A Passover Story For All Faiths
Featuring Private J.A. Joel and my former Vassar professor, Deborah Dash Moore
This is a story about the human need to keep tradition alive — to celebrate and feel gratitude, even in the face of peril.
It begins with Private J.A. Joel.
Private Joel, whose family emigrated from England to Ohio, was one of roughly seven- to eight-thousand Jewish members of the Union Army who fought, in his words, “to sustain intact the government of the United States ….”
I discovered his account of an 1862 Passover Seder conducted on the front lines of the Civil War, in an impressive and growing online collection called The Posen Library of Jewish History and Culture.
Private Joel writes:
After an arduous march of several hundred miles … we were ordered to take up our position at the foot of Sewell Mountain [in West Virginia].
As Passover approached,
… twenty of my comrades and co-religionists belonging to the Regiment united in a request to our commanding officer for relief from duty, in order that we might keep the holydays.
They found someone who was making a supply run back to Ohio.
… about the middle of the morning of the eve of Passover a supply train arrived in camp, and to our delight [it contained] seven barrels of Matzos [along with] two Haggadahs and prayer-books.
For the symbolic foods of the traditional Passover meal — the Seder – they sent “parties to forage in the country while a party stayed to build a log hut for the services.”
They obtained two kegs of alcoholic cider.
As for the all-important bitter herb – eaten each Passover as a reminder to Jews of the bitterness of being slaves in ancient Egypt — they found a weed that was so bitter:
… it is impossible for my pen to describe.… [it] excited our thirst to such a degree that we forgot the law authorizing us to drink only four cups [of wine], and the consequence was we drank up all the cider.
And then,
Those that drank the more freely became excited, and one thought he was Moses, another Aaron, and one had the audacity to call himself a Pharaoh. The consequences was a skirmish, with nobody hurt, only Moses, Aaron and Pharaoh had to be carried to the camp ….
For those thinking you had to be there — the last part of Private Joel’s letter, written a year after the Civil War ended, is the keeper.
There, in the wild woods of West Virginia, away from home and friends, we consecrated and offered up to the ever-loving God of Israel our prayers and sacrifice…. Since then a number of my comrades have fallen in battle defending the flag they have volunteered to protect with their lives. I have myself received a number of wounds all but mortal, but there is no occasion in my life that gives me more pleasure and satisfaction than when I remember the celebration of Passover of 1862.
Remembering The Exodus
Here is another celebration at the heart of the Passover story.
In the foreground is Miriam, leading her people in song, rejoicing in their escape from bondage in Egypt, with Moses behind her and an uncertain future ahead. Like the letter from Private Joel, it can also be found in The Posen Library.
It is the work of artist Charlotte von Rothschild, who painted it in the nineteenth century for an illustrated Haggadah.
Revisiting My Professor from Vassar
The reason I know about Private Joel and this beautiful illustration of Miriam is that I spoke with the Editor-in-Chief of The Posen Library, Professor Deborah Dash Moore. She just so happens to have been my professor at Vassar College many years ago.
I had not been in touch with her since I took her class.
When I reached out for this Wavemaker Conversation, she responded that, after all this time, she still remembered me.
Was it a paper I wrote? Or something brilliant I said?
“There weren’t a lot of men in the classroom at that time,” she told me. Vassar had recently gone co-ed.
I am determined to have Professor Moore recognize me for more than my gender.
In our conversation, which you can listen to here, I asked her what I would have to accomplish in this story to get an A.
Her answer provides a great takeaway for students of any age. You can hear it, and much more, by listening and reading along with the transcript of our Wavemaker Conversation here.
Bonus
I recommend pairing this Passover story with the celebration of a Christian holiday by the legendary Dutch explorer William Barents and his crew. Shipwrecked in a sea of ice in the Arctic in 1597, they chose to pause their battle for survival — and celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany.
That story was relayed by Andrea Pitzer, author of Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World, in the February 19th edition of the Wavemaker Conversations newsletter.
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To explore The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, a truly monumental collection of “more than three thousand years of Jewish primary texts, documents, images, and cultural artifacts,” click here.