ESTMINSTER Volume XI No.2 UARTERLY April 2020 A Ukrainian 19th-century print representing the Seder table Beasts of the Bible Charles the Great and his Jewish subjects Jewish Dynasties - Polack Isaiah Berlin From the Rabbi the day before Pesach, and you do no pretending that it was extinguished long searching after burning, because Pesach ago. Find ways to enjoy bringing to light is starting. You search in order to burn. what is, for lack of a better word, ‘bad’, or The rest of the sages, however, give a destructive. For this checking, as well as potentially counter-intuitive teaching. bringing things to light, is a process that They say that ideally you search the night happens with light, with that candle. before, or the day before, but if you Take on this checking, which is persistent haven’t, then you should check for but less judgemental than burning. You chametz during the festival itself. They see chametz and see the slightest even say that if you haven’t yet difference of just seventeen minutes of sufficiently checked for chametz you fermentation. You recognise your anger, should still check for it after the festival. and in your persistent checking, find in it As we approach Pesach, I encourage us One can imagine Rabbi Yehuda’s passion. You check your frustrations and to combine committed resolution with consternation with this view that one disappointments and find in them high patient work. I suggest that each of us should be actively looking on Pesach for standards, great belief in others and in supplement our passionate desire to do that which you cannot eat on Pesach! yourself. You find in tiredness, love. In better, with a more patient, persistent Were I to look for pizza on Pesach my bringing something to light, it may be and gentle approach to bringing change next step might be to eat that pizza, at transformed. in ourselves and in the world. There is an least a nibble, or to suffer some serious Structure writing, or praying, or talking ancient practice, set down in the discomfort. Yet our Rabbis teach us to with someone, or reading and discussing mishnah almost two thousand years ago, recognise chametz, to check for our bad the papers, and look for questions, before of searching for chametz, for all your inclinations, and to check for bad in the you assume statements. Bedikah, bread and other prohibited food, and world, and if necessary, to do so checking, means asking questions; then burning it the day before Pesach. repeatedly and persistently. exploring, warmly probing, interrogating. Indeed, the Mishnah on Pesach begins It is used elsewhere in Jewish law this with the instruction to search for term, bedikah, to cross-examine chametz by candlelight the night before May we find the witnesses. The judgement comes later; it Pesach. The word for searching is is the burning which offers the hope of a bedikah, the word for the subsequent opportunities in our world and a self exactly as it could be, but burning is biur. community at we need to search first - and, as we have I want to be more conscientious about found so often, - we need to search after observing the practice this year; partly Westminster to the burning too. May we find the because it sounds fun, especially the develop with joy. opportunities in our community at searching, and indeed over the years it Westminster to develop with joy. has become something of a game, with somebody hiding ten little pieces of bread or pizza, or whatever, in various parts of the house, so that they or others The chametz is still there. We may be can then seek them out, guided by a rightly disappointed, frustrated - furious candle or a torch late at night. The biur, even - with ourselves and with the burning, does however bring with it a developments in our world. There are Rabbi Benji Stanley serious sentiment; some recite a line, situations that require our persistent along with the burning, which declares checking, such as climate change, anti- May it Be Your Will, Eternal my God, Semitism and violent xenophobia, and that just as I have burnt the chametz we check in too with the hurt that feeds from my house and my possession, so such violence. too may I merit to burn my bad So, combine the burning desire to inclination from my heart, and so too eradicate bad, with persistent, gentle may You burn all that is bad from the checking by candlelight. Bring this world. checking to your life. Explore yourself Pesach is a time for change. There is a and your tendencies. Interrogate your disagreement in the Mishnah about how world and what concerns you. This to respond to the chametz that is still checking brings to light that which you there. Rabbi Yehuda says that you should have buried, that from which you have do all your checking, all your bedikah, sometimes preferred to avert your eyes , 3 Jewish History Beasts of the Bible it is unlikely that the cat played a part in the lives of the inhabitants. Problems of translation lead to confusion as to what form the animals actually took. Were there, for instance, crocodiles in the Holy Considering that chickens Land in ancient times? There were and their eggs play such an certainly crocodiles in the Nile, so the important part in the Jewish diet, it is Israelites would have been familiar with rather odd that the domesticated fowl them while they were in Egypt, but some never appears in the Old Testament. The scholars sometimes translate ‘behemoth’ hen, as we know it today, is probably – the great mystical beast – as crocodile. descended from the red jungle fowl, a Others use the same word for rhinoceros common bird in India dating back at least or hippopotamus, though it seems to 3,000 BCE. But nowhere in the Old unlikely that hippos ever reared up out of Testament is there a reference to a the Jordan to confront the local chicken, kept by the Israelites to eat - or inhabitants. for its eggs. However, many birds are mentioned, once God had created ‘every Many of the animals Noah’s Ark (1966) - Marc Chagall winged fowl after his kind’. Noah is mentioned are no longer expressly told to take birds into the Ark, to be found in Palestine: In the order in which God created the ‘every bird of every sort’. The first bird lions or bears, for inhabitants of the earth, the fish came mentioned by name was the raven, soon example, are not to be first, followed by the birds, the animals followed by the dove which came first to seen today though they and ‘creeping things’ and finally man. We Noah to explain that the waters were still are mentioned in the are told precisely which creatures are in place, and had to be sent out again, Bible for their fierceness, and occasionally suitable to eat and which are not. But returning this time to say that floods had as symbols – the Lion of Judah, for there is much more in the Old Testament gone down and it was safe to leave the example. We do not read about elephants than simply the Hebrew diet. We learn Ark. Peace was on the way. until the Maccabean times. The Book of about the qualities of animals, how they Kings speaks of ivory, or elephants’ teeth When in Leviticus we read about what is can be useful to man, and which were a imported from Ophir. In the post-exile fit to eat and what is not, birds are part of the lives of the Israelites in times, especially in the books of the specifically listed, some with Canaan, so many centuries ago. Maccabees, elephants are frequently extraordinary names. Particularly mentioned; they were an important Instructions in forbidden is the ossifrage (vulture), glede element in the armies of the Seleucids, Leviticus about eating (kite), and gier (eagle) and other birds of imported either from India or from Africa. fish are very explicit. prey (buzzard, osprey, hawk and owl), ‘Everything in the even the cuckoo. The list is endless. It The majority of animals mentioned are waters that has fins and scales, whether in includes pelicans, storks, cormorants and those domesticated by the Israelites for the seas or in the rivers, you may eat. But herons. These birds are common to the food or for use. The horse is never anything in the seas or the rivers that does Middle East even today and would have mentioned in Scripture in connection with not have fins and scales, of the swarming been a regular sight in ancient times. The the Patriarchs; the first time the Bible creatures in the waters and of the living instructions concerning which birds are speaks of it is in reference to the Egyptian creatures that are in the waters, is permitted sound a little strange. ‘Every army pursuing the Jews in their escape. detestable to you.’ No fish are mentioned flying creeping thing that goeth upon all The hilly country inhabited by the by name in the Bible, but fish are so fours with legs above their feet.’ Israelites was not favourable to the use of plentiful in the Mediterranean and in the Nevertheless, it is generally accepted that the horse; this is why the Bible speaks of rivers of the Middle East that they formed it is permitted to eat dove, pheasant, horses only in connection with war. a large part of the diet, and still do. In pigeon, quail, and turkey.