CELEBRATING THE LORD'S "LAST SUPPER"

Have you ever wondered what it would like to celebrate the Lord's Last Supper that commemorates the Exodus of the Jewish people out of Egypt?

Well, last night [Wednesday], my neighbor, who is Jewish, had invited me to have dinner over at her home. This wouldn't be the first time that we [me and my Dear OH] ate dinner there. However, this dinner was their first Passover Seder.

Today is Holy Thursday, and as all Christians know, it is the Christian holy day falling on the Thursday before Easter. It commemorates the Washing of the Feet and Last Supper of Jesus Christ with the Apostles, as described in the canonical gospels. Being Jewish at that time meant that the Last Supper would have taken place the evening before.

There is a short book that gets read during the meal that is called the Haggadah, which, according to Wikipedia, is: "a Jewish text that sets forth the order of the Passover Seder. Reading the Haggadah at the Seder table is a fulfillment of the mitzvah to each Jew to "tell your son" of the Jewish liberation from slavery in Egypt as described in the Book of Exodus in the Torah ("And thou shalt tell thy son in that day, saying: It is because of that which the LORD did for me when I came forth out of Egypt." Ex. 13:8).

Before the actual meal, I participated in their rituals, which included the eating of symbolic foods related to the time the Jewish people had been slaves to the Pharoah. The meal includes family participation, where the youngest child asks four questions, which ask why is this night different from all other nights during the year when certain things get done differently. Being there were no children there because of the COVID-19 virus social distancing, I got asked to read these questions [luckily I had the English text to ask the questions in].

Although the surrounding rituals of the meal did not exist at the time of the actual Last Support, the mere idea that it was the Last Supper, which the Lord ate. After the meal included a grace after a meal and the singing of traditional songs for Passover, which luckily got sung in English, I got told by my neighbor, Rebecca, that each song consisted of some sort of biblical symbolism.

The entire dinner I had last night had been an exhilarating spiritual experience, an experience that had heightened today's Christain holiday and will to the same for this year's Holy Weekend, albeit all the services will have to be online.

it should be pointed out that the alignment of these two holidays are usually as much as 8 days apart, so it is quite interesting this year that they're perfectly aligned.