It’s that time of year again when Jews who observe tradition celebrate the biblical festival of Passover in ways that the people living in biblical times could never contemplate. A modern wrinkle on this phenomenon is that many Christians now also try to celebrate the Passover they understand that Jesus celebrated, and try to connect the holiday of Easter to Passover.

Some of us (Jews) look at this as cultural appropriation, but all it really is is the sort of religious integration and modification that characterizes most religious faiths and traditions. Time goes on and people of almost every faith engage in enhancing and embracing new aspects of culture.

It is then, perhaps ironic, that neither Jews nor Christians observe Passover in any way that would have been recognizable to an Israelite living in the time of Jesus.

The Passover Seder, as we now know it, was a creation of the rabbis of the Mishnah, the Tanaim. It is part of a theology of substitution. Since we cannot follow the ritual prescribed by the Torah for the observance of Passover, namely the animal sacrifice described in the Torah on the Temple Mount conducted by priests, we instead prepare a festive meal and place it in the middle of a set of Psalms, mimicking their vision of the ceremony of old.

As should be obvious from the description above, the Passover Seder could not possibly have been celebrated while the Temple was still standing, because all involved would have deemed it their religious obligation to follow the Temple ritual. We don’t know precisely when the Seder came into being, my guess is in the middle to late 2nd century CE. It seems to have been well established by the time the Mishnah was redacted, ca 250 CE.

Jesus, of course, lived while the Temple still stood, and the accounts of his last meal place him in Jerusalem for the celebration of the festival. Whether that was a Passover meal at all is not clear because the authors of the Gospels provide some details which conflict. It might have been a communal meal before the start of the festival, or it might have been a festival meal. But whichever it was, it was not a Seder.

What this means is that both Jews and Christians have come up with methods and mechanisms to deal with the simple historical fact that there was a cataclysmic change in the ability of all groups who recognized the supremacy of the God of Israel to fulfill the requirements they all agreed that that deity had demanded of them.

Whether you are celebrating with a Hillel Sandwich, or a Eucharistic wafer, I want to wish you the peace of this season. May all captives everywhere be set free, and may wars everywhere come to an end.