by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2015/07/24 15:21 +00:00, original URI: http://www.siao2.com/2015/07/24/8770668856267196798.aspx
When I was a junior in high school, I performed a Passover Seder for the kids @ the local Gesù
because apparently I had kind of a reputation as a somewhat ornery truth teller of sorts, and the Jesuits (aka The Society of Jesus) were interested in exploring what they believed to be the more Jewish reasons for The Last Supper (as a Passover Seder).
1987 was a great year for making the point that Easter has to come after Passover, because it was a year when it comes almost as close as possible without messing it all a, what with one of them on April 14th and the other a few days later on April 19th.
So I explained to the local Gesù kids on how we were dealing with two or more technically three different calendars (Hebrew, Julian, and Gregorian), the first and second of which required an independent reason for not being dependent on each other for pragmatic religious reasons and the third of which was mainly developed to stop the drift of the second calendar over time.
My lesson plan ran about fifteen minutes long, but I was providing matzoh and all of the other pieces of the seder plate, hd led to other unrelated questions like how it was so similar to yet so different from the Eucharist and why that also needed its own independent reasons for each to stand on its own.
A fascinating little class on calendars, calendar reform, comparative religion, tolerance, and how hard it can be to keep matzoh interesting for eight days!