I think there are 2 rules for giving the drash today: 1. Keep it short and 2 don’t reveal the score of last night’s ncaa final.
I have read that more American jews (and I would be sure Israeli jews as well) attend a pesach seder than shul on Yom Kippur. Which is not too hard to understand, after all the food is much better. Last night within a mile radius of here there were doubtless sedarim where some people almost choked trying to cram a large wad of shmura matzah in their mouth at one time to meet their interpretation of the injunction to eat a k’zayit (size of an olive) of matzah, doubtless these sedarim made sure to cover all the "after the food" material so many of us gloss over. Others probably engaged in a seder of the type I saw advertised by a restaurant in the New York Times" traditional (not kosher) seder", which actually upon reflection wasn’t quite the oxymoron that it first struck me as being. It is likely at this seder the cry of "when do we eat" arose soon after one was assembled around the table. I would guess our sedarim fell somewhere in between.
But I am quite sure that all of the seders had a seder plate with the traditional symbols and some explanation or discussion of their symbolism was made. And that truly is the reason that the seder is so widely observed. It is so accessible, the physical symbols of both particularist and universal themes can be related to on a visceral as well as an intellectual level. And thus they meet an elemental human need for ritual.
This need for ritual involving the physical goes back to the very birth of Israel. Immediately after the exodus from Egypt and the splitting of the Red Sea, the Israelites were not comfortable without a physical representation of their relationship with God. Hence the chayt haegel the sin of the golden calf as soon as the Israelites miss the physical presence of God.
And what is God’s response to this when the second tablets are brought down. The commandment not to worship idols is twinned to the commandment to observe pesach(text exodus 34:18). Ibn ezra notes that Israel is commanded not to worship idols and instead to commemorate the god that has freed them. But I think something else is going on as well. While the idolatry is banned there is also a recognition that humans need something more than just the idea of God, they need the ritual as well. And what follows this parsha: the detailed description of the tabernacle, leading up to vayikra and the detailed laws of sacrifice, all reflections of man’s need for ritual.
I used to relate the story of the year I was in Miami for pesach and overheard a woman telling her husband that she couldn’t leave the supermarket till she found the kosher l’pesach evian water but this story was topped this year, when I spotted mizmor brand kosher lpesach spring water at the Pico Robertson Walgreen. We also have all seen the Passover macaroons sold in the bakery right next to the cakes. And doubtless we all have out own inconsistencies.
What all of these have in common I think, is the easy elemental inclination to ritual without its twin of more in depth knowledge. From all sides there is reliance on "tradition’ but a shallow knowledge of the intellectual system that underlines it. And by the way we should give pause before patting ourselves on the back for hitting the shveel hazahav the happy medium.
The beauty of delving into the intellectual system underlying the tradition is the genius of the manner in which it covers both dimensions that can give more depth to the tradition: One being taamei hamitzvah the aggadic or homiletic approach. (To give but one example the Chassidic interpretation that chametz represents the ego, the puffing up of ourselves, while the matzah represents getting back to our essential selves). And the other is the halachic, literally the way to go the structure that is essential to perpetuating a tradition. Pesach of course it is a demonstration par excellence of this: endless beautiful interpretations to bring around the seder table and seemingly endless rules regarding the prohibition on chametz, which are both aggravating but also lend the essential structure to the chag.
The past 2 years I have had the opportunity to study in a Talmud shiur with Rabbi Kanefsky. We are studying masechet Shabbat and although we often touch laws that I don’t always observe I seldom fail to find fascinating the way the legal system evolves over time with a great deal more flexibility and sensitivity to the societal context than I might have anticipated. At some points it would be an issue for me or a subject for discussion with others whether any of these laws were divinely ordained or whether the text of the torah really dictates any of these practices. But those issues are relatively unimportant to me at this point. This vast literature is our yerusha, our inheritance and as such we should have a familiarity with it.
Which brings us to this evening. Tonight we begin sefirat haomer leading up to Shavuot. Shavuot is the poor cousin of the shalosh haregalim. Even as observance of succot has grown among less observant jews Shavuot remains a distant third. And it’s not hard to understand why, it lacks those elemental symbols and rituals of the other two. But its theme is crucial to our Judaism: learning and developing an informed approach to our observance.
So perhaps it is fitting that we are given 49 days to count off till Shavuot. While we might have thought the hard work connected to the chagim is building a succah or cleaning and cooking for pesach, in fact the hard work is incorporating into our lives the more abstract more demanding, less elemental challenge of Shavuot. Starting tonight we have 49 days to work up to it.
Chag sameach