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Hidden eggs or hidden matzo. Lamb or ham (or another entree). Solar equinox or lunar calendar. Life after slavery or life after death.
Today Christians celebrate the culmination of the Easter season as Jews remember in the midst of Passover, two religious holidays steeped in richly different histories yet abundantly showing how much we have in common.
The overlapping of the two holy times is a good place to start. Both occur together more often than not, despite the dates being set using two different calendars.
Easter settles on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the first (vernal, or spring) equinox of the year, using the Gregorian calendar of modern times. Passover’s dates are pegged to the middle of the month of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar, which is based on the lunar cycle. Despite these divergent calculations and calendars, the two overlap roughly 16 times every 19 years, by at least one calculation.
They may be based on biblical events thousands of years apart — and on different ways of measuring years — but they both occur near the same time each spring, proving that we may have varied faiths and even unaligned calendars, but we have the same planet with the same sunrises and sunsets and the same moon going through the same cycles. A waning crescent in the night sky is a crescent seen the world over.
There’s also a shared faith, of course. As Rabbi Larry Kaplan put it during the Friedman Jewish Community Center seder Wednesday evening marking the start of Passover, “Jesus was a good little Jewish boy.” They have the same God with the same origin stories and the same fundamental guideposts for life. And there are widely held interpretations of the new Testament arguing that Christ’s “Last Supper” with his apostles the night before his crucifixion, was either an actual seder meal or, at least, a meal near Passover.
Like so many holidays and holy days, there are feasts full of foods with deep significance, intended to assure the histories and the beliefs are not only commemorated among the adults but passed on to the children. As noted in a Thursday story, the JCC’s community Passover Seder included questions and activities for youngsters, from hopping to a song about the Egyptian plague of frogs to hunting for hidden matzo wrapped in napkins, winning a bag of sweets by finding some plain unleavened bread.
Asked how matzo was originally made, 10-year-old Asher Dicton lightened the mood — deliberately or not — by authoritatively telling Rabbi Kaplan “You take two cups of flour …”
It was a moment that surely would not have had the same impact — or may not have even occurred, during the Zoom seders foisted on many by the COVID-19 pandemic. This was the first JCC in-person community seder since 2019, and as grateful as we all can be for the technology that kept us together while a virus held us apart, there will never be a substitute for gathering in person for these rightly cherished traditions.
This is a day of celebration, a time of remembrance, as season of rebirth. Many will gather and share special food and drinks, wear once-a-year garb, join in egg hunts or basket finding or seasonal songs. The details may vary from faith to faith and family to family, but basics that bring us together are always the same.
In that vein, Happy Easter, Blessed Passover and welcome spring!
— Times Leader