Happy Easter!...Happy Passover!

It’s one of those years when Easter and Passover coincide.  As you may recall, our family is going through a very difficult time. Maybe you’re going through a particularly difficult or stressful time. Despite that, we will, as I suspect most of us will, observe the holiday.

Before we all sign off from our ordinary lives this week to begin our respective holiday celebrations, I wanted to thank all of you who so sincerely and generously expressed your sympathy and support. It has been, and continues to be, a source of great consolation.

I also wanted to share these thoughts of Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, as published on myjewishlearning.com. After noting the coincidence of Passover and Easter, he attempts to point out the similarities, along with the differences, between the two - as he calls them - festivals. This particularly caught my attention: “Both festivals emphasize history and hope.”

Too many of our children have been educated without a reasonable knowledge of history. I suspect one reason for this may be a view that history contains many incidents of conflict between groups of people - ethnic, racial, national, etc. But here the Rabbi’s words show us how history can also connect us. In that connection lies the hope. 

For as many instances of differences and conflict, we find examples of what we share in common. Rather than ignore history, perhaps we should simply learn to respect our differences and focus more on what unites us as people who share a common Creator.

Rabbi Schorsch appears to be a man who has decided to do just that.

"If Passover is largely about Egypt, Easter is largely about Passover. Its historical setting is Jerusalem at Passover, the Last Supper could well have been an embryonic seder, and Jesus is fated to become the paschal lamb. Indeed, the new Catechism of the Catholic Church calls Easter “The Christian Passover” (no. 1170) and speaks of the “Paschal mystery of Christ’s cross” (no. 57).

The good news is that the death of one has the capacity to save many. The resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate affirmation of life or in the words of the Byzantine liturgy:

Christ is risen from the dead!
Dying, he conquered death;
To the dead, he has given life (no. 638).

Finally, because the message of both festivals is so central to the belief system of each faith community, it interlaces the liturgy year round. In the Haggadah we read that Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah was already advanced in years before he fathomed that the exodus from Egypt should be recalled by every Jew twice daily, in the evening as well as in the morning. That is the reason for the addition at the third paragraph of the Shema [a prayer said twice daily] in which this bedrock fact is affirmed. God’s compassion obliges us to sanctify our lives.

Correspondingly, for Catholics and many Protestants the weekly sacrament of communion, reenacting the last supper, turns God’s saving grace into a lived reality."

With best wishes for a Happy Easter and a Happy Passover,