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'Not by Bread Alone…': Food and Drink in the Rabbinic Seder and In

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'Not by Bread Alone…': Food and Drink in the Rabbinic Seder and In “NOT BY BREAD ALONE . .”: THE RITUALIZATION OF FOOD AND TABLE TALK IN THE PASSOVER SEDER AND IN THE LAST SUPPER Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus Wheaton College abstract The early Christians and rabbinic Jews who composed the accounts of the Last Supper and the Passover seder both used the conventions of Greco- Roman symposium literature to ritualize their foundation myths. Drawing upon anthropological theories of ritual that focus on the relationship be- tween ritual actions and ritual texts, this paper specifies the distinctive “strategies of ritualization” and “ritualized metaphors” of the Last Supper and rabbinic seder. The Christian Eucharist is a ritual of both separation and re-integration, stressing the Christians’ break with other first century Jews, as well as the union of contemporary Christians with their ancestors. The rabbinic seder is primarily a ritual of re-integration, stressing the unbroken link between contemporary Jews and their ancestors, despite the traumatic events of the Temple’s destruction and exile. The table talk of these rituals also associates words of “scripture” (whether the Written and Oral Torah, or the sayings of Jesus) with the food and drink to be consumed. Ingesting the foods “inscribed” with the words of God is a ritualization of scriptural metaphors, a palpable sensual experience of internalizing the rabbinic or Christian myths, which transforms the rituals’ participants respectively into “embodied Torah, or “the Body of Christ” incarnate. Jesus answered, “Scripture says, ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” Matt 4:4, quoting Deut 8:3 Pesah\ Matzah Maror [Paschal lamb, unleavened bread, bitter herb] AND YOU SHALL MAKE PASSOVER FOR YHWH YOUR GOD (Deut 16:1). This is—by means of the Passover you make below with the right intention, you will arouse its counterpart above, as if to say—the Holy One Blessed Be He will make a Passover like you do. And . by [the telling of] the story of the Exodus from Egypt, on the night which one praises the Holy One Blessed be He—Behold the Holy One Blessed Be He is praised with the praises of Israel, as is explained in the holy book of the -165- 166 semeia Zohar: “YOU SHALL MAKE A PESAH\ —a peh s´ah\ [a talking mouth]—FOR YHWH YOUR GOD as mentioned above. From the commentary of R. Solomon Ha-Kohen of Radomsk— Tiferet Shlomo—on the Passover Haggadah, 19th c., Hasidic Introduction When contemporary Jews and Christians perform the rituals of the Passover Seder or the Eucharist, respectively, they make a point of explaining the symbolism of the food and wine they eat and drink. Christians recite the words of institution, a conflation of verses from the New Testament, The Lord Jesus, the same night he was betrayed, took bread and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “Take eat, this my body which is broken for you; this do in remembrance of me.” In the same manner also the cup, after he had supped, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. This do in remembrance of me.” (1 Cor 11:23–26; par. Luke 22:19–20) Jews specify the meaning of matzah (unleavened bread); maror (bitter herb); and pesah\ (lamb bone), and give several explanations for the four cups of wine drunk at the Passover seder. Indeed, the Four Questions pose the ques- tion of the meaning of matzah and maror at the beginning of the seder. Why is there this stress in both traditions on eating, drinking, and talking about it? There are three main reasons why both the Christian and Jewish tradi- tions stress these elements. First, the Last Supper, upon which the subsequent Lord’s Supper ritual was based, was most likely a Passover seder. While the evidence for this is mostly circumstantial, it is nevertheless compelling, and it is certainly how the Synoptic Gospels understood and represented the Last Supper, especially Luke.1 Secondly, as I have argued in my dissertation 1 Brumberg-Kraus, 1991:203. The evidence: (1) all the Gospels clearly identify the Last Supper as the meal on the evening when Passover begins, except for John. John’s patently theo- logical purpose of identifying Christ as “the true Passover sacrifice” (not greater fidelity to history) motivates the evangelist to depict the Last Supper before Passover begins, so Christ’s crucifixion can occur on the same day the lambs for the Passover sacrifice are slaughtered. (2) Luke’s account mentions that the Passover lamb was served at the meal, even if Jesus didn’t eat it (Luke 22:15, 16). But without the specific mention of matzah and maror, this alone would be insufficient evidence that this meal was the same type of meal described by m. Pesah\. in the sec- ond century CE. Add to this that (3) there were at least two cups of wine at the meal, one before dinner, one after (according to Luke 22:17, 20)—like the Mishnah’s two before, two after the meal proper. (4) Jesus recited blessings over the bread and wine (Luke 22:17, 19) as the practice of Phar- isaic early rabbinic havurot, whose innovations made the Passover seder distinct from the Biblical observance of Passover. (5) Mark’s Gospel (14:20 par. Matt 26:23) mentions dipping food into condiments at the Last Supper, a practice the third of the three (or four) questions in m. Pesah\. 10:4 brumberg-kraus: “not by bread alone. .” 167 (1991), Christian and Jewish table talk emerged from the classical tradition of Hellenistic symposium literature. Hellenistic symposium literature glori- fied the convivial gatherings of educated people to discuss topics of popular intellectual interest over fine food and a cup (or two or more!) of wine. Fre- quently, the food and wine, or the habits of dining, were themselves the sub- ject of conversation. The scholarly Christian and rabbinic promulgators of the Lord’s Supper and the Passover seder used the conventions and practices of symposium literature, just as other Greco-Roman popular philosophers and sage/bureaucrats, in order to attract adherents to their groups and to articu- late their particular ideological perspectives (Brumberg-Kraus, 1991:247–48). Finally, the Last Supper and Passover seder are similar because both belong to the same category of religious phenomena: meal rituals. Or to be more pre- cise, the literary sources for the Last Supper and rabbinic seder both represent similar religious phenomena: meal rituals. In my earlier research, I was particularly insistent about this distinc- tion between literary descriptions of dinner rituals and the rituals themselves (1991:11). I tried to clarify certain aspects of Luke’s theology by comparing and contrasting his literary representation of table fellowship with what I called other Greco-Roman “idealizations” of table fellowship, i.e. in the vari- ous genres of symposium literature. However, I concluded from my com- parison that Luke’s particular use of the symposium genre and its common- places was somehow more oriented toward future performances of the meal rituals it described than its non-Christian counterparts. After all, few people go around re-enacting Plato’s Symposium, Petronius’ Cena Trimalchionis, or the lovers’ meals in Achilles Tatius’ novel Leucippe and Cleitophon, while the Lord’s Supper is a staple of Christian practice. Thus in function, Luke’s Chris- tian symposia had much more in common with the rabbinic seder preserved in m. Pesah\. 10, despite their significant differences in literary form. Luke’s Gospel consists of meal scenes imbedded in a narrative; the Mishnah’s seder is a “list of meal rules.” I knew Luke’s Gospel and the rabbinic seder “ritual- ized” the meals they describe or prescribe in ways that their counterparts in Greco-Roman symposium literature did not. But because I was so concerned with distinguishing between rituals and literary accounts of them, I was unable to specify precisely where and how the intersections between ritu- als and texts about rituals occurred. This paper is intended to remedy that problem. Hence my epigraph, “Man does not to live by bread alone, but on suggests distinguishes the seder from ordinary meals. (6) According to Mark 14:26 and Matt 26:30, the Last Supper concludes with the singing of “the hymn”—which could easily be a reference to the Hallel sung after the meal as per m. Pesah\. 10:6. (7) Both meals stress table talk as a significant component. (8) Reclining was the appropriate eating posture for each meal. Together, these details (nearly all conventions of Hellenistic symposia, too) suggest the Last Supper was a seder—that is, something much more like the rabbinic seder than the Israelite rite prescribed in the Bible. See also Bahr; Tabory 1977/78, 1981; Bokser, 1984; Brumberg-Kraus, 1991: 10–11, 203n12, 215. 168 semeia every word that comes from the mouth of God,” was chosen partly to suggest that neither the acts of eating nor the words about them in the Christian Eu- charist and early rabbinic seder can be fully understood when treated sepa- rately, but only when they are viewed together. So let’s return to our original observation: the authors of the early Chris- tian eucharistic traditions and the early rabbinic seder make a point of ex- plaining the symbolism of the food and wine they eat and drink. The table talk connected to the events and “props” of these rituals calls attention to the fact that the foods function as more than just nourishment. They are not “bread alone,” but are also coded with cognitive contents to be internalized, that is, “ingested” just like the foods on which their meanings are conveyed.
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