The Claustrophobia of the Passover Seder
Imagine that you are shut up inside your room. The forces of death rage outside, as you huddle together with your family and friends. Today this imaginative exercise requires no imagination at all. But I am not thinking right now of Tel Aviv or Beit Shemesh. I am thinking of Goshen, three thousand years ago, where the Jews, on Passover eve, were shut up in their homes, huddled together as the angelic destroyer made its way all about them, killing where it could.
We can distinguish two components of this situation: fear and isolation. Was there fear then, on that original seder eve? The Torah does not say, but then, the Torah is famously reticent about characters’ inner lives. One might contend that the Israelites were not in fact anxious; that, having witnessed the previous nine plagues, and especially the ways in which the plagues distinguished between them and the Egyptians, they were confident that God would keep them safe from any harm. But I think we are supposed to posit fear. After all, in the lead-up to, for example, the plague of hail, God did not ask the Israelites to undertake any act to ensure that their crops were not damaged; the hail simply did not fall in Goshen. But before the plague of the firstborn God tells the Israelites that they must protect themselves by smearing blood on their doors, and this instruction must have itself generated great anxiety: Perhaps I didn’t spread enough blood, or quite visibly enough? Could the blood already have dried and flaked off?
In any case, whether or not the original seder eve was a moment of terror or not, our tradition does not seem to preserve terror; it isn’t a feature of our commemoration of the event. On the contrary, there is a line of thought according to which we are supposed to experience the seder eve as the safest of nights, a lel shimurim, a night of divine guarding, so that we can dispense with our usual security measures. One arcane example: The last chapter of Bavli Pesahim, devoted to the seder, levels a challenge to the halakhah that four cups of wine should be drunk at the seder. The Bavli’s view is that things done in pairs—two, four, and so forth—are dangerous, because demons are attracted to pairs. How, then, can the Mishnah legislate four cups of wine? One answer, attributed to Rav Nahman bar Yitzhak, is that, because the seder is a lel shimurim, we need not fear demons.
We may conclude, then, that, whether or not our ancestors felt fear on the night of the Passover of Egypt, the phenomenology of the tradition does not preserve it. But that is not the case for the sense of isolation, the sense that we are shut in, sealed off from the outside. In different ways, the laws of Passover indeed immortalize this claustrophobic element. This element is not only history, not only something that happened in Egypt, but something that we are obligated to recreate every year. For example, after the Torah tells the whole story of the night of Passover in the book of Exodus, there is an appendix of sorts, in which God instructs Moses and Aaron in rules that are evidently meant to apply for future generations, and one of them is as follows: The Passover animal “shall be eaten in one house; do not take from its flesh outside the house.” (Exodus 12:46) This verse—so says the commentator Hizkuni—echoes God’s warning, issued before the plague of the firstborn: “And you, let no person go out from the entrance of his house until morning.” (Exodus 12:22) The prohibition concerning the meat may assume a practice in which, when someone hosts a banquet, he sends a portion of his feast—a manah, as in mishloach manot—to friends, as a gift. The rabbis, interpreting this verse, say that, not only is it prohibited to send meat from the Passover lamb outside the boundaries of one’s house, but also, if there are two distinct groups in the same house, each with its own Passover lamb—imagine a Passover hotel in Jerusalem, ca. 50 CE—then these two groups may not exchange meat portions. Not only that: Each group must set up a partition of sorts around itself, and the members of each group must face inward, toward its own space, and not outward, toward the other group. Maimonides summarizes these laws in his Mishneh Torah, in chapter 9 of the Laws of the Passover Sacrifice.
What are we to make of this aspect of the seder? Why do we preserve at the seder a sense of isolation, of closing ourselves off from the world beyond, of being pent up? How does this experience relate to other aspects of the seder? To address this question I will begin, a bit out of left field, with a man named Christopher Smart. Smart was an English poet who lived in the 18th century. Here are some lines from his most famous poem, Jubilate Agno (“Rejoice in the Lamb”).
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
…
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
…
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
It goes on. You might not be surprised to learn that Smart was committed to an insane asylum. This is a poem of praise, and the logic of praise that this poem distills approaches, at its extreme, the limit of madness. For the logic of praise is to focus resolutely on the object of consideration, in this case the cat Jeoffry. As a result, the observer disappears. The excerpt opens with an “I” (“For I will consider my cat Jeoffrey”), but once the “I” names the object of its consideration, there is no more “I”; there is only the cat. The self’s intense openness to what it sees ends up dissolving the self.
We can trace the same phenomenon in a text that is closer to home: the amidah. The amidah begins with three blessings of praise. These also constitute, then, a sort of praise poem. If Smart focuses on Jeoffry the cat, our praise poem in the amidah focus on God. The dynamic is different from Smart’s, but it ends up in the same place. Over the course of the three blessings, we learn how to praise. The blessings gradually detach us from ourselves, so that we can bring God into better focus. You can always tell the essence of a blessing by its signature, its closing words. The first blessing praises God as the “shield of Abraham.” Here we dwell on God, but in relation to ourselves as Jews. The second blessing praises God as one who “resurrects the dead.” Here again, then, we take up God in relation to ourselves, but stripped, as it were, of our specifically Jewish identity; instead we are simply mortal human beings who seek to live. In the third and final blessing, by contrast, there is no we; there is only “the holy God.” If the amidah is a framework for standing before God, then the culmination of praise therein is simply taking up God as the object of our consideration. The “we” disappears by devoting itself entirely to the task of seeing what is present to it.
I bring us back now to Passover, and to the seder. Why is the seder claustrophobic? Why do we insist on remaining inside the house, on setting up dividers around ourselves, on turning away from others? I construe this dimension of the seder as a corollary of the seder’s intense interest in constructing a “we.” The seder is the fulcrum of the tradition, when the people of Israel emerges by the transmission of the past to the future, from parent to child. If praise is about paying attention to what is happening around us, in a way that is incompatible with self-awareness, then the work of the seder lies precisely in self-awareness; in creating and recreating our identity; in producing and sustaining the “we.” We do this work by dwelling on our past (think: “we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, etc.”), by building the bridge between the past and the future (think: “and you shall tell your children on that day, saying, etc.”), by projecting a future on the basis of the past (think: “for it was not just one who arose against us to destroy us utterly, but in every generation, etc.”). The work of the seder is the work of identity formation, and in a certain sense this work needs to happen in a closed room. We need to be looking inward, at each other, considering our past and future, and not outward, at the world, at what is present, in a mode that dissipates the self.
The irony of the claustrophobic seder—do not go out of the entrance of your home, do not bring the Passover meat outside—is that Passover is also all about leaving, about going out. We might think about this tension in different ways, but the line of thought that I have been tracing leads us, I think, to the spring aspect of Passover, to the notion that “on this day you are going out, in the month of spring” (Exodus 13:4). The seder night needs to be all about us, all about our past, all about transmission from parents to children, from past to future. But then we have opportunity afterward to step outside, to consider, to see, to take in what is before our eyes, what is present. The Song of Songs, which we recite on the Sabbath of Passover, gives voice to this movement in a way not entirely unfamiliar from Christopher Smart and his passion for praise. I conclude with the final verses of chapter 7 of the Song (NJPS): “Come, my beloved, let us go out into the open, let us lodge among the henna shrubs. Let us go early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine has flowered, if the blossoms have opened, if the pomegranates are in bloom. There I will give my love to you. The mandrakes yield their fragrance, at our doors are all choice fruits. Both freshly picked and long-stored have I kept, my beloved, for you.”
