Sit down to the traditional Passover meal at Brigham Young University and things may seem a little strange:
Inside the student center, the tables were set with all of the Passover staples: bitter herbs, haroset, parsley sprigs and salt water, a Haggadah at each place setting. By 6:15 on a recent Friday evening, the hall had filled up with college and graduate students, alumni, faculty and a smattering of “townies” — more than 160 people in total. It was a scene reminiscent of the Seders that so many Jewish campus centers host at Passover time.
But this was no Hillel-sponsored event, a fact that would become apparent as soon as the invocation was given “in the name of Jesus Christ.” Rather, this Seder was hosted by Brigham Young University, the flagship school of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
The “Mormon Seder” freely weaves together traditional elements of the celebration with new additions. There’s no wine present at the meal on this dry campus, but there are references to the Latter-Day Saints’ own Exodus (from the Midwest) and to college sports:
Ludlow’s version of “Dayenu” included all of the customary lyrics — about the parting of the sea, the manna from heaven, the giving of the Torah — in addition to some with unique significance to the BYU community: “Had He scattered us among the nations, but not gathered us in the Rocky Mountains, dayenu; had He gathered us in the Rocky Mountains, but not given us Latter-Day Temples of our own, dayenu; had He given us Latter-Day Temples of our own, but not given us a special university, dayenu; had He given us a special university, but not a mighty basketball team, dayenu.”
There’s something wonderful and quintessentially American about this enthusiastic interfaith embrace. But I can’t help but wonder what the Jewish students on campus (according to the article there are a mere three) make of all this.
April 15th, 2011 | 10:14 pm
Is it supposed to be an “interfaith embrace,” or are the Mormons doing it for reasons of their own?
Evangelicals holding seders has been becoming more common in the last few decades, and it’s never been “interfaith” or even intended to include non-Messianic Jews. It’s about understanding the roots of our own faith, and the worship that Christ engaged in the last night of His life. I suspect the Mormon version is something similar, albeit with distinctively Mormon emphases.
April 17th, 2011 | 9:13 am
How very Mormon, expropriating other people’s feasts and turning them to their own syncretic purposes. They claim to be Christian. Do they not know that Easter is the Christian Passover–as is readily apparent in just about every language except English and German–Pascha, Pasque, Paska, etc. The Passover of the Jews is a typos of the Christian Passover. God delivered the Israelites from bondage in Egypt; the Christian Passover delivered us from bondage to sin and death. All this raises the question of why the Mormons deem their exodus to Utah more highly than that which is called the Feast of Feasts.
April 18th, 2011 | 12:59 pm
Whatever else it is, it’s goofy. I mean, I know BYU takes its basketball seriously, but “had He given us a special university, but not a mighty basketball team”????
Some Christians are having Seders, either to see what one is like or out of some weird misunderstanding of Christianity (Easter IS Passover, folks). But this seems like something else entirely.
April 18th, 2011 | 7:08 pm
Our homeschooling co-op is doing one, more or less to see what it’s like, and also as a way of understanding Jesus’ context. I think its goofy, but different strokes for different folks.
P.S. Our co-op is part Mormon and part evangelical.
April 18th, 2011 | 10:08 pm
I have a fairly long analysis of one point. The Jewish Daily Forward author does not understand what is going on with the Mormon connection of Brigham Young to Moses. He fails to acknolwedge that most Mormons do not have ancestral connections to the Mormon migration, especially when you limit it to those who came from the middle-west, but they still would identify with it.
This is the same way these people identify with the story of Moses leading the Children of Israel. It is not, as the “Daily Forward” author implies a resonance of the adstract expeience of the Jews with the concrete expeirence of the Mormons, it is a remembering of multiple times that God’s people had to flee into the wilderness. 150 years may be less than 3200 years, but in neither case do you have living people who expeirienced the situation.
This failure to grasp the true unity of the matter is probably driven by the Jewish view that faith is conditioned on inherentance and failure to understand the Mormon view that faith and a connection to the events of the past is built on a spiritual connection with the past.
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