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Eating -- A Religious Experience

The Talmud attaches added meaning to the dipping of the karpas in salt water by explaining it as a ploy to get the children to ask questions. One might wonder why this particular means was chosen to arouse the children's curiosity. One could have stimulated them to ask questions by decorating the table with colored balloons or by standing on one's head. It is apparent then that the ritual of karpas and salt water is intended to provoke the young to ask certain specific questions whose answers, the parents are waiting to give.

One of these questions, as we shall elaborate, goes to the heart of the issue of how man is different from any other living being. The Torah teaches a person to attain his daily physical needs in a human way -- not as an animal. For example, the way a human being eats should be different from the manner in which an animal consumes its food. Man may not sit down at a table and fall upon his food. He must first recite a blessing to indicate that the food serves a higher goal. It becomes a vehicle to serve the Creator.

Man eats in a dignified manner and afterwards offers a prayer of thanks to the Provider of the food. Not so the beast! The hungry animal hunts its food, eats it at once, continues without interruption until it is satiated and goes away. The animal eats only to still its hunger; it has no sense of restraint. The Torah characterized Esau as a beast-man. When he grew up he became a skillful hunter, while his brother, Jacob, remained a scholar, who stayed behind to tend the sheep. Once when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came in from the fields famished, according to the Bible, and demanded some food. Jacob fed Esau bread and lentil soup, and "…he ate, drank, rose and went away." (Gen. 25:34). The Rabbis observed that there was no washing of hands, no beginning prayer and no birkat ha-mazon. This is how a beast eats.

The Seder can serve as a model to teach us the Jewish philosophy of eating. We permit ourselves to have only a tiny portion of karpas. By immediately withdrawing from the food, we learn discipline and restraint. As human beings we must learn the self-control to put the food aside and make the meal a religious experience. By learning to do not what we have the urge to do, but what He commands, we serve God. For the Jew the meal is a religious experience that also serves a social function. It binds the family and the community to each other, to their common past and to their common future, as well as to their God. The food is secondary; the most important element of the meal is the spiritual component -- that which emerges from the divrei torah (words of Torah) that are exchanged. Hence the Seder begins by our drinking a cup of wine together and having a first course of greenery, and then, just when we would expect the food to arrive, we stop eating.

The children will wonder, "What is going on? This is strange. We did not eat much lunch because of the large Seder dinner. Now, where is the rest of the food?" The parents will respond by telling of the special character of Passover. On that holiday we became a people of God whose primary purpose is to serve Him. We do so by subsuming the physical to the spiritual -- by turning our meal into a learning experience and a prayer experience. Indeed the learning and prayer come first. It is through karpas that this lesson is brought home to the children around the Seder table.

A charming story is told about two beggars, Yidel, a Jew, and Ivan, a Russian. Both were always in need of a good meal, and one year, just before Passover, Yidel told Ivan that if he went into a synagogue and pretended to be a Jew, he would be sure to get an invitation to a Seder. About a month later, when they met once again, Yidel expected an embrace and a thank-you, but instead Ivan fell upon him with blows and curses. Finally Ivan explained, "I did exactly what you said. I went to the synagogue, sat in the last row, did everything the others did and played the deaf-mute. I got about a dozen invitations and went with the man who looked to be the richest. The table was set beautifully and his house was full of the aroma of cooked food. I sat down and waited to be served. First they began chanting in Hebrew. After a while they gave me a cup of wine and some parsley and salt water. A strange dish but edible. Meanwhile they kept on swaying and reading Hebrew. I was almost faint with hunger. Ten minutes, twenty minutes, an hour passed. I thought I would go mad. At last everyone got up and washed their hands. So did I. Then they gave me a flat, tasteless wafer and passed around a vegetable I had never seen before. I took a huge bite, and all of a sudden my eyes started to tear. I began to choke and my insides were burning. They must have known that I was a goy. So I ran from the table. I'm sure you put them up to it." "Oh, my friend," said Yidel. "If only you'd been a little more patient. After the karpas, matzah, and maror, all the delicious food would have come."

This is really what a Seder is: a great deal of reading, a great deal of swaying to and fro, a great deal of talking and learning. It requires much patience, but a meal par excellence for a Jew consists of far more than food.

This essay has been excerpted from the Ann Belsky Moranis edition of "A Haggadah Happening: An Artistic Passover Haggadah with a Traditional yet Contemporary Commentary". For more information on how to obtain this Haggadah, please contact artcenter@ohrtorahstone.org.il.

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