THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, April 4 - 5, 2020 |C5
had to flee before their dough had
a chance to rise.
Over the last 2,000 years,
Jews have managed to celebrate
Passover in the face of far worse
challenges than Covid-19. In the
year 70, the ancient historian Jo-
sephus reports, the Roman gen-
eral Titus besieged Jerusalem
three days before Passover, at a
time when the city’s population
was swelled by the vast numbers
of pilgrims who came to offer a
Passover sacrifice in the Temple.
The result was pestilence—or as
we would now say, an epidemic—
and famine, which according to
Josephus’s estimate killed 1.1 mil-
lion people. Yet the holiday went
on—as it did even in Auschwitz
during World War II, where some
survivors recalled clandestine Se-
ders conducted without a Hag-
gada.
By comparison, the Passover
obstacles of 2020 seem minor.
The internet is already full of
guides for conducting a virtual
Seder, in which guests can read
and pray together while eating
separately. Orthodox Jews ordi-
narily don’t use electronic de-REVIEW
vices on holidays, but this year
may be different. Last week, 14
rabbinic authorities in Israel is-
sued a statement permitting the
use of Zoom or Skype to connect
people during the Seder, pro-
vided that the app is turned on
before the holiday begins and not
turned off until it ends. Other
rabbis disagreed, however, and
practice will probably vary from
household to household.
However people connect on
Passover this year, they will likely
find new resonances in the Seder.
Everyone is thinking about the
importance of handwashing these
days, as a way to prevent trans-
mission of the coronavirus, but
washing your hands has been one
of the first steps in the Seder for
many centuries, as a preliminary
to handling food. One Passover
meme making the rounds lately
rewrites the order of the Seder so
that instead of handwashing oc-
curring once, it’s repeated be-
tween every stage of the meal.
Covid-19 also gives new con-
creteness to the section of the Se-
der dealing with the ten plagues.
The Book of Exodus relates that,
in order to convince
the Pharaoh to “let
my people go,” God
sent Egypt a series
of afflictions: water
turned to blood, the
land was inundated
by frogs and locusts,
cattle were killed by
disease, day turned
to night. Yet each
time Pharaoh re-
fused to relent, until
the worst plague of
all, when every first-
born child in Egypt
died on the same
night. In this way
God requited the
genocidal decree of
Pharaoh, who had
ordered all Israelite
boys to be killed at
birth.
But the Israelites
were spared, since God had sent
them into a kind of quarantine:
“None of you shall go out at the
door of his house until the morn-
ing,” he instructed Moses and
Aaron. The name of the holiday
commemorates this event, as the
Haggada explains: “It is a Pass-
over offering to the Lord, because
He passed over the houses of the
children of Israel in Egypt whenH
ow is this night
different from all
other nights? That
question, which
Jews ask every
year as part of the Passover cele-
bration, will get a new answer in- When the holiday begins
on Wednesday night, for many
Jews it will be the first time in
their lives that they cannot at-
tend a Seder—the ritual meal
that commemorates the Israel-
ites’ journey from slavery in
Egypt to freedom in their Prom-
ised Land.
According to a 2013 Pew Re-
search Center poll, the Seder is
the most widely practiced Jewish
tradition in the U.S.: Only 23% of
American Jews regularly attend a
synagogue, but 70% go to a Seder.
In the age of Covid-19, however,
bringing together old and young
people in a small space to share
food is simply too dangerous. In
Israel, where all gatherings of
more than 10 people have been
banned, the Health Ministry has
urged Jews to limit their Seders
to their nuclear family. Chabad,
the international Jewish outreach
organization, has posted a list of
frequently asked questions on its
website, including “Can I at least
invite my neighbors?” The an-
swer is “no, no and no!”
This advice is in keeping with
the traditional Jewish principle
that the preservation of life over-
rides almost any other duty. And
a Seder is a religious duty, not
just a chance to see extended
family and enjoy holiday dishes.
Seder means “order” in He-
brew, and it involves an ordered
series of ritual actions, prayers,
songs and stories—15 steps in all,
which are recorded in the Hag-
gada, the Passover prayer book.
The core of the Seder is a long
script, usually recited by the
guests in turn, which narrates
the Exodus and
draws out its mean-
ing. One reason why
Passover is the
quintessential Jew-
ish holiday is that
you celebrate it by
talking about it. As
the Haggada says,
“everyone who dis-
cusses the exodus
from Egypt at
length is praisewor-
thy.”
In fact, the Bible
implies that while
the purpose of Pass-
over is to remember
the exodus, the exo-
dus took place in
part so that Jews
could celebrate Pass-
over. “And this day
shall be unto you for
a memorial; and ye
shall keep it a feast to the Lord
throughout your generations; ye
shall keep it a feast by an ordi-
nance for ever,” God tells Moses
and Aaron in Exodus 12, on the
eve of the Israelites’ flight from
Egypt. That Biblical passage is the
origin of Passover practices that
Jews still follow today—such as
eating matzo, unleavened bread,
ILLUSTRATIONS RUTH GWILYin memory of the Israelites who
BYADAMKIRSCH He struck the Egyptians with a
plague, and He saved our houses.”
For most people alive today,
the idea of a plague that strikes
a whole nation—so that “there
was not a house where there was
not one dead,” as the Bible
says—was until recently hard to
imagine. Covid-19 is nowhere
near that deadly, but it has given
us an inkling of the fear of and
vulnerability to disease that all
human societies lived with until
the 20th century. For the Jews of
Europe, times of plague were
doubly dangerous, since they
were often blamed by their
Christian neighbors. During the
Black Death of 1348, hundreds of
Jewish communities in Western
Europe were attacked, despite
the intervention of Pope Clement
VI, who pointed out that Jews
were dying from the plague just
like everyone else.
The Seder acknowledges the
horror of such afflictions with a
distinctive ritual. When it comes
time to recite the ten plagues,
participants remove a drop of
wine from their cups after each
plague is named, either with a
finger or by spilling it. The cus-
tomary explanation for this prac-
tice is that it’s a way of symboli-
cally decreasing the joy of thecelebration, in acknowledgment
of the suffering of the Egyptians.
In the words of the Talmud, God
“doesn’t rejoice over the down-
fall of the wicked.”
Throughout the Seder, in fact,
joy and sadness are inseparable.
Modern scholars have argued
that the Seder is modeled on the
ancient Greek symposium, a
drinking party in which men
would talk, joke and listen to mu-
sic while reclining on couches.
On Passover, likewise, Jews are
supposed to drink four cups of
wine and recline at leisure (a
practice seldom followed today,
when people are more used to
sitting upright at a table). These
are ways of demonstrating that
Jews are no longer slaves, as in
Egypt, but free people.
At the same time, one of the
key ingredients of the Passover
meal is bitter herbs—often rep-
resented on modern American
plates by horseradish—which is
eaten as a reminder of the bit-
terness of the lives of the Israel-
ite slaves. Another dish, charo-
set, a paste made of fruit and
nuts, is meant to resemble the
clay used by those slaves to
make bricks; and matzo is re-
ferred to in the Haggada as “the
bread of affliction.” This year,
for Jews separated from loved
ones in the shadow of a pan-
demic, the chastened happiness
of Passover will have a new
meaning and relevance.This year,
the story of
the ten
plagues will
feel more
concrete than
ever.Castaways and
Other Lonely
Survivors
BEING ONE’S OWN
company can be bliss-
ful, but not when it’s
involuntary. According
to John Donne, the
17th-century English poet and
priest, “As sickness is the greatest
misery, so the greatest misery of
sickness is solitude.” Now that
nearly two in three Americans are
currently subject to shelter-in-
place orders as a result of the cor-
onavirus pandemic, how will we
cope with prolonged isolation?
The Germans have a special
word for feeling utterly alone and
isolated:mutterseelenallein,acom-
pound that literally means
“mother’s souls alone.” According
to one theory, the word entered
the German language as a misin-
terpretation of the French phrase
moi teut seul, “me all alone,” which
was used by the Huguenots—
French Protestants who fled to
Berlin in the 18th century to es-
cape persecution at home.
Although the ancients didn’t
have an equivalent word, they cer-
tainly knew the feeling. In 44 B.C.,
the Roman statesman Marcus Tul-
lius Cicero was declared an enemy
of the state and forced into hiding.
Despite his loneliness, or perhaps
because of it, Cicero used the time
to write his final work, “On Du-
ties,” in only four weeks.We can’t all be like Cicero, of
course, and write a masterpiece
while on lockdown. But we can cer-
tainly rise to the occasion and sur-
prise ourselves. One of the least
likely castaways in history was the
wealthy French aristocrat Margue-
rite de La Rocque de Roberval, who
in 1542 agreed to accompany her
spendthrift cousin Jean-Francois
de Roberval on a voyage to New
France, modern Canada. The jolly
adventure became a nightmare af-
ter Roberval accused Marguerite of
sexual immorality while on board
his ship. This was his flimsy excuse
for marooning her along with her
maid and lover on the deserted
Isle of Demons off Newfoundland.
Marguerite’s lover and their
baby soon succumbed, as did her
maid, leaving the hitherto pam-
pered heiress to survive in the wil-
derness as best she could. During
her two years as a castaway she
killed a bear, ate its carcass and
turned its skin into clothing. After
her rescue and return to France in
1544, Marguerite created a new life
for herself as an educator. The
treacherous Roberval escaped pun-
ishment, but was subsequently
murdered by a mob in 1560.
Such stories provided ample ma-
terial to Daniel Defoe, who wrote
the ultimate social isolation story,
“Robinson Crusoe,” in 1719. The
novel has been adapted many times
since, including for the 2000 film
“Cast Away,” starring Tom Hanks as
the Crusoe figure. Defoe based his
tale in part on the real-life castaway
Alexander Selkirk, a Royal Navy offi-
cer who in 1704 was abandoned by
his shipmates on a deserted island
in the south Pacific, where he man-
aged to survive until he was rescued
five years later.
Defoe himself knew something
about prolonged isolation: In 1703,
he was imprisoned for several
months after he published a pam-
phlet satirizing the Church of Eng-
land. Defoe’s stint in prison made
him a better advocate for the social
outcasts he described in his novels,
just as Crusoe’s 28-year sojourn on
the island made him into a better
person—a man of faith and purpose
rather than the malcontent of his
former life. “No man is an island en-
tire of itself,” wrote Donne; being
human makes us all connected, no
matter where we are.HISTORICALLY SPEAKING
AMANDA FOREMAN
Tom Hanks in ‘Cast Away.’EVERETT COLLECTIONPassover
is the
quintessential
Jewish
holiday:
You celebrate
it by talking
about it.Amid the Covid-19 pandemic,
the Jewish holiday that begins next week
will be celebrated in new ways—and gain
new meanings.A Passover
Unlike
Any Other