the Jews crossed the Sea of Reeds and the sea closed and drowned the Egyptian army behind them, the Jews broke into song, as the Torah tells us. But the Angels in heaven also broke into song, until God rebuked them, because the Egyptians were also God's creation. The message seems to be that even though we can't understand how God could punish the Egyptians so severely with the plagues, it isn't appropriate to celebrate that vengefulness. Only the Jews were entitled to sing, and their song wasn't for the death of the Egyptians, but for their own salvation.
Maddie asked me, if that was the case, if the Egyptians were just as much God's children, why did God Chose Israel for a special relationship? And so I told her a second Midrash, which says that God offered the covenant first to Egypt and other nations- who turned it down because it contained some moral restrictions they were unwilling to accept. And then God offered it to the Jews, and they accepted it without caveat. I don't know what this Midrash means, really. I told Maddie that at minimum the takeaway is that the ancient Israelites were aware that Chosenness is difficult to understand and were struggling with it. What I didn't tell her is that an old Jewish joke parodies this Midrash. It goes like this:
God approached the Philistines and asked if they would accept the Torah. They asked "What does it say?" God said "Thou shalt not steal." The Philistines said, "But we make our living by raiding other tribes. We can't accept the Torah."
God approached the Canaanites and asked if they would accept the Torah. They asked "What does it say?" God said "Thou shalt not murder." The Canaanites said, "But our whole worship is centered around ritualized killings. We can't accept the Torah."
God approached the Israelites and asked if they would accept the Torah. They asked "Is it free?"
So yeah... when Jews are faced with tough questions and doubts about doctrine, we laugh.
(Also, showing off a new icon here. I clipped it from the episode of Numb3rs where Don walks into a synagogue for the first time in years. It's a beautiful shot, of Don looking so small and the synagogue looking so big, so old, so terrifyingly overwhelming.)