Two Passovers, Two Kings: One Law

Between Past and Present

“I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear…Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else.” (Walt Whitman, “I Hear America Singing”)

“And when a stranger who resides with you would offer a passover sacrifice to the Lord, it must be offered in accordance with the rules and rites of the passover sacrifice. There shall be one law for you, whether stranger (ger) or citizen (ezrach) of the land.” (Numbers 9:14)

AND WHEN A STRANGER SHALL SOJOURN AMONG YOU. He too shall observe the second Passover in accordance with the ordinance. Others say that the reference is to the first Passover. (Ibn Ezra)

I.

This week’s Torah reading, Beha’alotecha (Numbers 8:1-12:16), teaches that those who missed their original chance to offer a Passover sacrifice can have a second chance a month later—but only those who had a good reason for missing the first time. Those who were impure or were traveling get a “doctor’s note,” as it were. But you can’t deliberately sit out the Passover holiday knowing that it will come again in a month. It is in the context of teaching about the second Passover offering—Pesach Sheini—that the Torah tells us “there shall be one law for you…” Two passovers, but one law. How can this be? Context. The unity of the law is not the same as conformity of behavior.

Still, the Torah is ambiguous, leading commentators to disagree about the referent of “one law.” Does “one law” mean that gerim, understood by Rashi as “male converts who have just undergone circumcision and are healing from their pain,” must nonetheless keep the first passover? Or does it mean that strangers not only have to keep the first Passover, but also get a second chance if they miss the first?

The Torah might have taught the importance of having a single law for everyone anywhere, but it places it here, right after telling us about the extenuating circumstances that create a need for a second Passover. It also might have have abstained altogether from teaching about the unity of the law—is that not obvious? Isn’t it a basic feature of good law that it should be applied equally to everyone within the polity—that nobody can buy or bully their way to a heter (exemption) simply because they have power? But perhaps the unity of the law needs to be taught precisely to those who might otherwise seek to exclude. The Israelites might have said to themselves—or the strangers might have said to themselves—“we are not part of this.” (This is precisely what the wicked child suggests during the Passover seder, perhaps fulfilling the Torah’s very anxiety.)

Note: the Hebrew ger, in the Torah, means an ethnic non-Israelite who nonetheless lives in the land of Israel; in rabbinic Judaism, ger means a convert to Judaism, that is, someone who participates and counts fully in the community despite being of a non-Israelite ethnicity. In the Torah, communal belonging in the Torah is land-based, while in Diasporic Judaism it is not; in one, you “convert” simply by living in the land of Israel, in the other, you convert by living amongst the people Israel, which has less concrete definition.

I take the juxtaposition of the second Passover and the single law for all to be a teaching about pluralism, about accepting diversity without giving up on the possibility of a common project. Diversity of practice, diversity of need, is compatible with the concept of a common law or common good. Moreover, when you observe people different than yourself, be it a fellow member of your tribe, or simply a sojourner among you, don’t “other” them—find the commonality, the “one law” that connects you.

The common ritual of remembering the Exodus binds all Israelites, but just as not everybody can eat the Passover Sacrifice the first go-around, not every Jew has an ancestor who actually left Egypt. And that’s Ok. Because, ultimately what matters is not history, but remembrance, not origin, but destiny. Conversion is possible, just as Pesach Sheini is possible, because the main point of the Exodus is not that it happened in the past, but that we find it salient in our present lives. One way to belong is by identifying with the story. The person who doesn’t eat the first Passover sacrifice by choice—the apostate—dis-identifies with the story. The stranger who never went through it, but lights up at its telling, becomes more a part of it than the dissident native.

The two reasons given for missing Passover Sheini are impurity and travel, both involve a kind of leaving of the community, if a temporary form. This suggests a metaphoric dimension to the law that there shall be one law, whether for stranger or citizen. Even though there are times in life, where, by necessity, we are like strangers, we shouldn’t make ourselves into essential or permanent outsiders. The law can be ours even if we are circumstantially unable to keep it. Pesach Sheini teaches us not just to look mercifully and generously on those whose situation is different than our own, but also on ourselves, whose situation is often different than what we expect for ourselves. One can be a ger, in the sense of a stranger or an individual and still belong to the collective.

II.

Ernst Kantorowicz, German-Jewish intellectual historian theorizes about the “King’s two bodies.” One body is the actual body of the king, while the other is something more symbolic, intangible, transferable, representational, and externizable, like the King’s staff. A person who holds the King’s staff is looked at has being the King’s second body or laying in possession of the King’s second body. The basic idea is that the King can’t act without agents, and so these agents working on the King’s behalf are as if the King, in duplicate. The existence of Two Passovers may correspond to the concept of the doubled King. How so?

Just as a king is nothing without devoted servants, the past is nothing without a loyal present. Despite being superior in status (the Latin princip, from which we get principle and principal, means both supreme leader and beginning, like the Greek arche/archon), the past is ultimately dependent upon us. In the words of scholar Isaac Reed, author of Power in Modernity: Agency Relations and the Creative Destruction of the King’s Two Bodies, the past may be our rector, but we are its actors. (This is also how we should take the High Holiday song, Ki Anu Amecha—God is our rector, but we are God’s actors).

Pesach Rishon, the first Passover, corresponds to Passover qua the past. Pesach Sheini corresponds to Passover qua now. The first Passover is the past as king. The second passover is the present as servant. My point in using the metaphor of king and servant is not to wax nostalgic for monarchy, but to emphasize the surprising idea that even within a radically hierarchical relationship dependency cuts both ways. The King is far from the kingdom and needs eyes on the street. Whatever the advantages of the past, we have one advantage over it: we are here now. In this sense, the convert may be second to or later than the native, but the original generation needs the convert to keep the message and transmit it. We are all gerim, converts and outsiders to the original Torah, the original Exodus, the original founding. But this is the nature of time, the structure of generational change, which is inbuilt into Creation.

There are two Torahs, a written Torah and an oral Torah, a static dimension of tradition fixed in the past and a dynamic dimension fixed in the present—but one law. It is tempting to seek to divorce the two Torahs, to worship either at the shrine of nostalgia or to cancel the past and deify the morals of the present. But doubleness is our condition, making a resting place neither in past nor present, neither in nativity nor strangerliness. In the debate between origin and destiny, we must weight towards destiny. What matters is where we can go more than where we literally came from. Rav Soloveitchik distinguishes between brit goral and brit ye’ud, a covenant based in happenstance of birth (or in Heidegger’s words, “thrownness”) and a covenant based in choice (“projection”). Yet it is striking that the Torah teaches this idea precisely in the context of Pesach, remembering the Exodus. We owe remembrance to the past because it makes our present possible and gives purpose to our future. But the past is also never over, never merely historical. And that is why we have a second Passover. In the broad sense, we have all missed Passover 1, owing to travel, distraction, shame, fear, ignorance. Thankfully, we can enjoy Passover 2 as if it were Passover 1. We outsiders have always belonged.

Shababt Shalom,

Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh

P.S.

I hosted Oxford Professor of Political Theory, Teresa Bejan, on Meditations with Zohar.

I spoke with Jonathan Silver about the intellectual history of equality on the Tikvah Podcast.