Minister’s Column
Today is Passover. The holiday started last night (Monday) at sunset. One of the high holidays of Judaism, Passover celebrates the exodus of Jews from Egypt, synonymous with their escape from slavery into freedom. As a Gentile (non-Jew), I have experienced a Passover seder only a few times. The ritual connection to the exodus is powerful. As a Unitarian Universalist minister, I am called to honor holidays from religious traditions around the world and to contemplate their meaning—both within their original religious context as well as in the broader context of human life.
One piece of the Passover story that I am connecting with now is the sense of home safety. As the story in the Torah goes, Jews marked their homes so that the Angel of Death would pass over them. The Angel of Death came with a plague that killed the first-born child in every house—but not the houses of the Jews that were marked. Some scholars think that the Jewish ritual of Passover is connected to a more ancient ritual of home protection, where people in a clan would mark their homes with a dab of goat’s blood as a protection against demons.
When I moved into my home here in Mount Pleasant, Michigan three years ago, I did a blessing of the home with a prayer. I have done the same for members of the congregation who move into a new home and ask for a blessing. Through such a ritual, we express a deep human longing for safety and security. The Passover holiday reminds us of this.
This is a universal meaning within the Passover holiday: the desire for safety. We want to know that our homes will shelter us and our loved ones. We take action to this end in physical ways: building a strong house, fixing the roof, locking our doors. And we take action as people of spirit: we pray for protection; we burn sage for cleansing; we exorcise demons from our homes. We use ritual tools including smoke, blood, and prayer. The ancient Jews and their even-more-ancient ancestors did this; modern Jews remember this, as memorialized in their sacred text and as kept alive in the yearly rituals of Passover. May every household be safe from curses and plagues. May traditions of solidarity and freedom endure.
PRAYER:
May the whole world celebrate and remember this day with the Jewish people.
May we honor the ancient story of Passover.
May we honor the traditions that hold Jewish families and communities together in Israel, in Michigan, and everywhere.
May every household be safe.
Blessed be.
Shalom.
Rev. Andrew Frantz
April 23, 2024