The Jews: Next Year in Which Jerusalem?

IN Cincinnati's Plum Street Temple, Reform Rabbi Albert A. Goldman marks the Sabbath of Passover Week with his civil rights-oriented "Freedom Sabbath," which is attended by representatives of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and of the N.A.A.C.P., labor organizers and Protestant ministers. In Miami Beach, the ads for a kosher hotel promise not only an olympic-size saltwater swimming pool, but also "Passover Specials" in room rates and a cantor and choir for Seder services. In Connecticut, a self-proclaimed congregation of Jewish humanists fashions a Passover Haggadah (the Seder narrative) that manages to avoid any mention of God. In Manhattan, an ecumenical group of friends sits down to a classic Seder meal including the symbolic foods: matzoth, bitter herbs and haunch of spring lamb. After reading the Haggadah, the group invites one of the Christians present to read from the New Testament; he chooses the passage in Luke where Jesus celebrates his Passover meal, the Last Supper.

Thus, with their own interpretations of the ancient rituals, a number of U.S. Jews marked the eight-day festival of Passover that ends this week. Most other Jews observed the feast in more traditional ways. But all told anew the old stories of Pharaoh's wrath and the Lord's good providence that took them out of Egypt, their house of bondage. Sometimes their Christian neighbors joined them, aware that their own celebration of Easter, just days away, was inextricably tied to the Jewish holiday.

It was at a Seder that Jesus first offered the bread and wine as his body and blood, and in Christian liturgies he has become the archetypal Paschal Lamb.

Of course Passover and Easter carry quite different spiritual meanings. Easter is a feast of resurrection; Passover a feast of survival. Easter denotes God's sacrifice for the redemption of all men; Passover God's special compact with one people. That compact often seems "exclusive," yet according to the Old Testament, God did charge his people with a message of love and justice for the world. Thus Passover also means a kind of redemption to Jews, a redemption anticipated in the climactic affirmation that ends the Seder celebration: "Next Year in Jerusalem!" For two millenniums that cry has been the Jews' link to the homeland and each other, a confident pledge that they will one day be reunited in Israel.

For most of those two millenniums, "Next year in Jerusalem!" was only a dream, a burning reason to stay alive in the midst of the Diaspora (the Exile) and often calumny and pogrom. In recent years the real possibility of aliyah ("ascent" to the homeland) has been realized. Jerusalem is accessible, for the moment at least a precious part of Israel; yet most Jews remain in the countries they grew up in. What does the old pledge mean now, in a world where Israel and the Diaspora exist side by side? Where do Jewish loyalties lie? Who, or what, is a Jew now that Jerusalem is no longer just an evanescent goal?

The questions are part of a new and deep search for Jewish identity in Jews the world over, especially in the U.S., Israel and the Soviet Union. The search takes many forms, for Jews — as indi cated by their diverse Passover obser vances — identify themselves with a broad assortment of labels