The Surprising Origins of the Passover Seder

In his popular book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, the Israeli writer Yuval Noah Harari contrasts the universality of religions such as Christianity and Islam with the particularism of Judaism.

To him, Judaism is an insular religion, a “tribal creed … focused on the fate of one small nation and one tiny land …”

Harari is not the only one to use the term particularism when referring to Judaism and the Jewish experience. Yet are we so sure of the particulars when speaking of Jewish particularism?

Passover will be here soon, and in the context of understanding the origins of the Seder and the Haggadah, I was recently surprised to learn that one of the most widely celebrated events in the Jewish calendar, the Passover Seder, is, in part, a ritual inspired by another culture.

The purpose of the Passover Seder is the retelling of the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt; based on the Biblical verse (Exodus 13:8) “And you shall explain to your child on that day, ‘it is because of what the Lord did for me when I went free from Egypt.’”

But the central focus of the Haggadah is a strange night-long meeting of five prominent rabbis, tanaim (early contributors to the Mishnah), in the coastal town of B’nei Brak in the Land of Israel. They are discussing the exodus from Egypt, an event that took place well over a millennium earlier. What would have been the purpose of the meeting? Neither family members nor students were present, so it was not a Seder as we know it.

Some suggest that the meeting of the sages in B’nei Brak had something to do with the Bar Kochba Revolt (132-135 CE), noting that it took place at the home of Rabbi Akiva, the spiritual head of the revolt. However, some of the rabbis were no longer alive at that time, so the dateline does not work.

It turns out there was another Jewish revolt against the Romans between the Bar Kochba Revolt, and the earlier revolt that ended at Masada in 73CE. (Three Jewish-Roman wars in only 65 years!)

This was the Kitos Revolt (115-117 CE), named after Quietus, the Roman commander who subdued it. It involved large uprisings in the Jewish diaspora: Cyrenaica (eastern Libya), Egypt, Cyprus and Mesopotamia (Babylon). But some of the fighting took place in Judea, in the town of Lydda. Could the meeting of the five Jewish sages in B’nei Brak have occurred during the lead up to the Kitos War, or during it? It would have taken place a short distance from Lydda, so the need for secrecy and vigilance might explain the odd nature of the meeting portrayed in the Haggadah.

Alternatively, Israeli artist and writer Mordechai Beck suggests that the meeting in B’nei Brak is one of good friends, and the lesson the rabbis teach us in the Haggadah is one of eternal friendship, a friendship that has the power to take us, the readers, annually out of Egypt.

Israeli scholar Lee I. Levine’s engrossing book Judaism and Hellenism in Antiquity makes it clear that Beck’s emphasis on the friendship of the rabbis is the better analysis, but in a somewhat different context.

Levine notes that the meeting of the five rabbis in B’nai Brak resembles a Greco-Roman symposium. What was a symposium? A symposium was a convivial meeting of friends over dinner to discuss a point of philosophy. It was an all night affair, men only, and it included drinking wine and eating a variety of foods, including sweet and savory items such as a mixture of nuts and apples steeped in wine, all while reclining in a leisurely fashion.

Aside from the fact that the rabbis were focused on a historical event, the exodus from Egypt, the principal difference from a typical symposium of the day to today’s Seder, has to do with the after dinner activities, described euphemistically as the dessert (affikomen, derived from Greek). These often included drinking and bawdy behavior and the rabbis in their wisdom adopted the more family-friendly tradition of the middle matzah, eaten at the end of the Seder, as the affikomen.

This perspective on the origin of the Passover Seder highlights the point that all religions and cultures interact and influence one another, and terms like universalism and particularism can be misleading. Levine concludes that the Jewish people have survived through the centuries because they were able to maintain their own ways while at the same time being open to change. Or, as the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (z”l) puts it,“Every one of us is a mix of the universal and the particular. Life is our commonalities plus our differences. If we had nothing in common, we couldn’t communicate. If we had everything in common, we’d have nothing to say.”

Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.