Why is this Night Different from All Other Nights

In a moment in time when most American and Israeli Jews are both ignorant of and uninterested in most ritual practices of traditional Judaism, the seder is an anomaly. Recent studies by Jewish groups in America suggest that over three-quarters of American Jews, defined demographically as people born to a Jewish mother, participate in some form of the festive Passover meal, most of them reading some portion of the set text, the Haggadah and performing some of the rituals associated with the holiday. Perhaps even more surprisingly, a recent survey in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that over fifty percent of "secular" Israeli Jews read some portion of the Haggadah at their seders. The following analyses try to explain this unusually successful Jewish ritual according to its function in Jewish societies on the one hand, and its symbolic composition on the other.

A functionalist analysis of the seder begins with the somewhat loaded deck of data which which I began: the actual practice of the seder among Jews. To a functionalist, the anomalous success of the ritual is perhaps its most salient feature, because it -- rather than something about the particular symbols of the evening or the structure of the ritual itself -- most begs explanation. As discussed below, a scholar interested in the symbolism of the seder, for example, is not interested so much in the bizarre fact that millions of otherwise nonobservant Jews dip parsely in salt water, eat bitter herbs, and consume various traditional foods according to their ethnic backgrounds. Rather, she is interested in the parsely, the salt water, the herbs, and the foods. This is not to say that anyone interested in symbolism discards what the "believers" say the symbols mean, or what the symbols "mean" to them in some deeper sense. But for the functionalist, the symbols are important only insofar as they "mean" something for the functioning of the community.

Why, then, has the seder been so successful in Israeli and American Jewish life? First, we must note as functionalists that the answers for each community must be different. Although there are many sociological commonalities between American Jewry and Israeli Jewry, there are so many fundamental differences -- the diaspora condition versus statism, the construction of Jewish identity itself, and so on -- that the serious functionalist must regard the two societies as more different than alike. From the outset, then, there seems to be a weakness in an exclusively functionalist approach to the seder, because if it is only how the seder functions that explains its essential meaning, then it seems a rather curious coincidence that the same ritual has been so successful in two different places.

At the same time, there are many examples of Jewish rituals which have thrived in some social contexts but not others, suggesting that societal context must matter to some extent at least. Lag B'Omer, for example, is a festive day of bonfires, picnicking, and childrens' games in Israel, but attempts to develop similar practices in America have not been very successful -- perhaps because of the "public," civic nature of these practices which jar with American Jews' construction of their religious identity as a private matter, an issue which will become crucial shortly. Likewise, some Jewish social practices which are very popular in America -- patterns of philanthropy, for example, which are often justified in religious terms -- are not widespread in Israel, probably due in large part to Israeli state support of religious institutions, a policy which would be unconstitutional in America, as well as unlikely. Insofar as these two relatively minor phenomena are "religious," it is clear that the functionalist approach explains things that a symbolic approach cannot; if it is all symbolism, and the resonant meanings of those symbols, then it is somewhat odd that some symbols thrive in one place but not in another. But let us (re)turn to the Seder.

I would suggest that the American Seder be understood functionally as privatizing and deinstitutionalizing Jewish religious practice. What the structure of the Seder -- a private meal, usually held in homes, usually by families -- enables is a zone of interpretive cultural space that is free of institutional hierarchies. To translate the pomo-speak, the Seder is a form of community identity without the community. The Seder's success in America, then, can be explained by the function that it performs: it enables a form of cultural affiliation to continue by privatizing it.

American Jewry is defined by its schizophrenia. Judaism, unlike Christianity, does not have at its conceptual foundation a division between the "Public" and "Private" spheres. "Rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's" and to God what is God's is the ethos of a community that sees itself and its world as divided into "religious" (the Greek word originally had a connotation of separateness) and "secular" spheres – but this innovation of Pauline Christianity, which sought to invent a new "spiritual" mode of being which need not be mapped onto the physical, geographical, and tribal ones, is not found in the key sources that shaped Jewish religious practice. One could be a Christian and a (former) Jew, a Christian and a Roman, a Christian and a Syrian. The same could not be said for Judaism at the period. One was either a Jew or a Gentile, but not both.

This division between religious and secular fulfilled a critical function for the growth of Christianity on the one hand and the cohesiveness of Christian societies on the other. First, it enabled the "spiritual" message of Christianity to spread without the ethnic exclusivity of Judaism; the universal God could become universally worshipped, regardless of cultural differences. Second, the secular/religious distinction enabled early Christian cultures to subordinate their differences, which otherwise could lead to wars and economic struggles, in the name of a larger unity. The church was one in the body of Christ; as such, it became less important to fight someone because he was of a different tribe.

Judaism, on the other hand, developed under very different conditions. Judaism is marked by a number of proscriptions which have the function of separating Jews culturally, and physically, from non-Jews. In contrast to Christian belief systems which had the function of uniting different racial and national groups, Jewish beliefs and practices -- dietary laws, prohibitions against eating or drinking with non-Jews, endogamy rules, etc. -- tended to reinforce the notion that "Jews" were a separate nation, not just a religion that could be practiced by any nationality. Thus, while early Christian texts tended to transcend nationhood by demarcating a separate space for the "religious," contemporary Jewish texts sought to maintain, and perhaps even emphasize, the unity of the religious and 'secular' – and concurrently, the separateness of Jews from other nations.

Such exclusivity is at odds with the melting-pot ethos of American civic culture -- which itself has its roots in Protestantism. As such (turning again towards the Seder), Jews face a dilemma: they can either be loyal Americans, part of the larger American community, or traditional Jews. To be sure, some Jewish communities responded to the dilemma by enacting new religious prohibitions that actually increased Jewish separation: new dress codes, stricter prohibitions about social intercourse with gentiles, and a new resistance to change mark "Orthodox" and "Ultra-Orthodox" Judaism, both of which have their origin in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe.

But American Jews overwhelmingly have sought some form of synthesis between Americanism and Judaism. The Seder performs this synthetic function better than other Jewish religious practices, and that is why it has succeeded so well in America. Unlike the sabbath, which requires weekly divorce from the rhythms of American civic life, and unlike dietary laws, which require some degree of abstinence from American social engagements, the Seder allows the American Jew to be "fully Jewish" without impinging at all on her Americanness. In some ways, we can even see the Seder as a Jewish practice of the Christian type: it is a private religious affair, separate from the public.

To be sure, this may not have been the original "function" of the Seder as conceived by the Talmudic rabbis. Scholarship suggests that, in fact, the seder liturgy and ritual was developed to deliberately separate the Jew from the growing communities of Judeo-Christians, not allow the choice to be both a Jew and something else. But it is a central function of the Seder today in America.

The Israeli Seder has a subtly different function. In Israel, it is not the split between the religious life and the secular state that troubles most Israelis. Rather, it is their union. The majority of Israelis consider themselves either "secular" or "traditional," and those of the former category tend to abhor the growing influence of religious groups over matters of state. (This might have been true of "traditional" Jews as well, although recent trends in this community to vote for the Shas religious party question whether such a statement is valid.) For those "totally secular" Israelis who are still interested in some form of Jewish identity, the dilemma is precisely the opposite of the Americans': they seek a way of being Jewish that is free from the coercive interference of the state. Where American Jews sought to practice a Judaism that did not interfere with their Americanism, some Israeli secular Jews seek to practice a Judaism with which Israel does not interfere.

The Seder performs this function as well. By adhering to the strict letter of the law, which is another anomalous feature of secular Israelis' Seder practice, secular Israelis are able to be "full Jews," according to the dominant Israeli paradigm – even among secular Jews -- of what that term means. Yet they are able to do so without participating in a public ritual whose boundaries are patrolled by rabbinic or statist authorities. Where the American Seder created a zone of private religious space separate from the secular public, the Israeli Seder creates a zone of private religious-cultural space separate from the religious public.

There are important functions of the Seder which transcend national boundaries, and which admittedly are closer to the sorts of functions that functionalists usually study. For example, the norm of the Seder being "family time" maintains family ties in contexts where family members may reside far away from one another -- despite the relative smallness of Israeli society, this feature of the Seder is often dominant in secular depictions of it. The long preparations necessary for the Seder mark the family occasion of one of import. Its fixed date requires life to be scheduled around the family time, rather than accommodating the family to an otherwise busy schedule. In short, it is quite possible to disregard all of the foregoing discussion about constructing identity and see the success of the Seder as entirely due to its family-strengthening function.

This plurality of possible explanations within functionalism suggests a set of problems with the methodology, with which I will close this portion of the paper. First, functionalism acts according to a quasi-scientific-method: an effect of the ritual or belief in question is analyzed, or supposed, and then a causal linkage is drawn between the function noted and the ritual/belief itself. However, there is never a "control group." To test a functionalist hypothesis, one would need to study a group that held a certain belief (e.g. that certain women are witches) and then a similarly situated group that lacked the belief, with the ultimate aim of showing that, but for a given belief, the society in question would not be able to successfully regulate itself in the given way (e.g. promoting a given form of family structure). Obviously, this is impossible. It is nearly always impossible to study a reliable textual record of a society "before" a given belief took hold, and it is very difficult to find groups similar enough to prove the causal link. Would American Jewry disintegrate, to some extent, without the Seder? One can look at Jewish communities without the same extent of Seder observance, or other religious groups without similar family feast-times, but there will invariably be more "noise" from other differences than the actual signal in question.

Finally, and relatedly, functionalism has the flaw of constructing self-fulfilling prophecies that paper over important dysfunctional elements in religious societies. Perhaps the insularity of the Passover Seder heightens the atomism and fragmentation of the American Jewish community. Perhaps the Seder ritual as practiced today has no social function whatsoever, and is really just a vestigial remnant of a once-vital institution. To be sure, a functionalist analysis of the Seder does not preclude such critiques, but it does implicitly assume that the Seder, or any other ritual, fulfills some function in its societal "food web." Functionalism tends to underplay the disruptive elements of ritual, the dissonance it might have with a societal structure, and the extent to which rituals outlast their functions entirely.

If functionalism sometimes seems too dogmatic, imprinting its somewhat circular sociological interpretation on top of whatever ritual it finds, symbolism is, in some ways, quite the opposite. A symbolic treatment of the Seder ritual will be almost completely oblivious to the social value of the Seder as practiced, and will tend to focus resolutely on the phenomenon of the Seder iteslf. For the "pure symbolist," if any such person truly exists, the Seder could be practiced by 10 people or 10,000; the analysis would be largely the same. Even an analysis which recognizes the multivocality of the symbols, akin to Victor Turner's treatment of the Ndembu milk tree, still focuses on the meaning of the symbols themselves, rather than on their societal value.

A symbolic approach also tends to downplay two factors which would be essential to any historical analysis: the internal linkage of the symbols to other myths, and the external linkage of symbols to other traditions from which they have been appropriated. Yisrael Yuval, whose work was alluded to earlier, has tried to show that certain elements of the Seder ritual -- parts of the liturgy, the emphasis on the literal and historical meanings of the bread rather than a metaphorical one (e.g. "This is my body"), and so on -- are a direct polemic against nascent Judeo-Christianity. But it is hard to see how such political exigencies play into an analysis of the paschal lamb, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs as quasi-Jungian, atemporal symbolic referents.

Of course, the Seder is replete with symbols to analyze. First, the ordered structure of the ceremony itself -- Seder itself means "order," perhaps imitating in some way a cosmic order, of which the Exodus is a part. Second, some of the specific foods mentioned: for example, an egg, though not strictly speaking part of the ritual, is eaten in many communities, explicitly recognized as symbolizing eternity, spring, and rebirth.

It is important in such an analysis to distinguish symbols, whose referent is ultimately not cognizable, from signs, whose referent is clear. Most of the foods and practices in the Seder are actually signs, not symbols. The bitter herbs are explained to "symbolize" the bitterness of slavery in Egypt, but this symbolism is really just a metonymic form of representation; they stand for something, but do not signify something beyond human experience. So too the charoset, which stands for the mortar used in making bricks; the unleavened bread, which is said to remind Jews of the unleavened bread baked in the hasty exit from Egypt; and so on. These referents, though they refer to evenonly in Jewish memory and not the actual memory of anyone partaking in them, are not symbols in the Eliadian sense.

Part of the trouble with a symbolic understanding of the Seder is that Jewish literature itself discusses symbolism, and so we are dealing with a culture that is irretrievably 'non-naive' insofar as how it regards its symbols. Some traditional discussions of the unleavened bread, for instance, say that while the matza refers to the Exodus, it symbolizes in a "deeper" sense the need to purge vanity and greed (leaven) from the human psyche. And Kabbalistic readings of the seder turn every aspect of it into a symbolic referent to powers within the godhead. Thus, it is harder for the scholar to draw interesting symbolic links within the Seder, because one has to account not only for the symbolism imputed to the Seder's rituals, but the conscious symbolization of the rituals themselves within the Jewish tradition. It might be easier to symbolize "I am a parrot," because at least then the scholar does not have to contend with what the people in question say the symbol is "about." They simply evince it.

A symbolic treatment of the Seder is far less interested in the political concerns discussed earlier in terms of the functional approach. A symbolist might be interested to see how some symbolic structures appear to have succeeded, whereas others have not, but this question in no way defines what the Seder essentially is. The Seder's true meaning can only be discerned, in the symbolic approach, by analyzing the grammar and vocabulary of the symbols themselves. That many or few people speak the language is of marginal interest only.

Despite this apparent myopia, we can understand symbolism's success as an explanatory methodology by concluding with a look at a (fictional) symbolic account of the "Cup of Elijah," a functional cup of Elijah, and then trying to see, admittedly based on anecdotal evidence, which may yet explain the "success" of the Seder more.

Wine, which may symbolize life-blood or ties of community or religious "consumption," is very frequently an object that is sacrificed or set apart for the deity. Libations in ancient Greece, for example, serve as symbols of the earth's produce which must be returned to the earth goddess. Because of its intoxicating quality, wine may also symbolize a link between the earthly and the divine, not unlike the use of soma in pre-Hindu Vedic and Upanishadic rituals. Especially because of the linkage in many cultures between blood and money, the linkage of wine is critical: wine resembles blood, inasmuch as it is produce, is a form of currency (material or spiritual) as well.

Wine as used during Passover is particularly rich in symbolic associations, both overt and beneath the surface. The wine may represent the blood of God (as in Jesus's pronouncement) or may be seen as the blood of innocent victims (as in medieval blood libels against the Jews). In both cases, wine's symbolism is polemically deployed; claiming that blood is necessary for the production of Jewish wine (and unleavened bread) re-encodes the consubstantiation of wine into blood in the communion. (Gavin Langmuir has noted that the origination of the blood libel closely followed the Catholic Church's more radical statements on the communion ritual, in fact.) Here, the universal symbolism of wine-as-blood-life is used for antisemitic purposes.

The Seder is a time of much wine-drinking; each participant must drink four cups of it. Setting aside some of the wine for an emissary of God (Elijah) takes the symbolic place of the sacrifice of the paschal lamb: it links heaven and Earth -- Elijah partakes in the feast -- and gives of the wine-blood-money to the deity.

Functionally speaking, we can see a rather more mundane purpose behind the general use of wine: it gets everyone drunk together. If the Seder, and its success, has much to do with its familial nature, we can see the wine as serving a critical function in bringing the family together. However, setting aside some wine for an absent, messianic guest also serves important functions. First, it emphasizes that the Seder is not (only) a time for everyone to get drunk together -- if this were too obvious, the Seder would not be seen as something "holy" and would not force family members to come from near and far. Second, it links the individual family units celebrating the Seder together with a larger sense of Jewish community, since the community as a whole awaits its redemption heralded by Elijah. Thus, even as the Seder enables a "private religious space" as discussed earlier, it also links that space with the larger community via the cup of Elijah. Finally, it is important to note that the Seder requires the door of the house to be opened not just so that Elijah can enter, but also so that the poor of the community can enter and partake in the feast. Obviously, this practice serves a clear function of wealth-sharing and communal fellowship.

The Seder is an interesting case to study because part of the ritual is its intended self-reflexivity; participants are invited to ask what the significance of the various ritual objects are, and why the group has come together. The "Answer" contained in the Seder's liturgy is that the Seder as a whole is an act of (communal) remembrance, that every element of the ceremony hearkens back, to one extent or another, to the Exodus. Obviously, a critic can take issue with the accuracy of this "Answer," particularly since many elements -- the Cup of Elijah -- seem far removed from the Exodus narrative.

But because the Seder contains some attempt at "explanation," one must admit that the symbolic approach, however removed it seems from explaining why these symbols have succeeded and others have not, better captures the meaning of the Seder as understood by the texts associated with it, even as the functional analysis might better capture the "true" meaning of the Seder to the participants. A symbolic midrash on the meaning of the Seder's rituals is no more privileged, in my view, than any other one. It depends on certain psychological assumptions about the universality of human experience, and finally must take the somewhat weak position that the Seder succeeds because its symbols subtly play on these deep human belief structures.

But really, "why the Seder succeeds" is not a religious question. It is a sociological one. "What the Seder is" is not only a religious question, it is one of the religious questions asked in the Seder itself. If Mircea Eliade was concerned to carve out an interpretive space unique to religious experience, rather than sociological or economic ones, then symbolism better fulfills that goal. Symbolism may reduce to universal themes of religion, but functionalism reduces to sociology. Which of those results is more "accurate," in my view, itself depends on other commitments the interpreter may have as to the nature of religious experience. And those commitments seem more theological than academic.