dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Why is the answer in the WSJ?

Put in Christian terms: The Passover Seder recalls and celebrates the resurrection of the people of Israel.

Today we tend to think of slavery strictly as an injustice, which of course it is, and some modern Seders treat the Passover as the triumph of justice over oppression.

But this is not the traditional view. In the ancient world, slavery was not just a hardship for individuals but a kind of communal death. An enslaved nation can survive for a time, perhaps, but they have no future. A people in bondage is slowly crushed and extinguished,

The notion of slavery as a form of death is accentuated in the story told in the Passover Seder. The small clan descended from Abraham settles in Egypt. They are fruitful and multiply, becoming numerous and mighty. The glow of life in the people of Israel arouses Egyptian resentment. Set upon and subjugated, they are ground down by hard labor and harsh oppression.

But the descendants of Abraham call out to God (I can't hep but think of 'you have more than you know' here)

—and he raises them up out of slavery, parts the Red Sea, and delivers them from Pharaoh’s murderous anger…

The early Christians did not celebrate Easter with sunrise services. They gathered in the deepest darkness, long before dawn, for the Easter Vigil, which has been restored in many churches, including the Catholic Church. In the Vigil, Christians are like the Israelites fleeing with Pharaoh’s army. Easter begins in a night-darkened church. We are in the valley of the shadow of death.

In the story of Exodus, the Israelites make it through the split waters of the Red Sea to dry land. But they are not simply safe. God releases the waters, and Pharaoh’s army is destroyed.

So it is at the Easter Vigil. A chant known as the Exultet announces that the darkness shall not triumph. “Be glad, let earth be glad, as glory floods her.” With a haunting refrain, the ancient song links Passover to Easter: “This is the night,” we are told, “when once you led our forbearers, Israel’s children, from slavery in Egypt and made them pass dry-shod through the Red Sea.” And “this is the night when Christ broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld.”

Passover does not teach Jews that oppression is not real and suffering not bitter. The lesson is more powerful: God favors the people of Israel with his Torah, and its sweetness outweighs every setback, evil and disaster.

Nor, then, is Easter a simple springtime celebration of life. The resurrection of Jesus reveals something more urgent and shocking: God favors the sons of Adam with a triumphant love in the person of Jesus, the Christ. And that love does not fend off or parry death, but destroys it, just as light overcomes darkness.

https://archive.is/qrXQM#selection-4607.0-4615.317