By Stanley Tiger
SAN DIEGO –Passover in the 21st Century presents Jewish people with new dilemmas unimagined in previous eras: Should I have regular white flour matzah, whole wheat matzah, egg matzah, any of the flavored matzahs, and more recently “gluten free matzah.” We also have the choice of salted or unsalted matzah, domestic or imported or any of the combinations and permutations of the above. (What a great idea for a new app!)
Passover also presents a deeply personal and culturally unique experience shared with family and friends creating memorable experiences which overlap from generation to generation going far back, well before my grandfather broke matzah at our Seders or had to deal with modern matzah dilemmas.
This Passover was somewhat different for me because I was more sensitized to the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of our Seder.
I had recently read The Essential Talmud, written by one of the foremost Talmudic scholars of our age, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz. Talmud is a unique collaboration of books written by many authors over many centuries with comments derived from the primary source of Jewish sacred writing — the Torah, the book still preserved in scroll form common to all branches of Judaism.
In reading The Essential Talmud I was awakened to a world — actually more like a universe — of which I was lacking in knowledge. The book is a rich condensation of deeply considered ideas. It explores many amazing concepts which expand our insight on the genius of our Jewish traditions. Allow me to elaborate…
Rabbi Steinsaltz’s book develops the history and describes many of the “defining principles of logical analysis which permeate Talmudic scholarship”– an area that has molded Jewish character and thinking for centuries.
Among the most fascinating is the discussion of how ideas are examined from every conceivable aspect, to include issues that may otherwise appear to make no sense to us at all — at least initially.
One such example involves a question that was examined anywhere from roughly 500 to 2,000 years ago. The question was, “What if a tower could float in the sky?” The issues discussed were ownership, land use, rights and questions of this kind.
The astounding thing about this area of discussion is that it presaged satellites by all these centuries!
Another question asked was – what if an animal could have a human face, or a human had an animal face? The questions involved the morality and proper treatment of ugly or disfigured people and such. With genetic engineering today, such speculations are totally within the realm of possibility.
A third question asked all these centuries ago was, “What if a mother could develop in her womb the child of another woman?” Again this is an astoundingly farsighted question which we are asking as part of the realities of the 21st century!
So, this Passover, I am celebrating God’s evacuation from Egypt of the Jewish People (whether factual or symbolic), that the Jewish People have preserved our customs and learning all these millennia and that just as the Jewish People have been led out of the desert, so too may we lead the rest of humanity from the desert of modern slavery, ignorance and prejudice!
(Now, how do we fit all this into an app?)
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Stanley Tiger is president of Jewish Universe Media, an educational 501(c)(3). He is currently writing a book on the interaction of Judaism and modern science.