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The Passover Freezer
Are you planning Passover?
Let's make sure you're planning a celebration, not a Passover popsicle!
Newcomers to the feasts often have lots of questions about how to do this or that. Because Passover is such an important Scriptural celebration, it does require a bit of practice. The challenge for newcomers who have no guidance is trying to figure out which parts of the seder are "Biblical." Or if they're trying to be more linguistically correct, "Scriptural." May if we're trying to keep it in the freezer, we should say, "Torahcal."
In our effort to return to the ancient paths, sometimes we take some detours. I've heard people say they want to do their Passover seder "just like Yeshua."
Think about that.
Ouch.
Anyway, it is meritorious to try to obey the Word as accurately as possible. Obeying, however, doesn't mean trying to find Passover in a several-thousand-year-old freezer. Which they didn't have back then anyway. Often the newcomer will piece together the Passover commandments from different contexts, then conflate them. Different historical circumstances affected what was practiced.
The Egyptian Passover isn't stored in a freezer and then taken out once per year. The Torah itself and additional Scriptures explain how the feast was practiced in different generations. The Father's Word never changes, but how generations grow from its seed does reflect different practices as long as the seed of the literal Word in its context is obeyed.
In Creation Gospel Workbook Six, the following excerpt The Biblical Seed explains how "additional" things were added to the basics of the Egyptian seder. The Torah is the Seed, and how we practice it demonstrates how the Seed grows and begins bearing fruit. The Seed must be in the fruit.
Practices such as a festive meal, cups of wine, singing Hallel, or as you saw in the last newsletter, how the story is told or how the matzah is handled, all reflect living the letter of the Torah. A Passover seder is not a popsicle from the freezer of time, but a lively evening full of the warmth of salvation and a little of the scorching heat of apocalyptic expectation:
The Biblical Seed
Exodus 12-13 describes both what the Israelites were prescribed in Paschal sacrifice in Egypt as well as what they would do in future generations. The text of the Torah covers some distinct possibilities that are left to readers to discern possible overlap by comparing examples or precedents in the Tanakh:
1) the Pesach in Egypt
2) the Pesach ritual in future generations without regard to location
3) the Pesach when a sacrifice will be offered in a specific place of national worship
4) the Pesach of the circumcised only.
All possibilities included some basic elements: matzah, bitter herbs, dipping, sacrifice, questions/teaching the next generation by identifying with the Exodus as a personal salvation. So how did added elements such as singing, symbolic foods, a meal, and wine find their ways into the seder ritual? Is this "adding to the Torah" or a permitted growth from the seed of the Word? The BEKY Book Truth, Tradition, or Tare? addresses this question very specifically.
Additional elements are grown from hints, examples, and precedents in the Tanakh. There are even some extra-Biblical Second Temple references (Books of Chronicles and Jubilees) that document these "added" rituals or ways of thinking about the Pesach celebration. In fact, the idea of Pesach becoming a celebration is based on the text of the Torah itself, which commands the feast as a "chag," or celebration. The essence of chag is twirling, like dancing.
As the Jewish practices gradually were extinguished from the Christian holidays, the idea of ascetic fasts and practices was introduced to commemorate the agonal suffering of Messiah Yeshua. While it is critical to discern the suffering of Messiah on our behalf in order to appreciate the magnitude of the Father's love toward His people, the Torah's view of the feast as a celebration must be allowed to guide the orthopraxis.
In fact, a traditional seder's elements include an opportunity to experience the range of emotions in the telling (haggadah), the meal, and the praises of salvation and triumph sung as part of the feast. A passionate story-teller will literally preach the Gospel message in its entirety through the introduction of each seder element, evoking suspense, fear, sadness, relief, exaltation, joy, etc.
The element of a communal meal at Pesach is implied in the Exodus 12 text, but other contexts associate times of worship with communal meals (Esther, Daniel, 1 Samuel 9:13; 22-25). Leviticus and Deuteronomy describe the priestly meals as well as how each Israelite eats of his own sacrifices.
After the wilderness journey's conclusion, the Israelites once again could celebrate more fully the elements of Passover that the previous generation experienced in Egypt. They circumcised their males, carried out the specified sacrifice toward the evening, and they ate unleavened bread, for the manna stopped. "Hence the eating of the land's bounty is associated with offering the passover sacrifice and eating unleavened bread." (Bokser. p. 17)
The eating of bounty from the Land was incorporated into the time of the Pesach, which functioned as a kind of appointed time marker when the first fruits offering of the barley became the key to open that bounty from the Land. As such, the communal meal may have first incorporated the good produce from the Land as part of the celebration.
The festival nature of this meal along with the eating of the sacrifice, matzah, and bitter herbs is recorded in 2 Chronicles 30:1-27. The people are celebrating Pesach "with great gladness." In addition to the joy of the people, the Levites and priests are praising daily with powerful instruments and song. 2 Chronicles 35:1-19 describes the eating of the sacrifices by family groups and the singing of the Levites and other experts. By this time, the celebration is centralized in Jerusalem. Although there are problems with purification readiness, the repentant Israelites are accepted for celebrating according to their heart motivation, not the ritual details expected in the Temple precincts.
Although Jubilees 49 (2nd Century BC) is an extra-Biblical work of literature, it does mention the people's joy as they drink wine, eat, and praise God. It is in The Book of Jubilees that the ritual of drinking wine is first mentioned. The Jubilees emphasizes the observance of Pesach as a seal against a year of plagues, "a kind of preventive health measure, in effect, apparently, until the end of the fiftieth Jubilee, the Jubilee of Jubilees, when complete redemption will come about." (ibid. p. 20)
The Book of Revelation holds a similar theme in relation to the seven feasts, for it includes the sealing of the righteous against the plagues that were first visited upon Egypt (see CG Workbook Two) and presents antithetical seven cups of wrath to the sealing four cups of the seder (mystically seven; see CG Workbook Two), or even possibly seven Kiddush cups of seven feasts.
"For behold, the winter has passed, and the springtime has come."
No Passover popsicles necessary!
Shabbat Shalom!
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