When difference promotes dialogue

The Kitchen Sink
    By Karen Abravanel

The turkey was off-limits because it was Good Friday, but Mary Jo could eat everything else at our seder, including my mother's matzo ball soup. "This is some of the best matzo ball soup I have ever tasted," she said. My mother smiled. Mary Jo Tully is the Chancellor of the Archdiocese in Portland, Ore., making her one of the highest-ranking women in the Catholic Church. But last Friday night, when she joined my family in our celebration of the first night of Passover, Mary Jo seemed like just another dinner guest.

Yet she differed from the others. For myself and the other Jews around the table, the seder was a time to unite with our families, to carry out our traditions. It was a time to remember our past--as distant as the Exodus or as recent as last year's seder--and to discuss our future and its promise of redemption.

For Mary Jo, there was additional meaning in the calendar proximity between Easter and Passover. Since the Last Supper was a seder, the symbolism was significant. "I thought about not coming because of Good Friday," Mary Jo explained to the other guests, when they asked why she could not eat any meat. "But then I thought about what Jesus would have done."

Her presence embellished our seder and quelled my concerns about her feeling uncomfortable. By the end of the meal, she had joined in our family jokes. Meanwhile, her familiarity with Scripture illuminated our reading of the Haggadah, the Passover text which combines excerpts from the Torah and the Talmud--Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish oral tradition--into the story of the Exodus.

Reflecting the values of its Jewish writers and readers, the Haggadah encourages discussion and debate. Toward the middle of the seder, my father pointed to a well-known but slightly cryptic passage from Deuteronomy. "`My father was a wandering Aramean,'" he read. "What is this? I mean, who are we talking about?"

Mary Jo looked up from her Haggadah. "Well," she offered, "we've always just assumed it's Abraham."

My father was not convinced.

Whatever the true identity of this wandering Aramean, he illustrated the roots of divergence between our two faiths. We were able to discuss the Aramean because he appeared in a source that we shared--the Torah, or the first five books of the Old Testament--and we were forced to discuss him because of our shared difficulty in interpreting this source. A Jew and a Catholic read the same passage, and assigned to it distinct meanings. Our differences have developed from similarity.

Sometimes, these differences in interpretation begin as conscious efforts to avoid similarities. For example, my Rabbi points to the continuous repetition of the number four in the Haggadah. Near the beginning of the seder, the youngest participant asks four questions about the meaning of Passover; then participants read an allegory of four different sons. Finally, throughout the course of the seder, we consume four special foods and four cups of wine.

Asserting that in each case, one of the four does not quite fit with the others, my Rabbi suggests that scholars made additions to change the total number from three to four. The number three, he explains, was too closely associated with the Holy Trinity. Contemporary scholars estimate that the Haggadah was put together about 2,000 years ago, so it is certainly possible that such changes were made over time.

It is especially believable, however, because of the tendency to define oneself and one's beliefs through comparisons with others--to discover what one is, it can be easiest to figure out what one is not. The number four is only a "Jewish number" because it is not the number three, which is associated with Christianity.

Such a system of definition can be especially important to members of a minority community who live within a majority culture with which they may be more familiar. Surrounded by images of the majority's beliefs and rituals, American Jews frequently define their beliefs in contrast to Christian doctrine. "Christians believe that the Messiah will come again," we might say, for example. "But we believe that he hasn't come yet."

Drawing such a contrast enriches our understanding of our own beliefs as well as those of others. I would like to think that this describes Mary Jo's experience at our seder last week, even if it was prompted by something as insignificant as an unidentified wandering Aramean.

Mary Jo is an outspoken proponent of interfaith dialogue, which relies on the analysis of such contrasts, although I doubt that she came to our seder in hopes of improving Catholic-Jewish relations. She came to share an occasion that had meaning for all of us, an occasion that highlighted some of the underlying similarities between our two faiths. It is these similarities that can help us to understand our differences and make our differences so intriguing.

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