Joseph Shulam: An Introduction to Passover
Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.
Shalom. The preparations for the Passover have started here in Israel, and I think in every Jewish community around the world. We're just less than two weeks from the Passover.
Passover is the main holiday of the Jewish calendar. In fact, according to the biblical calendar, it is the first holiday, because the month of Nisan is the first month of the year according to the Bible. I know that the Jewish people celebrate Rosh Hashanah or Jewish New Year in September, but it is on the first day of the seventh month, which is the Feast of Trumpets. The first month is Nissan.
Another name for Nissan is Aviv. Aviv means the time of the blooming, and if you travel in Israel now, in March, the end of February, beginning of March, all the way through March, and the middle of April, you'll see the fields green, full of flowers, wonderful red anemones, the lily of the valley, with many different kinds of flowers, even some orchids. Judean orchids here in the hills of Judea. Beautiful times. Springtime.
And the Feast of Pesach, of Passover, falls on the fourteenth day of the month of Nisan. The 14 days is always a full moon. It's a full moon because we are going according to the lunar calendar in in Judaism. The ancient calendar of Israel was the lunar calendar. Like all over the eastern world, until today, all of the east, east of us, east of Europe, go according to the lunar. The Chinese, the Persians, the Indians, the Japanese, the Koreans, all go according to the lunar calendar. So the 14th day of Nisan is the beginning of the Passover. Passover Eve. And it is full moon.
And, like all the holidays of Israel, except Esther/ Purim, which is also in the 14th of Adar, the last month of the year, are connected with history and historical event. Here we talk about the exodus of the children of Israel out of slavery, out of Egypt, and going into the Sinai desert in order to reach the land that God gave to Abraham some 400 years earlier. And God swore that it will be given to Israel as an inheritance forever. That's found in in Genesis 13 verse 15, and in other places.
So it's a historical holiday. It is an agricultural holiday, because immediately after the first day of Passover starts the early harvest, the first harvest of the fields over here, of grain, of barley and wheat. And it is also a cosmic holiday, because it is connected with the events in the cosmos: the full moon and the beginning of spring. All these things are tied together. However, for believers in the Bible, for Jews and Christians, Passover is mainly a historical holiday, commemorating the great act of salvation that God did in the history of the Jewish people.
Every act of salvation, including what Yeshua, or Jesus according to Western Way that they call him, did, is connected with the Passover. When when Yeshua comes to John the Baptist to be baptized and essentially start his ministry, John the Baptist proclaims him the Lamb of God that came to take the sins of the world. What? The Lamb of God? The Lamb of God is connected with the Passover lamb that is killed on the eve of Passover by every household in Israel when they were in Egypt.
And Yeshua is called the Lamb of God in the beginning of his ministry, but also at the end of history, in the book of Revelation, Yeshua is called the Lamb of God. So Passover is not only a Jewish holiday. It is a biblical holiday. It's a holiday that Yeshua and the Apostles kept. It's a holiday that the Jewish people kept for thousands of years, commemorating the exodus from Egypt, the deliverance from slavery into freedom, from darkness into light, from oppression to the freedom of God's presence and revelation, as it happened in Mount Sinai.
Just a short time, fifty days after they left Egypt, God revealed himself to the whole nation of Israel. 600.000 men able to do war between the age of twenty to fifty, which means that if they had wives and children, we're talking about a huge crowd gathered at the bottom of Mount Sinai to received the Torah, the revelation from God, the instructions from God of how to live and how to be godly and righteous people.
So Passover is a great holiday. But it's very interesting that when we talk about the holiday and all the preparation for the holiday, where God's emphasis is given. I'm going to read to you from Exodus chapter 12, which is actually the story of the exodus, and the slaughter of the lamb, and the putting of the blood on the doorpost. In that context, God reveals the following: from chapter 12 verse 25 on,
"it will come to pass when you come to the land which the Lord will give you, just as he promised, that you shall keep his service. And it shall be when your children say to you, what do you mean by all this service, by all this work that you're doing, that you shall say: it is Passover sacrifice of the Lord, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, and when he struck the Egyptians and delivered our households."
Notice, it's all about the children. The holiday itself is a memorial of what God did, and in fact everything that Jews do is connected to this memorial. When we do Friday night Shabbat dinner, we say in memory of the exodus from Egypt. So it's a very important central event in our history, but also in the history of all Christians and all believers in God and in His word, the living world, Yeshua our Messiah.
I will continue this in the next session, but for now I want to tell you that even the New Testament is full of Passover. From the beginning of Yeshua was ministering, to the end of his ministry, in the end of a world history when history will not be no longer. What will happen? The devil and all of his angels will be cast into the sea of fire.
The sea of fire is a picture of what happened to Pharaoh and his army when they were cast into the 'end sea,' yeah, 'Yam Suf' is translated the sea of reeds, is true. But the same word, without the vowel, different vowels, is 'the end'. And so even the end of history is connected to the Passover event and feast.
Joseph Shulam: The Passover Seder
Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.
Shalom. We're in the second session about talking on the topic of Passover. I gave kind of an introduction, a historical introduction, a biblical introduction. I ended with the text from Exodus 12, verse 25 to 27, where the emphasis that God puts on all the ceremony that we're doing on Passover: for the children.
The children will come to you and ask: What is all this work that you're doing? What is all this cleaning about? What is all this preparation about? And you will say to them: It is the Passover sacrifice of the Lord, who passed over our houses, the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when he struck the Egyptians and delivered our houses/ homes.
This deliverance is the monumental pattern for all deliverance in all of our history. But actually, what is all the work that we do in Passover? Today of course, in the Land of Israel, as a result of the Diaspora, we don't take a lamb, one year old lamb, keep it at home for 10 days, and then on the fourteenth day slaughter it at our doorstep and put blood on our door posts. We don't do that anymore, for many reasons.
But what we do is a kind of a drama. And the drama starts with the children. When we gather in the festive evening with beautiful tablecloths, wonderful foods, with all the elements that remind us of what happened in Egypt, the children start everything. The first thing that happens in the Passover Seder, in the Passover dinner, is the children. The children come with four questions. "Mah nishtanah HaLailah HaZeh MiKol HaLeilot": How is this evening or this night different than any other night? And there are four questions like this and four answers:
On this night, we don't eat bread and matzah. We only eat matzah. On this night, we don't only eat vegetables and other things. We eat vegetables and bitter herbs to remind us of the slavery and of the bitterness of slavery that the children of Israel experienced in Egypt. On this night, we don't sit regularly on the table, but we recline. The children start with these questions, and it is all already seen in the text of Exodus chapter 12.
Because almost every major thing that God does in the whole Bible, it's for the children. When the holiest text that we have is: 'Hear o Israel, the Lord our God is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your might, with all your soul.' And the next thing, right after this great high theological statement, what comes?
And you should teach your children. You should talk to your children when you get up in the morning, when you go on the highway, when you put them to bed. You should talk about God to the children, because God is looking at a faith that is not one generational. He's looking at a faith that is going to exist when the Messiah comes, when the end of the world comes. The Jewish people, at least, hopefully all the Christians as well, will celebrate with the Messiah, all dressed in white in Revelation. And they'll be singing songs. What song they'll be singing?
They'll be singing the song of Moses. Song of Moses is recorded in chapter 15 of the book of Exodus. Moses and the children of Israel just crossed the Red Sea on dry ground, and he's got this epic song of redemption from the enemy. At the end of history, Passover will play a role. And the people, Jews and Gentiles, dressed in white, their sins forgiven, they will be singing the song of Moses and the song of the Lamb, which is also connected with the Passover.
So Passover is very important. But the ceremony is not so difficult. It's easy. The ceremony, first of all, everything we, when we have bread and wine and good food, like every Friday night for Shabbat and every other holiday. What do we do? First thing, we wash our hands to eat bread. Tradition says we wash our hands. It's not the most important thing, but it is a good thing because it's hygienic, and it reminds us that what we are about to do now is not simple every day, eat a sandwich, eat a falafel dinner. It is something special. So we have ceremonial washing of hands.
The second thing that we do is we tell the story. We let the children start, then we tell the story of the Passover and how it developed. You know, in the New Testament, Yeshua sends his apostles to Mount Zion, tells them where to go, He tells him how to find a place for him, as for his disciples - to eat the Passover. It is not an unusual thing. They were not Jerusalemites, most of them were Galileans.
And in the time of Passover is one of the three pilgrimage holidays in which the population of Jerusalem tripled in size. So there was all the hotels were full. Every house, according to our tradition and according to ancient documents, every house in Jerusalem received guests. So a Yeshua and the disciples are guests in somebody's house. They're in an upper room, and they're preparing for the Passover, and they're eating the Passover together.
And if you read the story in Luke, you see that they drank more than one glass of wine. Because in Passover, it's tradition that we drink four glasses of wine. So Yeshua, we have the first and the third glass, which is called the cup of redemption, in which Yeshua blessed and said, this is my blood, the blood of the Covenant. Yeah. And the second thing that we eat that is major is the unleavened bread, the matzah. If you have seen the matzah, you can buy it in any supermarket in America today, or in many places around the world.
One blind man, here's a Jew sitting and eating matzah, he doesn't know what it is. He says: 'What are you eating?' He says: 'I'm eating matzah. You want a piece?' 'Yeah.' The Jew gives the blind man a piece. The blind man feels it and says: Oh man, this is the most messed up text I've ever read. He's reading it as Braille on the matzah. But the matzah is flat, and it's a bit rough. It may feel like, to a blind man, it may feel like Braille.
And we drink the wine we eat the matzah. We remember the sorrow and the suffering of the Jewish people in Egypt by eating bitter herbs and also horseradish, raw horseradish, which is quite, you know, sharp and can bring, easily bring, tears to your eyes from being so strong, so sharp. And that in order to remember the tears that the children visual shed during their years of slavery in Egypt.
Then we eat also what's called haroset, which is a mixture of apples and cinnamon and honey and raisins and dates and all kinds of sweet things that look like mud, to remind us that our forefathers in Egypt had to make their own bricks with their own hands. So it looks like mud. It doesn't taste like mud. It tastes good. But we mix the bitter herbs, the horseradish, actually, with the haroset, with the sweet stuff that looks like mud, to remind us that even in Egypt, God's grace never stopped to bless us and give us strength and send us a savior in the in the person of Moses, to take us out of Egypt.
So one of the main things that is in the ceremony of the Passover is that one of the first things that we do: we take a piece of matzah, we break it in half, and we hide half of it, and it's called 'afikoman'. It's the hidden Messiah. It's the hidden dessert. It's the hidden last piece that we eat. The last thing we eat after the meal is this half hidden matzah, and it reminds us of the Messiah that is right now hidden from all of us. Not only from the Jews. Not only from the eyes of the Jews. He's hidden from the eyes of the world.
We are waiting for his second revelation, for His return. We're waiting for the full redemption of the world to take place. And all of it is connected, my dear friends and brothers, with the Passover. The next session will be the Passover as a command for the church in the New Testament. Something that is ignored by 99.9 percent of all Christians. They read it and they don't see it. They don't see it because they were blinded, like the Jews were blinded from the Messiah. God hid his face from them until 1967, with His beginning to reveal His face to Israel, to the Jewish people.
The church needs to have their eyes open to to the text and to the truth of God's Word. That's in the next session. God bless you all.
Joseph Shulam: Passover in the New Testament
Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.
This is the third session talking about the Passover. But this time I want to talk about the Passover in the New Testament, and essentially the Passover and the church. The reason is we have a very interesting text in a very interesting setting in the first letter to the Corinthians. And we must remember that Paul spent quite a bit of time in Corinth. He spent time in Corinth and wrote two letters to the believers in Corinth. In this letter, there is a lot of interesting laws and things. And one of the things that is very interesting, and it is ignored by 99.9% of all Christians, is a command about the Passover.
But let me give you a little bit of background. We're talking about 1st Corinthians chapter 5. First Corinthians chapter 5 starts with this horrible sin that existed in the congregation, in the community of believers in Corinth. There was a man that had a sexual relationship with his mother-in-law. My dear, one couldn't be any stupider and dumber than a person like this.
However, he must have been a wealthy, powerful man because the church didn't do much about it. I'm sure if it was some John Doe, the believers would have done something about it immediately. But he must have been a man with means and power, and they kind of ignored it and didn't want to get into it and deal with it.
So the Apostle Paul writes them a very strong reprimand, tells them what to do with this man—essentially, to excommunicate him, to throw him out. And in this context, it must have been springtime or just before Passover. And in verse 6 of chapter 5 of First Corinthians, he enters into the Passover theme. He said,
"don't you know that a little leaven—in Hebrew, chametz—leavens the whole lump? Therefore, purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us."
I'm gonna stop here for a minute and analyze this text. He's using a Passover paradigm of cleaning the leaven from the house. Who does that? Only people who celebrate the Passover. If they don't celebrate the Passover, they know nothing about it. They're not going to clean every morsel, every crumb of leaven, or leavened bread, or cookies, or Burekas, or whatever you want that is made out of dough that is leavened dough—has to be cleaned out of the house, from the cupboards, from under the cupboards, from everywhere. If you ate a sandwich while you're in bed, you have to change the sheets and wash them before the Passover so there's no leaven in the house.
So he said, listen, the principle is that a little leaven leavens the whole lump and makes the whole house leavened. Therefore, clean the leaven. Take out the old leaven so you become a new lump. What kind of lump? A lump of truly and unleavened bread. And he says, you are this unleavened bread. You are people without leaven, without sin. And therefore, you've got to keep the communities without sin. You've got to keep the community pure from that leaven that is sin. And then he tells you why: for indeed, the Messiah, the Christ, is our passover.
Do we as disciples of Yeshua have a Passover? Of course, we have a Passover lamb. The Messiah is our Passover lamb. It's very interesting. If I go back to Exodus 12 and read the beginning of the chapter, I find out a great, great mystery when it says every household should have a lamb, and every household should slaughter that lamb at the doorpost and put the blood on the doorpost.
And then it says, and all Israel slaughter their lamb—one lamb—the lamb collectively. Of course, in the time of the Passover itself and centuries later, each household had their own lamb. But that text is a mystery text because it is impossible. But it is possible when we think about the Yeshua as the Lamb of God.
But back to this text in the New Testament. The Messiah is indeed our Passover, who was sacrificed for us. Who is the Passover lamb. Now, Jewish people haven't sacrificed on the altar since 70 AD. We are now in 2018—almost two thousand years since the temple was destroyed, since we don't have any sacrificial services other than giving money, like Christians do, to the church and charity. But we still have a Passover lamb that is alive, was sacrificed for us, resurrected after the third day.
It was not by accident—crucified on the eve of Passover folks. It was all pre-planned, it was all prophesied by the prophets of Israel. And so, we have a Passover. It is the Christ, the Messiah himself. And then in verse 8 of First Corinthians, the Apostle says very clearly in an emphatic command—and in Greek, it is very command language—
"therefore, let us keep the feast, not with the old leaven, not with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth."
Yesterday, I talked to a rabbi, the Orthodox rabbi here, neighbor across the street from our building, and he was cleaning his car very meticulously from any crumb, everything. And we talked about, I'm gonna wait till next week because I, you know, don't want to bring in bread when I go shopping to the supermarket, everything back into the car.
So I told him, yes, you cleaning your car, I'm sure you cleaning your house very meticulously. We need to clean our hearts as well from malice and instead of malice and wickedness, put in sincerity and truth. He said, yes, I agree. And our rabbis taught the same thing. I didn't tell him at that point yet that this is from the Apostle Paul in the New Testament.
Yeah, but notice the command is: "let us therefore keep the Feast." How can Christians read this and say the opposite—"let us not keep the feast"? When I started keeping the Passover, I was fired in the States from the congregation that I was working with. Wasn't fired for long. The same day I was fired, the same day I was reinstated because I knew how to argue and teach the Word of God and tell them: 'listen, you're wrong.' Because Christians think, oh, if you celebrate the Passover you're doing it to be redeemed, to be saved, to have your sins forgiven. Has nothing to do with the sins forgiven. It has to do the historical event that was the greatest event of redemption in history.
And there were not only Jews there. There was a mixed multitude of a lot of Gentiles. We know some of the tribes that joined the Israelites, like the Kenites and the Meherites and others—the Cahanites—that joined with Israel and entered the Land of Israel and had a part of the inheritance of the land together with Israel.
So the Passover was not only for the Jews, for Israelites, for the 12 tribes. It was for all those sojourners, pilgrims that joined Israel and inherited with Israel the land and lived in the land. And the Word of God in the five books of Moses and the Torah takes them into account and actually encourages them to join and to celebrate the Passover with Israel.
Paul, that the same thing in First Corinthians. Christians are missing out because they are still tied by their umbilical-cord to Rome. And Rome worked hard to eradicate everything that is biblical and replace it with everything that is pagan. And so, yes my dear brothers and sisters, Paul commands the church in Corinth—which was made up of Jews and non-Jews—"let us therefore keep the feast." Christian tradition said, let us not keep the feasts. They replaced it with a pagan holiday.
Yes, resurrection was a very important day and a very important celebration. It happened in Passover. It didn't happen in Easter—named after some Babylonian goddess, Ishtar. Yeah, it happened in Passover, on the third day of Passover. Yeshua resurrected from the dead. The day of the harvest had started, and Yeshua got out of the grave on his own. And He wasn't in panic. Yeah, He took the time to fold His grave clothes and put them at the top of the marble slab where His body was laid.
We too don't need to be in panic, but we need to know that the part of the restoration of the church and the restoration of Israel is a return to the Word of God, to the biblical pattern, and leaving behind all that false teaching that came from tradition of Rome. This is not Judaizing. Paul wrote it. Paul wrote it to Gentiles and Jews in the church in Corinth, and he meant it.
And we too, folks, need to start doing more of what the Bible says and coming home spiritually, because the Messiah is coming back. And when he comes back, he's going to ask you and me what he asked Peter before he was crucified:
"When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith in the earth?"
I say yes, he will—you and me and thousands of others who are coming back home spiritually. And the Jews are coming back home physically and will come home spiritually as well.
May you have a happy Passover and a kosher Passover. In Yeshua's name, amen.
If you would like to go further into depth in your learning about Passover, click here to get to our comprehensive guide for Pesach (Passover).
