Easter falls on the last day of Pesach this year, and the symmetry seems so perfect in my bicultural home. My Irish-American spouse has arranged an impressive Easter basket full of goodies that evoke the Catholic syncretism that brought bunnies and eggs into Christianity; this is as much a celebration of springtime as the festival of the resurrection of the Christian savior.
Ours is not a fully pesadik home and, although that bothers me a little, I recognize that it is a necessary consequence of our cultural negotiation. It is a compromise that I am willing to make for our happy home. We have not cooked any chametz nor eaten any at our table (although she might have privately, but I won’t ask). It doesn’t matter to me. Like the fasts of Yom Kippur and Tisha b’Av, eating the “bread of affliction” is my personal obligation, one that I will not impose on her.
My spouse adores hamantaschen, and makes excellent ones herself for Purim; she buys me sufganiyot every Chanukah and eagerly anticipates my latkes and the blintzes that I will prepare for Shavuot – served up with her apple butter. She requested matzoh brei with cheese for her special Easter breakfast.
Our home is a place of respectful, loving coexistence, where we light the candles and say the brochas over the bread and wine every Shabbes, and I help decorate her tiny tree and receive my in-laws’ generous gifts at Christmas, and mock-grudgingly tolerate the bowl of candy “for the ancestors” on All Hallows Eve. The meme of the Pillsbury Doughboy, “he is risen” on one side and “he is not” on the other, is a humorous reminder of how easily we, Jew and Christian, can live together happily, peacefully, and in love.
But things are never that simple; our home is not the world outside, nor has it ever been and, as much as I look forward to our vegetarian ham dinner and a bite of a hot cross bun when the sun goes down on Pesach, I confess that Easter still fills me with some trepidation. The festival of the resurrection of the Christian savior resonates with cultural memories and dark primal fears only partially-buried in my unconscious. Outside the door of our loving home is a world of danger that, for 1,700 years, has invariably escalated to existential peril at Eastertide.
This has been our season of horrors throughout our history living alongside Christians. It was during Holy Week leading up to Easter that Europe’s Jews could most reliably expect to be brutalized, raped, and murdered by Christian neighbors whipped into a frenzy of fervent religious devotion. Trapped in the city’s main tower by Christian inflamed by enthusiasm for the Crusades just before Easter in 1190, the Jews of York chose mass suicide rather than the gruesome deaths that awaited them at the hands of their pursuers. The incident inspired the mythic narrative of André Schwarz-Bart’s tragic novel The Last of the Just.
On Easter in 1389, the good people of Prague stormed the city’s ghetto and hacked almost a thousand Jews to death, sparing only the children to be adopted and raised as good Christians. The horror inspired fantasies of the Prague Golem, a supernatural being who would ever after defend the city’s Jews. The memory of that fantasy, and the terror which inspired it, lived on in the 1915 film The Golem, in Michael Chabon’s 2000 novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and in the costumed figure of Superman, the mythic hero created by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel in the dark days of Kristallnacht.
The good Christians of the Italian city of Trent took time out from Easter services in 1475 to arrest the entire Jewish community for the murder of a Christian child. Men, women, and children, they stood accused of abducting young Simon, slaughtering him, and using his blood in Pesach rituals. After extracting confessions on the rack from three of the Jewish community’s leaders, the Christian court burned fifteen Jews at the stake.
The Blood Libel reared its head again and again, in Norwich, Lincoln, and Bialystock, where the alleged victims of Jewish blood sacrifice became Christian saints. It happened again on Easter in 1903 after a Russian boy was found dead in the town of Dubasari in Russian Moldavia. Come Sunday, Russian Christians left their Easter services exhorted by the Orthodox clergy and Russian imperial officials to seek revenge. Over two days in Kishinev, they murdered almost fifty Jews, raped dozens, and destroyed their homes and businesses.
At the foundation of the Blood Libel was the original Christian canard that the Jews had killed Christ, something that I was reminded of in my childhood when a schoolyard bully called me a “cracker-eating Christ-killer” and laughed. Many Christian denominations, though not all (and not even most of them) have walked the libel back in the last few decades. In 2011, Pope Benedict XVI explicitly repudiated the charge of Jewish deicide. It was a decent gesture, even if it was almost two millennia late, but I have to wonder how many Christians were actually listening.
That became apparent when I recently expressed some ambivalent feelings about Jesus Christ Superstar in a social media conversation. When I first heard Time Rice’s and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1970 rock opera more than 40 years ago, I found it to be a moving, but ultimately alienating work of musical theatre. Ian Gillan’s Jesus, and Yvonne Elliman’s Mary Magdalene were veritable star turns, and Murray Head’s interpretation of Judas Iscariot was a performance of extraordinary power. But, as a Jewish kid growing up on an overwhelmingly mainline Protestant suburb of Montreal, the musical drama of Christ’s Passion only emphasized my sense of cultural isolation.
One of my interlocutors tried to reassure me that, if anything, Superstar was unorthodox to the point of heresy. “There is no resurrection, and neither Pontius Pilate nor Judas are really evil – they’re men with complex motivations trapped by circumstances beyond their control.” All of that might be true, I replied, but the villains of the story are still the Kohanim, the Jewish Temple priests, who pay-off Judas, demand Jesus’ execution – “we have no law to put a man to death” – and hector Pilate until he orders it. Rice and Webber simply rearticulated the old accusation that the Jews murdered Christ.
“But, of course they did,” he said. “You can’t deny that it happened.”
It would be nice to consign the dark incidents of murderous antisemitic rage to the past, and attribute the persistence of bigoted myths like the deicide to simpleminded ignorance, and there was a time when I did just that. But things have changed. In 2021 the world feels far more hostile to Jews than it has in decades. In the last five years alone, there has been a string of cemetery desecrations, synagogue vandalism, and murderous antisemitic rampages so numerous that I have lost count. The jackbooted legions of white, Christian nationalism are on the march, whipped up by totalitarian leaders and Dominionist Christofascists from their pulpits.
I could not quite understand why, in the past few weeks, my social media feed had been flooded with advertising pitches from Messianic Jewish organizations and the One for Israel Ministry, a missionary effort to convert Israeli Jews to Christianity. They even had the gall to ask for a donation to help them in their work. But then I remembered: Eastertide was in the offing, and the Christians have come for us. Again.
Throughout our history in the Christian world, we have always been given the choice to convert, assimilate, or enter the ghetto, and those appear to be our choices still. Many Jews, seeking some kind of security or a path of least resistance, choose one of these options, and all are, in one sense or another, equally legitimate. Many of us are determined to stand up in an Amidah of resistance and push back, demanding respect for our difference from the overwhelming Christian hegemon. But this is both difficult and often perilous, and the fight is, quite honestly exhausting. Sometimes, it would be nice to just coexist.
On this day, when the last day of Pesach overlaps with Easter and, in my home, we eat a lunch of matzo with egg salad and cheese, and dye hardboiled eggs while gleefully singing “dye-dye-aynu,” such coexistence even seems vaguely possible. The world outside my door is not my home – but it could be. Our two holidays are festivals of renewal, and we celebrate both the liberation of my people, and of all people, from slavery, and the resurrection of the Christian savior at a time when, after a long hard winter, all creation leaps into the bloom of life.
Such sentiments are not reality of course, the history is there, and extending the love and mutual respect of our home to the world outside is a daunting task. But my father used to say at the Seder table that the work of liberation that began when Moses strode into Pharaoh’s court remains unfinished as long as there remains a single person in bondage. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan wrote that salvation – a term he used instead of the more Jewish notion of redemption to emphasize its universal import – was neither an act nor a goal, but always a project to create a world yet-to-be inscribed in our days and years.
Today, at least, I can live with that and embrace the hope for a better world implicit in the coming of spring.
***
Photo © Matthew Friedman