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Say
My Name
Passover
started last night. Today is Maundy Thursday. For the first
time in close to 20 years I had to check my datebook to find
out when each was happening—sometimes they are close
together, sometimes farther apart.
For the
first time in almost 20 years I will not lead the Maundy Thursday
service. I guess it was always my favorite service—maybe
because it was all about food. It commemorated the last dinner
that Jesus ate with his closest friends. There’s not
much information in the gospels about what kind of sauce was
on the fish, whether the bread was made from stone-ground
grains or not (though, you know, given the technology, it
probably was) or if it was key lime pie or raspberry pavlova
that rounded out the meal. The point is, fill in the blanks.
The larger
point—though I think a menu is terribly important—was
that this was a meal designed to be about remembering it.
The Last Supper means it’s a remembered supper. It’s
not tonight’s supper or a supper next week. It’s
all about what happened and would not happen again—but
was still far too significant to simply forget.
In that
respect the Maundy Thursday observance of the final supper
Jesus had with friends and the Passover Seder have much in
common.
The Seder, too, is a meal designed around the theme or remembrance.
The text read and the actions indicated in the text comprise
the Haggadah. And though there are many different versions
of it, all of them pivot on the act of looking backward with
gratitude to God who righted misfortune and brought deliverance
from slavery.
For a
couple of years I participated in a Seder where we followed
a women’s Haggadah. We commemorated our foremothers and
our daughters and the kinds of imprisonment that have been
historically characteristic of women’s lives. I remember
bringing my daughters with me. We each had to name our mothers,
grandmothers, etc, as far back as we could. On the Grae side
I could name Norma, my mother, and Jennie, her mother, who
had died the month before my mother married.
On the
Page side the only woman I could name was Sophie Wilomena,
my father’s mother. Maybe
because I know nothing about the lives of the women who are
my forebears it is easy not to be too curious—there’s
no way to find out anything about them since they were working
class Danes and Germans who came to this country and didn’t
own property, didn’t hold office. Basically, they didn’t
leave a paper trail, which is the only way to know—or
prove—that anyone existed. So if I don’t know their
names, this is not surprising.
But maybe
it’s precisely because there is a paper trail for so
many of the women in the Hebrew and Greek scriptures that
their namelessness incenses me. And when I think of our collectively
remembering the exodus from Egypt in the Passover Seder or
Jesus gathered around the table of the Last Supper in Maundy
Thursday services, I want to say—this is not dayenu:
It’s not sufficient to remember only the first-born sons
or the 12 disciples or the fearless warriors or David or Jesus
or Moses or Elijah unless we also remember—and remember
to name—the women who carried them, bore them, shaped
them. And even that is not enough. It is not dayenu—not
sufficient—to only remember these women as mothers. And
that’s because their tragic portrayal in both Hebrew
and Greek scripture is as far more than mothers and far less
than human.
They are
largely unnamed. Do we remember their stories? Could we name
these women? Of course not. They slip between the lines of
scripture. Their stories are unsettling, not the kind of thing
to tell the children in their religious education classes.
After
all, who wants to tell the story of the Levite’s concubine?
That poor upstart whose father and husband condoned her gang
rape by the men of the town in order to spare her husband’s
own hide? Outraged that she has been raped, abused and killed,
her husband dismembers her body and sends it to warlords all
over Israel in order to get the fighting started. And, of
course, he is successful.
Who wants
to tell the story of Lot’s wife? Yeah, we all know she
was turned to a pillar of salt because she disobeyed and turned
back to look at the home she was fleeing. By why is her sin
more egregious than that of Lot’s himself when he offered
to whore out his virgin daughters in order to spare the man-flesh
of his divine visitors?
Or what
about Jephthah’s daughter, poor girl? Her father, the
insecure but reliably victorious warrior tells God he’ll
slay the first person he sees on his arrival home if he could
gain yet another victory. Well, he does. And the first person
he sees on his arrival is his daughter, dancing and singing
as she comes out to welcome him home.
Women
might fare better in some of the stories in Greek scripture,
but they still don’t earn themselves names. The stories
are great, gripping. In one, a woman with serious fibroid
problems grips Jesus’ hem and her bleeding stops; he
knows and commends her for her faithfulness.
In a couple
of other stories, women who are members of a long-hated rival
religious sect encounter Jesus. In one instance, Jesus gives
her grief on the number of husbands she has had. In another
he insults the woman who begs him to heal her daughter, though
he does, indeed, act as if she has persuaded him that his
narrow view of who was worthy of being healed was a wrong-headed
one.
In yet
another story—and such a poignant story—a woman
washes his feet with her tears and dries them with her hair.
This pisses off the disciples mightily. But Jesus says “Truly
I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole
world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”
Would that that were true, but it isn’t. We have no name
by which we can remember her.
And so
we gather at Passover Seders and Maundy Thursday services
with the express purpose of remembrance. Then we leave these
solemn observances blithely unaware of who we don’t know.
Without their names, these women are not even significant
enough to forget.
—Jo
Page
jograe@yahoo.com
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