Is Passover Christian?

At first, the half-hour television film The Passover seems to be one of those instructive seasonal documentaries. A Jewish family is sitting down to a typical Passover Seder. An announcer tells the story of the Exodus, the Jews' anguish in Egypt and their struggle to leave, and that terrible night the Angel of the Lord passed by the houses of the Jews to strike down the first-born sons of their Egyptian masters. On the traditional Seder table are the symbolic foods: the salt water and bitter herbs, reminders of the time of bondage; the roasted lamb, recalling the paschal sacrifice on the eve of the Exodus; the mixture of apples, nuts, spices and wine, symbol of the mortar with which the Hebrews made bricks for Pharaoh. And of course, the three matzoth, which, suggests the narrator, "represent the Father, Son and Holy Spirit."

Represent the what? The Christian Trinity? What kind of Seder is that? Not an ordinary one, to be sure. It is the Seder as seen through the eyes of the American Board of Missions to the Jews, a 77-year-old Protestant evangelical organization, whose efforts to convert Jews now stretch to six countries. At a cost of $ 100,000 for air time and extensive promotion, the board planned to show the film in a dozen major U.S. cities this week to coincide with both the Christian Holy Week and the beginning of the eight-day Passover celebration at sunset Friday. "In April," announced an ad in Christian Herald, "one million Jews will watch one Christian telecast." If the million are in front of their TV sets, they will be watching something else. In the face of criticism from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the Synagogue Council of America and the New York Board of Rabbis, the New York showing of the film was canceled last week. Stations in ten other cities followed suit.

Jewish Easter. The Rev. Daniel Fuchs, general secretary of the American Board of Missions to the Jews (and himself the son of converts from Judaism), was puzzled by the uproar. When the show was broadcast last season in Los Angeles, Fuchs says, the board received 5,400 requests for literature, more than half of them from "Jewish names." At least six of the inquirers, he says, were converted to Christianity, and only about 20 letters were critical.

It would be difficult to deny the program's proselytizing intent. In its hardsell conclusion, the film argues that Passover is "a clear prophecy of a greater story, the story of redemption through Christ the Messiah, the Lamb of God, who lived and died and rose again for the redemption of all who believe." That reading is based on a long tradition of Christian exegeses of the Hebrew scripture, which sees prefigurings of Jesus' mission in many Old Testament passages and practices. Jewish criticism, accordingly, was not so much aimed at the fact of proselytizing* as at the method. Some Jews assailed the program for using their own festival in an attempt to evangelize them; others were resentful because the Christian message was slyly introduced into what first appeared to be a documentary.

Christians, of course, will now miss the show, too--and its other message, which was to inform them of their own heritage in the Jewish feast. Ironically, in a spot radio broadcast for Easter and Passover on New York's WINS this week, Ecumenicist Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum is reminding Christians of that religious link. The events of Holy Week, he pointed out, "cannot be understood, as Jesus and his early followers understood them, apart from their profound rootedness in First Century Judaism." There is, of course, the obvious fact that the Gospels record the Last Supper as a Passover meal. But Tanenbaum goes further: "The pilgrimage to Jerusalem with palms was a traditional practice of the country Jews of Palestine, who inaugurated the Passover festival by such rites . . . The retreat to the Mount of Olives was based on the practice of King David, who made a pilgrimage there to wrestle in a cave for seven days with the spirit of death, only to emerge victorious."

Tanenbaum speaks from considerable historical evidence. Which suggests another question and perhaps another documentary: How Jewish is Easter?

* Christian proselytizing of Jews has become a thing of the past in the U.S. Roman Catholic Church and most major U.S. Protestant denominations, but it persists in a number of fundamentalist churches and such independent bodies as Fuchs' group.

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