Passover

Abstract

Religious holidays are often rituals of collective remembrance. They draw groups together, reminding them of their common, sometimes mythical, origins. This holds particularly true for Judaism, in which collective identity is based on the memory of a collective past, and every holiday references ‘the historical narrative of a community’ (Connerton 1989: 46). At Passover, Jews remember one of the founding stories of their people: the Exodus of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. 1 During the Seder, Jews all over the world come together to eat, drink, and read the Haggadah, the ritual text that sets out the order of the night. This scripted occasion — not only the text but also the ritual foods and the glasses of wine to be consumed are prescribed — is the paramount vehicle for the transmission of cultural memory within the family framework. The commandment ‘And you shall tell thy son’, drawn from Exodus 13:8, which appears twice in the Haggadah, emphasizes the importance of the family in integrating the next generation into the community. Josef Yerushalmi, an expert on memory and Judaism, poignantly calls the Passover Seder ‘the quintessential exercise in Jewish group memory’ (1982: 44). During the Seder, memory becomes a social practice as ritual elements reenact the past in the present — the eating of matzah, unleavened bread, or the six symbolic foods on the Seder plate.