I will always treasure a Passover seder the former Appleton rabbi and his family shared with my family. I had attended a few public seders before--one I remember put on by a Reformed Jewish temple that rented space from my UU fellowship in Indiana. I had read about seders, too. But participating in a family seder--especially with such an observant family--revealed different dimensions to the ceremony. Reading the words and prayers, listening to the Hebrew, eating the various foods symbolizing different aspects of the Passover story, drinking the wine to excess, seeing the connectedness of this family to the mythical story of their ancestor's exile in Egypt and return to Israel: all of these aspects of the Seder experience struck me very deeply.

The Passover seder reveals much about Judaism. It reveals the importance of ritual. For thousands of years, Jews have remembered the mythic exile and return through the seder ceremony, repeating many of the same words and symbolic acts century after century. The seder, in its wealth of rich detail, reveals too the Jewish impulse to find meaning in the everyday aspects of life. Each item of food in the seder meal has symbolic significance. For the observant Jew, you can find God in the details of daily living: in the hand-washing before a meal, in how meals are prepared, even what kind of plates food is served on.

The Passover seder reveals the importance of family in Jewish life. Some of the most important and frequently observed rites in Judaism today are ceremonies like the seder and Shabbot (or Sabbath) that take place at home in small gatherings of family and friends. These ceremonies in the home ritualize and celebrate the family ties that have been so central to Judaism, especially during these last two millenia of exile. The seder is particularly powerful because it ritually and mythically invites each family to look beyond itself and recognize that it is part of one great family: the family of all the Jews the world over, the family that is called Israel.

The Passover seder also reveals one of the foundational beliefs of Judaism: that God intervenes significantly in history. The God of the Hebrew Bible is not some distant energy that got the world started and then withdrew. Nor is God caught up in the intrigues and petty tinkering of Olympus. Rather, Jews believe that God intervenes in powerful ways in the unfolding of history. The seder, like so many Jewish observances, retells and rekindles the history of the Jewish people and its relationship with God.

Another characteristic of Judaism revealed by the seder is the idea of a Covenant with God. The Covenant is the central idea at the core of the relationship between the Jews and God. The Exodus experience culimanated in the Covenant. This is the Covenant in a nutshell: God will continue to bless the people of Israel if they continue to honor God's laws. Part of obeying the laws is serving others, most especially those in need. This service and obeying the laws would prove to be no easy task. One story told by the rabbis says that God offered the Covenant to other peoples as well, but none other than the Jews accepted. And, according to the rabbis' story, the Jews accepted the Covenant "on impulse, not realizing what they were getting into."[1] The Jews, then, believe they are chosen not just for privileges, but also for special service and even suffering.

Most importantly, the Passover seder reveals the importance for Jews of the story of the exile to Egypt and the return to Israel. This story, so central to the first two books of the Bible, is in many ways the foundational myth of Judaism. For more than 2500 years, Jewish experience--both individual and collective--has been viewed through the lens of this story. The seder ritual brings contemporary Jews back to that time and place: no matter when or where they live, through the ritual they are again enslaved in Egypt. They are again led out of Egypt by God and Moses. In the Seder, the Jews say, "We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt...[and] For ever after, in every generation, every Israelite must think of himself or herself as having gone forth from Egypt."[2] The Exodus never happened. The Exodus always happens.[3] The seder ritual dissolves the normal boundaries of time and place. Sitting at the seder table, the Jew ritually becomes enslaved in Egypt and liberated in the Promised Land.

And the seder brings alive other Jewish experiences--both individual and collective--of exile and return, suffering and redemption, enslavement and liberation. Jews interpret so much of their experience through the lens of the Exodus story. This is especially true with the three most critical, wrenching experiences in Jewish history. The first of these was the exile to Babylon 586 years before the common era. The great Temple in Jerusalem--the center of the Jewish universe, the place God connects most directly with the earth--lay plundered and destroyed by the invading Babylonians. Reliving the story of the exile to Egypt, the Hebrews were again carted off to a foreign land. Many Jews interpret this exile through the eyes of the Covenant: they must have been remiss in living by God's laws and were therefore punished by losing their homeland.

The exile in Babylon lasted for three generations. Sixty-six years later, the Persians conquered Babylon and allowed the captive Jews to return to their native land. Many chose to do so, repeating the Exodus return home. In Jerusalem, they rebuilt the Temple.

The second wrenching event happened in 70 of the common era. This time, the Romans destroyed the great Temple in Jerusalem. Again, some Jews interpreted this as punshment for not fulfilling their part of the Covenant. In this interpretation, God used the Roman army--just as God used the Babylonians--to make a point to the Jews. Three generations after their Temple's destruction, the Jews rebelled against Roman rule. Once again, it looked like return, redemption and liberation would flow out of a terrible calamity. This time though, in a defeat more stinging than the defeat in 70, the Jewish rebellion failed. The second Temple would not be rebuilt, and most Jews for almost all of the next two millenia lived scattered in the diaspora, far from their homeland..

The third wrenching event happened very recently: the Nazi Holocaust. The Holocaust, with the murder of six million Jews at its focol point, was just as wrenching--maybe more wrenching even--as the Babylonian exile and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70. In the Jewish theologian Emil Fackenheim's words, the murderers of Auschwitz "denied, mocked and murdered the God of Israel six million times--and together with Him four thousand years of Jewish faith."[4] This time, though, the experience could not be interpreted through the lens of the Covenant: no Jew could possibly view the Holocaust as God's punishing the Jewish people for not fulfilling their end of the Covenant. The Holocaust, with one million children and infants among its victims, resulted from massive and systematic evil, not punishment for violating the Covenant. Again, Fackenheim puts it eloquently:

...not a single one of the six million died because they had failed to keep the divine-Jewish covenant: they all died because their great-grandparents had kept it, if only to the minimum extent of raising Jewish children.[5]

An event perhaps as important to the Jewish people as the Holocaust occurred just three years after the last of six million Jews was murdered: the creation of the state of Israel. Here, on the heals of this catastrophe echoing the story of exile in Egypt and two thousand years of actual exile, comes the triumphant return to the promised land. The State of Israel turns out to be the real Final Solution to the Jewish problem: finally, borrowing from the words of the poet Frost, the Jews have a home: "a place, where, if you have to go somewhere, they have to take you in."[6] Finally, Jews the world over have the security of knowing such a place exists.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust and Israel's birth, no wonder th seder has become such an important part of the contemporary Jewish scene. The whole mythic story remembered and recreated in the seder resonates so deeply with the the Jewish experience of Holocaust and redemption. The Seder participant is enslaved in Egypt and now is also imprisoned at the point of execution in the gas chamber. And he or she returns triumphantly to the Promised Land.

Many of the world's religions today are rapidly changing. Fundamentalisms challenge the fabric of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam as well as Judaism. Catholicism has changed more in the last several decades with Vatican Two and now a reactionary Pope than it changed in hundreds of years. But no religion in recent times has experienced more upheaval than Judaism. No religion has so recently experienced events any where near as wrenching and profound as the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel.

These massively important events leave Judaism facing some equally profound challenges. The first challenge is theological: how to find God in the Holocaust. The creation of Israel, though in many ways replicating the redemption experience of Exodus, is not enough to give meaning to the Holocaust. How can a Jew believe in the Covenant with God knowing God did nothing to stop the Holocaust? How can a Jew continue to believe that God intervenes in history if God couldn't or wouldn't intervene in the Holocaust? How can a Jew believe in the coming of the Messiah if the Messiah chose not to come during the Holocaust? Where was God in the Holocaust? Jews continue to struggle with these questions. The Holocaust shook the foundations of Jewish belief unlike anything else I can imagine.

A second challenge facing Judaism and the Israeli people in the aftermath of the Holocaust and 1948 is the legacy of Israel's creation: another people have been rendered homeless. The Jews, whose faith since the Prophets has been so focused on fufilling God's vision of justice and compassion, now find themselves in the position of witholding inalienable rights from the Palestinian people. The Jews in Israel now find themselves at the other end of a gun, firing too often on unarmed civilians. How can this be?

And finally, assimilation is a huge challenge, especially here in the United States. When I asked the former rabbi here in Appleton what he saw as Judaism's foremost challenge, he replied "Assimilation!" without a moment's hesitaton. One of the ways Jews maintained their identity for so long in exile was by living close together in often segregated Jewish communities. Such communities are far less prevalent today than before the Holocaust, particularly in Europe and the United States. What's more, the McDonaldsization of the United States and world culture threatens to overwhelm all minority cultures worldwide, including Judaism.

Though the number of Jews has always been small, Judaism has had a tremendous impact on Western culture and religion, including Unitarian Universalism. In particular, I think that the Jewish emphasis on questioning has greatly influenced Unitarian Universalism. Rabbis vigorously debating the meaning of every nuance of their tradition, using their hearts and minds to contemplate and discuss, has an echo in our Fellowship during the congregational response that follows our sermons. A second gift from Judaism is the tradition of the prophets. This prophetic tradition continues to challenge us to work for what ought to be and not to accept the injustices of our society; it continues to challenge us to examine our individual responsibility for injustice. Another gift from Judaism is a love for the freedom embodied in the Exodus story. We, too, believe in freedom--freedom of worship, freedom of conscience, freedom from oppression.

Perhaps, though, hope is the greatest gift of all from the Jewish people to us and the rest of the world. Hope--even in the face of the Holocaust and pogroms and two thousands years of exile. Surely this spark of hope is part of what sustained the black slaves in America, toiling in the fields singing songs about the Exodus. Surely this spark inspired civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King to keep working for the dream of equality, Nelson Mandela and the ANC to free South Africa from oppression, Gandhi to free India. Judaism remembers, retracing the events of history with eyes open to evil and injustice, and then dares to embrace life, dares to still hope. In an increasingly desperate world, this hope is a precious treasure.