Messiah's Meal

This afternoon, as most Jews are busy counting down the minutes until their first post-Passover bite of pizza, members of the Chabad community will be sitting down at thousands of tables across the world to participate in what is called Seudat HaMoshiach, the Messiah’s meal. The meal is a custom first taught by the 18th-century founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, and expanded upon and disseminated in the early 1900s by the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe. While I myself have never attended a Seudat HaMoshiach, I hope to do so soon, having heard it described lovingly by my Chabad friends. It is a festive gathering – a farbrengen of sorts – the final meal in the final hours of Passover (made all the more special tonight given that it will also be the end of Shabbat) that mirrors the seder with which the holiday began. Matzah and wine are brought to the table as celebrants sing Hassidic niggunim (melodies), share words of Torah, meditate on the spiritual significance of Passover, and tell stories of the Baal Shem Tov. As at the seder itself, three matzot are eaten, and no less than four cups of wine are drunk. The gathering reaches a crescendo with eight niggunim, starting with one taught by the Baal Shem Tov himself and continuing with one from each of the seven Chabad Rebbes, of blessed memory. The combination of song, wine, and most of all community is aimed to transport the gathering to another spiritual plane – so much so, I am told, that it typically runs well past the end of the holiday and the reopening of the pizza shops.

The subject at the core of this eighth-day seder, as its name indicates, is the moshiach and a prayed-for utopian future that will be brought about by his arrival. Discussed at length is the nature of the messianic age: what it will look like and most of all, the steps we need to take to bring it about. It is heady stuff, I know, a subject that to appreciate fully requires that I take not one, but two detours into the mystic scaffolding of the Passover season. More than just explaining the custom, I hope these detours will tap into the essence of both our soon-to-be concluded festival and this Yizkor hour for which so many have gathered this morning.

Detour #1: As you well know, Passover celebrates the liberation of the ancient Israelites from Egypt, when God redeemed our people from slavery to freedom. All our Passover observances, prayers, Torah and haftarah readings, and, most of all, the seders are expressions of gratitude for our nation’s redemption from bondage. What you may not know, but may have intuited from this morning’s haftarah reading, is that as the week of Passover progresses, our focus shifts from that past redemption to a future one. The first hint comes on the Shabbat prior to the seder when we read of the prophet Elijah, the harbinger of the messiah. Today, on the eighth day of Passover, our prophetic reading describes Isaiah’s messianic vision of the wolf lying down with the lamb, the leopard with the kid, the dispersed gathering from the four corners of the earth, and God’s name becoming known to Zion and all of humanity. In other words, by the conclusion of Passover, our emphasis is less on a past redemption and more on an anticipated one. Today we are meant to be filled with the hope that the same God who brought us out from under the thumb of Pharaoh’s oppression will redeem us soon: a hope given ritual expression by Chabad’s eighth-day seder, the Seudat HaMoshiach.

Detour #2: As anyone who has sat down at a Passover seder knows, the key to its success is stated explicitly at the very start by welcoming people to our table. Ha lachma anya, “This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate,” we say, holding up the matzah. “Let all who are hungry come in and eat, let all who are needy come and join.” There is, as my friend and teacher Erica Brown explains, a direct connection between redemption and extending hospitality. When we open ourselves up to the presence of another, when we welcome someone in, we signal that we know the heart of a stranger and have chosen to leverage our freedom toward welcoming loved one and stranger alike. (Seder Talk, pp. 3-17) This spirit of hospitality, hachnasat orhim, is the secret sauce or activating agent of Passover: leveraging our past affliction into present-day empathy, thus transforming what could be a rote telling of history into an identity-shaping call to action. If the point of the seder were just to tell a story, it would look different and be a whole lot shorter. What is the Haggadah if not a cast of characters welcomed in year-in and year-out? People and personalities real, historical, and imagined – the four children, Rabbis Eliezer, Yehoshua, Akiva, Elazar ben Azaria, and so many others. The young, the old, the learned, the new – everyone initiates a spirit of welcoming that reaches fulfillment as we welcome Elijah the Prophet, the prophet who, as noted earlier, signals both past and future redemption. The Exodus story may be about leaving Egypt, but our redemption is found in the act of welcoming people.

By way of these detours we are brought back to today – the final day of Passover and our present moment of Yizkor. Today we look toward a future redemption – a time when, by way of human effort and God’s hand, the gap between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be is both narrowed and bridged. This is the message and hope of today whether or not you attend a Seudat HaMoshiach. And what is true of the first seder nights is true today, too: Welcoming guests, the tried and tested activating agent of Passover, brings about that future redemption. At Yizkor our spiritual guests are not Rabbi Eliezer or Akiva, but the loved ones whom we recall, our spouses, our children, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, companions, friends, and loved ones who no longer walk this earth. At this moment, in this sacred hour, the floodgates of memory open, and our hearts are filled with remembrances: acts of kindness, large and small, that our loved ones performed. We meditate on their high ideals, on the values that they clung to day-in and day-out. We recall what made them smile, what made them cry, what made them laugh and most of all, what made them . . . them – the unique humanity that was theirs and theirs alone and can never be replaced. Our memories are poor compensation for the enormity of our loss, small consolation for the passing of our loved ones for whom we will ever long. Yizkor offers the souls of our lost loved ones brief sanctuary in our hearts, and gives us, the living, comfort and inspiration in the gift of our memories of them.

Which brings us full circle. If on seder night we find our past redemption through the act of welcoming, so too, on this eighth and final day of Passover, it will be by remembering our loved ones that we bring about our future redemption. In welcoming the memories of our loved ones, in remembering their acts of kindness, not only are we comforted, not only do we hope the collective weight of their good deeds tips the scales of the heavens themselves, but we hope that such a remembrance impels us, the living, to lives worthy of their high ideals. I recently had occasion to read Standing for Reason by John Sexton, the president emeritus of NYU. The book itself is about university culture, but the epilogue, entitled “Being Worthy of Lisa,” takes a personal turn as Sexton tells of his loving marriage to Lisa Goldberg and the tragic January day when she died in an instant with no warning. Despite his grief, Sexton understood that he could not be immobilized in loss; it was she, not he, who had died. Rather, he writes, “I try to live each day in a way that is worthy of Lisa’s love and I work to represent adequately both of us in the corporeal world. She devoted her life, in ways far beyond my talents, to bringing together the estranged peoples of our nation . . . I may think of myself alone as Don Quixote, off tilting at windmills on a fool’s errand. But I cannot think of Lisa that way, nor could anyone who knew her or who saw what she accomplished. So I am emboldened.” (p. 180)

I cannot think of a better way to frame the meaning of Yizkor than Sexton’s words. Why do we remember our loved ones? We remember them so that in our own lives we ourselves can be worthy of their love, that we can live each day worthy of our sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers – all those whom we recall. Those remembering loved ones today know better than anyone the painful shortcomings of our world, the yawning chasm between the world as it is and the world as we wish it were. Our loved ones have passed, and we miss them dearly. And yet by welcoming them into our hearts now, we will be emboldened, prompted to live lives filled with kindness, patience, tzedakah, intention and, most of all, love. We will live in a manner that will serve to narrow and bridge the gap between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be, because we will be living lives worthy of their love. One good deed, one mitzvah at a time, we will bring about the redemption for which we so desperately hope and pray.