Anticipatory Celebration

Anticipatory Celebration
EXODUS 12: 1-27

I am sometimes asked, “What do you miss about England?” One of my joke replies is that I miss a magnificent chocolate-and- cream pastry called an “elephant’s foot” that they sell at a bakery where we often had Saturday lunch. Another reply is “proximity to Israel.” The last time we went there, two years before our move to the United States, the trip came immediately after Easter, which that year came at the same time as Passover. We were driving through the Galilee mountains and stopped at a fast-food stand at lunchtime, where I tried to buy a sandwich. The man looked at me in disbelief. Of course there were no sandwiches. It’s Passover week, for goodness’ sake. There is no bread from which you can make sandwiches this week. I felt really stupid. I almost got the impression that the man thought I might be from the rabbinic police, trying to catch Jews who were not observing Passover properly. It was one of those moments when you realize that the observances and other realities of which Scripture speaks are not just things from the past or stories in a book but contemporary realities. Passover is not just an event from a nation’s past in the way that King Arthur or William the Conqueror might be for me. It is the event from the past that shapes the present for Jewish people...