According to Sydney Teagarden, ‘23, as Christians, Jewish history is our history too. This is why her family has been part of the Messianic movement for about fifteen years. Teagarden describes Messianic Judaism as “ a movement of believers in Yeshua (Christ) who want to celebrate God’s salvific history leading up to Christ.” This is also why Teagarden has decided to share some of her experience with Jewish feast days on campus, giving Covenant students a chance to enter into this wider story of redemptive history.
Last spring, Teagarden led a Passover Seder. The Seder followed the traditional Jewish haggadah, or order of service, but incorporated a celebration of the Last Supper, which was a Passover meal, and ended with the recognition that Jesus is the Passover Lamb. The group sang together in Hebrew, and pronounced blessings over each of the elements: hand-washing as a symbol of purity, telling the story of the Exodus, eating bitter herbs dipped in saltwater to symbolize the bitterness of slavery and the tears of the Israelites, and eating charoset - a combination of grape juice, apples, and nuts - to symbolize both the mortar mixture that the Isrealites used to hold bricks together and the sweetness or redemption.
“I really like the slowing down, and I love the explanations of everything...and almost in a sense, the uncomfortableness of something that doesn’t feel ‘Christian’ and yet is so rich and so full of the rescue story from Egypt. That single, historical, pinnacle moment is so rich and our daily lives can be viewed in that spectacle. I am so much like the Israelites. I’m so bitter and I turn so quickly to what I think I know. There’s a reason God doesn’t just snap his fingers and save me just like that, because we need to know that he is the one true God and he has defeated all the other mini-gods, ” said Judah Dorsey, ‘23, of his own experience with Passover celebrations.
On Sunday, Dec 5, Teagarden held another event: a celebration of Hanukkah. A group of students gathered in the Caudle room, eating Boston cream donuts (in place of the sufganiyot, round jelly or custard donuts traditionally eaten for Hanukkah) while she shared the history of Hanukkah and how it relates to our faith as Christians. Legend has it, Teagarden explained, that when the Greeks forbade the Jews from teaching the Torah, they began gathering under the cover of gambling instead. They would gamble with dreidels - small spinning tops - into which they carved parts of the Torah which they would incorporate into their lessons. Gambling with dreidels is now a traditional part of Hanukkah celebrations.
Into each dreidel is carved four Hebrew letters: gimel (takes the whole pile), hey (gets half of the pile), nun (gets nothing), and shin (puts one piece back into the pile). Together, these four letters form an acronym for “a great miracle happened there,” and are a reference to two miracles: the miracle of the deliverance of the Jews from the Greeks, and the miracle of the oil in the temple during the Maccabean Revolt which should have only kept the lamps burning one day, but lasted eight.
As Christians, Teagarden explained, we know the end of the story. We know that God has ultimately delivered us through Christ. But Jewish history is a history of God’s faithfulness and deliverance time and time again. “We can know the end of the story, and still look at some of the middle chapters and say ‘these are pretty cool’ too,” Teagarden said.
A couple of dreidel-gambling games broke out, and one grew particularly competitive, drawing in a large crowd to look on. After a long and intense match, self-proclaimed “King of Hanukkah” Keenan Kessler, ‘23, won.
“The event was great overall,” Kessler said. “It was great learning about the history of Hanukkah in a fun and interesting way. And there’s no better way to spend two hours than yelling at your friends while playing the Dreidel game.”
So why participate in these traditions as Christians? Because, Teagarden argued, “We are extremely prone to forget who God is and what he has done for us to prove who he is and his love for us. He set up his calendar in Leviticus 23 intentionally for our benefit, so that we would be reminded of his tangible love and deliverance.”
If you have any questions about Jewish feast days and Messianic Judaism, Teagarden says feel free to reach out to her at sydney.teagarden@covenant.edu, or to track her down somewhere on campus.
“I’m always down to get a meal or go on a blink run!” she said. And, keep an eye out for a celebration of Purim this March.