Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
I remember early on in my academic career when I was startled by a revelatory statement. I was sitting in my advisor’s office, attempting to understand Jewish interpretations of the Exodus, naively wondering how the historicity of the event would alter participation in the Passover ritual.
Suddenly realizing my error, my advisor interjected, “You know, most Jews don’t believe the Exodus literally happened, in the very least, not the way the biblical text recounts.”
I’m not sure why I was so surprised by that statement. In my own academic work, I knew scholars doubted the historicity of the Exodus account. Yet, to think Jewish participants were conscious of this, when many of my own Christian peers rejected the notion, was shocking to me.
My advisor explained, “Jews know this didn’t happen, but they just don’t want to hear about it on Passover.”
This conversation led me on a journey in pursuit of the answer to the question: “If one is not remembering a literal fact, what is one remembering?” I thought of my own Christian tradition, particularly the memory-ritual of communion, and found myself mimicking my advisor’s words, “I know not everything happened as the gospels recount, but I just don’t want to hear about it when I partake of the bread and the wine.”
Hindu scholar, Christian Novetzke argues, “No individual remembers without the aid, consciously or unconsciously, of a social milieu” (Religion and Public Memory, 26). Religious idioms, rituals of religious memory, engage the social consciousness of an established group, resonating the power of collective memory in their specified forms. This memory is the foundation of group culture and the shared story becomes the fabric of communal identity. Operating as an ideological guide for the present, memory, as sociologist Maurice Halbwachs argues, allows group members to situate themselves within an attachment across time.
Thus, the significance of the Passover Seder or Communion meal is in their power to allow group members to participate in this social identity across time, not in the literal event or in the precise method of the rituals’ performance. As historian Pierre Nora argues, memory is embodied in society, “subject to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of the distortions to which it is subject,” (Realms of Memory, 3).
So in the memory of the ritual, what does one believe? Perhaps belief is not in the historicity of belief; rather, in the relevance of belief in the community. We participate in a memory of stories far more powerful than their historical origins.
Jonathan Safran Foer, editor of the acclaimed New American Haggadah, describes the Passover Seder ritual in these words:
“Here we are: Individuals remembering a shared past and in pursuit of a shared destiny. The seder is a protest against despair. The universe might appear deaf to our fears and hopes, but we are not- so we gather, and share them, and pass them down” (vi).
This shared past is not a strict dot on a historical timeline; rather, it is a fluid past shared with others who have participated in the ritual’s story. I partake of the Eucharist not because I am boldly declaring a literal fact, but because I am participating in the shared Christian story that countless before me have shared. The Seder and Communion meals are not declarations of the historicity of belief; belief is in the narrative power of the communal story. And by participating in these meals, we participate in a community of shared doubts and despair, of shared fears and hopes, a community of shared destiny.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
