The spirit of the Passover banquet

Who is invited to share the meal of liberated humanity, and what is there to eat? Through a comparison between the Seder and the Greco-Roman banquet, Ivan Segré highlights a specifically Jewish conception of liberation, and what it implies. For what is shared during this Jewish “feast of words” is the story of a liberation that took place but which, in order to be effective, must be re-enacted for each human being: “where do you stand, individually, with the story of your own exodus from Egypt?”

 

 

 

Every year, Jews celebrate the Exodus from Egypt on Passover night, during the seder, a meal that is arranged, thought out and conceptualized, during which the main focus is on storytelling (the Exodus from Egypt), drinking (four cups of wine) and eating (bitter herbs, unleavened bread and the substitute for the Passover lamb).

The apparent similarity between the seder meal and a Greco-Roman banquet has been emphasized many times. Indeed, Jews are enjoined to “lean” during the seder; however, the act of “leaning” to eat and drink is a practice with a clear symbolic meaning, evoking the status of the master, as opposed to that of the slave. At a banquet, the masters are “leaning” on beds or benches; they converse, drink and eat, while the slaves serve them, silently and standing. This is why, in ancient times, taking a seat at a banquet was a social marker, a “distinction” par excellence.

Does this mean that on Passover night, Jews celebrate the fact that they too have become masters? Or is it rather that the meal in question, the seder, is specifically designed to highlight the radical antagonism between two forms of banquet, that of the masters on the one hand and that of the Jews on the other? But in distinguishing in this way between the “masters” and the “Jews”, are we expressing anything other than the ethnic particularity of a category of masters? Or is it therefore a question of opposing two antinomic conceptions of freedom?

That the name “Israel” or “Jew” cannot be reduced to ethnicity is something that the Haggadah, the traditional text that is read on the evening of the seder, emphasizes in a remarkable way by using the name “adam” in a crucial passage:

בכול דור ודור חיב אדם להרות את עצמו כאלו הוא יצא ממצרים

“From generation to generation, adam [mankind] is obliged to consider himself as if he himself had come out of Egypt”. Rather than the name ‘Jew’ or ‘Israel’, it is therefore the name ‘adam’ that is used here. In other words, to consider oneself, to assert that one has come out of Egypt, is the business of the humanity within us. And in the historical context of the elaboration of the seder, that of Babylonian antiquity on the one hand and Greco-Roman antiquity on the other, it is a localized and, moreover, formidably polemical matter. To grasp the full extent of this, it is important to set the scene, that of the ancient banquet. In an article on the iconography of Athenian vases dating from the 6th and 5th centuries BC, a historian writes about the banquet:

“Greek drinking customs imply that one drinks collectively, after mixing wine and water in craters, because it is dangerous for men to drink pure wine. Well-tempered wine, drunk in equal parts among guests, has positive values that seem to be reserved for men. Indeed, the moment of the symposium, of drinking together, which generally follows the meal, is a moment of male conviviality, where friends meet, as equals, to talk and sing together, lying on beds. In this context, there is no place for women; wives do not attend the symposium, nor do daughters. The only women present are there in an ancillary capacity, so to speak: companions for pleasure, servants or musicians, they do not benefit from the symposium but help it to run smoothly. Various texts indicate that they were hired for the occasion and had the status of companions, hetarai.”^[1]

In the Greek city, women were assigned two distinct, irreconcilable roles: either they fulfilled a reproductive function, or they were an object of pleasure; in this sense, they were either “mothers” or “whores”. The courtesan, “hetarai”, hired for the occasion, therefore attends the banquet, but as an accessory. The wife is excluded from it; her social function is exclusively utilitarian. Nicole Loraux puts it this way:

“For the existence of women is not problematic only in Athens; it is problematic in each of these ‘men’s clubs’ that are the Greek cities, where there are only male citizens, where women have no status other than that of reproductive beings, which is both essential and strictly delimited.”^[2]

This assignment of the feminine to the alternative “mother” or “whore”, the Midrash Genesis Rabbah, written or compiled between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD, relates it to the society of the “men of the generation of the flood”, the society that was to be destroyed by the waters:

“This is how the men of the generation of the flood behaved: each took two wives, one dedicated to procreation and the other to pleasure; the one dedicated to procreation remained crouched, like a widow during the lifetime of her husband, and the one dedicated to pleasure drank a sterilizing potion to prevent her from having children, and remained with her husband, adorned like a prostitute.”^[3]

The civilizational and ideological antagonism is therefore clear and distinct and, on the evening of Passover, it is formulated in the simplest way possible, namely that the wife participates in the banquet on an equal footing with the husband: the woman, like the man, recounts the exodus from Egypt, drinks the four cups of wine and eats the bitter herbs, the unleavened bread and what takes the place of the paschal lamb. And if there is a very unusual practice at the time, it is the obligation – the mitzvah – incumbent on the woman to drink the four cups of wine, knowing that it is, par excellence, a matter for men in antiquity, as the historian quoted above pointed out: “wine has positive values that seem to be reserved for men”. During the seder, however, women are “obliged” in the same way as men, the reason being, as the Talmud teaches, that women participated, like men, in the “miracle” of the exodus from Egypt (Tractate Pesachim 108b). The words, the wine, the bitter herbs and the unleavened bread (matzo) are obligations incumbent on both men and women on the evening of the seder, because they share the same humanity, the same “miracle”.

The Passover seder is therefore a mixed banquet, not in the sense that the masters have courtesans to perfect their drunken evenings, but in the sense that freedom is not a male affair, it is the affair of the humanity in us (“adam”), and this humanity is dual, masculine and feminine, as stated in the first occurrence of the name “adam” in the Bible (Gen. 1:26).^[4] The equal humanity of the masculine and the feminine is therefore the first aspect, on the evening of the seder, of the Jewish polemic against Greco-Roman antiquity.

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The second aspect relates to slavery. Let us start with the remark of a historian of antiquity about the Jewish people: “No [other] ancient people made slaves their ancestors”^[5]. This is what the seder banquet expresses through the bitter herbs and unleavened bread (known as the “bread of the poor”): it is not a question of celebrating belonging to the master class, but of recounting a process of emancipation. For the obligation of the narrative, the Haggadah, is the injunction to retrace the history of a liberation. And once again, to grasp the extent of the polemical subversion that is brewing at the seder table, it is advisable to consult the historian of antiquity.

The City and its Slaves [La cité et ses esclaves] by Paulin Ismard opens with a banquet at the end of the 2nd century AD, attended by masters, in this case fine scholars: “Lying on banquet beds, these scholars move from one subject to another during what resembles a veritable ‘feast of discourse’ (logodeipnon)”. They discuss various subjects, food, trinkets, the Greek language; and also slaves, a question having been raised: “Did the men of the past, like some of our contemporaries, have a multitude of slaves?” After discussing the lexicon of slavery, they address the thing itself. And Ismard comments:

“[…] our brilliant scholars are not only philologists, quick to explain the use of this or that word. They are also slave owners, members of the social elite of the Greco-Roman Empire, and during the discussion they exchange advice and recommendations of all kinds, useful for the good management of their slaves – this thing “so difficult to possess” as one of them says. The fear of slave revolts is ever-present in their conversations, and they never fail to recall several famous episodes in which slaves took up arms and rose up, in Sicily, on the island of Chios or in Athens.”^[6]

Slavery is also discussed at the Passover banquet. But the difference is that it is about being freed from slavery, a theme that is absolutely central on the evening of the seder. That is what needs to be told. The Haggadah insists on this:

וכל המרבה לספר ביציאת מצרים הרי זה משבח

“Whoever speaks and speaks again [ha marbe lessaper] of the exodus from Egypt is worthy of praise”. The Hebrew ‘ha marbe lessaper’ refers to a kind of ‘feast of words’. But in the course of the seder, this “feast of words” does not accompany the meal, it precedes it, so that it begins by taking its place. Thus, while the story of the exodus from Egypt is being told, the table is reduced to its basic elements: the cup of wine, the bread of the poor, the bitter herbs. In contrast, the banquet of the masters is of a different order: they eat all sorts of delicacies, exchange opinions about everything and nothing, discourse like scholars and, incidentally, address the question of the management of slaves, as if changing the subject. Ismard observes:

“In fact, while Book VI of Athenaeus’ Deipnopsophistes offers the most explicit passage in all of Greek literature in which ancient thinkers come to discuss the institution of slavery, it appears throughout the narrative as an insignificant aside.”^[7]

In contrast, the seder meal is therefore a kind of banquet for freed slaves, men and women who have left Egypt and gathered together that evening to recount their newfound freedom. But this freedom that they talk about is not, cannot be that of the masters. In this sense, the purpose of the Passover seder is precisely to talk about another freedom, antagonistic to that of the managers of slavery, whether they were Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek or Roman. In other words, what the men and women of Israel are instructed to put into words on the evening of the seder is a freedom standardized by the exodus from Egypt.

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The banquet celebrating the exodus from Egypt is therefore both the meal celebrating the end of slavery and that of assumed, considered and reflected antagonism towards the ideology of the masters, their conception of freedom and their use of words. To be sure of this, one need only return to the biblical text and observe that the main actor in the exodus from Egypt, Moses, first left the house of his masters before leaving Egypt (a land of servitude identified in the Bible as a “house of slaves”). Found in the river, taken in as an infant by Pharaoh’s daughter, Moses becomes like a “son” to her (Ex. 2:10); then he “grows up” and it is then that he “leaves” Pharaoh’s house to join his “brothers”, the Hebrew slaves (ibid., v. 11). Immediately, seeing an Egyptian master beating a Hebrew slave, he intervenes, saves the slave from the master’s hand, “struck the Egyptian and buried him in the sand” (ibid., v. 12). Word gets around, Pharaoh is informed and Moses has to flee Egypt. He goes underground.

The first exodus from Egypt is therefore that of the man Moses, the “Egyptian” who, having left the house of Pharaoh, freed himself from the ideology of the masters by taking the side of the Hebrew slaves. And in fact, immediately afterwards, he takes the side of the women against their virile oppressors (ibid. v. 15-19):

“Pharaoh was informed of this and wanted to kill Moses. Moses fled from Pharaoh and stopped in the land of Midian, where he sat by a well. The priest of Midian had seven daughters. They came to draw water and fill the troughs to water their father’s sheep. The shepherds came and drove them away. Moses stood up to defend them and watered their livestock. They returned to their father Reuel, who asked them, “Why have you come back so early today?” They replied, “A certain Egyptian [ish mitzri] protected us from the shepherds; what is more, he even drew water for us and gave the cattle something to drink.” (Rabbinate translation).

This man Moses is described by the daughters of Reuel as a “certain Egyptian”, in Hebrew “ish mitzri”, literally an “Egyptian man”. Now the same phrase was used earlier (v. 11) to describe the master – an “Egyptian man”, “ish mitzri” – who was beating a Hebrew slave. Moses, having grown up in the house of Pharaoh, outwardly resembles an “Egyptian man”, a master. But his actions bear witness to another reality, an inner one, radically foreign to the law of the “Egyptian man”: he saves the Hebrew slave from the hand of the Egyptian master and then, with the same step, he saves the “daughters” of Reuel from the hands of the harassing shepherds, a kind of dominant males.

The scene of Moses confronting the shepherds takes place near a “well”, where the “girls” gather to water the cattle. Drawing water from the fountain is, in ancient times, as in traditional peasant societies in some respects, a quintessentially feminine activity. Describing other Athenian vases from the 6th and 5th centuries BC, the same historian, quoted above, writes:

“The fountain thus appears to be the equivalent, for women, of what the public square is for men. A public place, but – at least in image – predominantly feminine. Some representations show other encounters where men come to watch them: the image integrates the male gaze of the vase’s spectator into the painting. The fountain can even become, on a mythical level, a place of violence or ambush: thus Amymone, surprised by Poseidon, or the young Trojan prince, Trollos, accompanying his sister Polyxena to the fountain and attacked by Achilles.”^[8]

The motif of women gathered around a water source runs through history; pictorial modernity bears witness to this: Picasso’s “Three Women at the Fountain” and Signac’s “Women at the Well”. The variation of this motif in the Bible follows a precise logic that would require a study in itself. For the time being, let us simply note that the first exodus from Egypt, that of the man Moses, is thus described: leaving the house of the masters, siding with the Hebrew slaves against the Egyptian masters, then, in the same step, siding with the women of Midian against the harassing shepherds; finally comes the word of the Tetragrammaton addressed to Moses during the episode of the burning bush (Ex. 3:4), in the heart of the desert, in a place soon identified as Sinai. The structure of the Passover banquet thus mirrors that of the story of the singular departure from Egypt of the man Moses. It has to. Because if the Tetragrammaton singularly addresses Moses, during the episode of the burning bush, to urge him to go and free the Hebrews, it is because of the path that Moses took, of himself, beforehand. The Tetragrammaton is addressed to whoever can hear it.

We know Moses’ objection to the divine word that, at the burning bush, enjoins him to go and free the Hebrews: he stammers, is not very good at speeches; he fears that he will not be able to convince either the Hebrew people or the Egyptian Pharaoh. No matter. What he has to say must not take the form of a fine speech, it must be felt in the heart.

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After the Hebrews left Egypt, Yitro, alias Reuel, father of Zipporah, Moses’ wife, joined the Hebrews in the desert, taking with him Zipporah and Moses’ two sons, Gershom and Eliezer (Ex. 18, 2-4). From this we learn that Moses’ wife and children did not live to see the exodus from Egypt. The Midrash (Mechilta), in order to resolve an apparent contradiction between the verses, explains that Moses, on the advice of his brother Aaron, finally took them to safety in Midian, so that they would not experience the harshness of slavery. They therefore only joined Moses and the Hebrews later, in the desert, once they had already left Egypt.

Knowing that the experience of leaving Egypt is the founding event of Israel, how can we explain why Moses’ close friends, wife and children did not take part? The answer to this question depends on what we have highlighted above, namely that there are indeed two exoduses from Egypt, first that of the man Moses, then that of the people under the leadership of the man Moses. And so Moses’ intimates experience the exodus from Egypt through the man Moses, in the light, precisely, of his intimacy.

We say “the man Moses”, not in the sense that Freud intended during an investigation that claimed to identify the pharaonic origins of the Hebrew myth, but in the sense of the Haggadah, the traditional story that accompanies the seder banquet:

בכול דור ודור חיב אדם להרות את עצמו כאלו הוא יצא ממצרים

“From generation to generation, adam [human being] is obliged to consider himself as if he himself had come out of Egypt”. The text goes on to support this teaching with a specific verse, Exodus 13:8:

וְהִגַּדְתָּ לְבִנְךָ, בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא לֵאמֹר:  בַּעֲבוּר זֶה, עָשָׂה יְהוָה לִי, בְּצֵאתִי, מִמִּצְרָיִם

“You shall then give this explanation to your son: ‘It was in this light that the Lord acted in my favor when I left Egypt’” (trans. Rabbinate).

What justifies the teaching of the Haggadah, according to which every adam must consider himself as if he himself had come out of Egypt, is therefore the verse that singularly enjoins you to tell your son, your close friend, about your own exit from Egypt, your singular exit from Egypt. The close friend or relative learns it from you, in precisely the same way that Moses’ close friends and relatives learn it from him. It is ultimately the formidable test on the evening of the seder, namely the question: how far have you got, uniquely, with the story of your own departure from Egypt? Because the Egypt in question is neither a myth, nor a country, nor even a political regime (that of the Pharaohs); it is more the matrix of all civilized alienations, starting with those that structure the ancient Greco-Roman banquet.

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Ivan Segré