Matzo balls and Easter eggs, side by side

It seems divinely appropriate when Christian and Jewish holidays coincide, but it doesn’t happen that often. This week, Friday is both Good Friday and the first Seder of Passover. Easter Sunday is the second day of Passover. It’s just like the old days — I mean the really, really old days — since it is believed by many that Jesus was crucified on a Friday and, sometime before that, sat down to what has become known as the Last Supper, a Passover meal.

This weekend thus takes on a spiritual aura, with millions of Jews and Christians gathering with family, praying and eating holiday food.

This feels like good karma.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the reason the holidays rarely fall on exactly the same days is that Christianity and Judaism use different liturgical calendars. Judaism uses a lunar calendar, and the dates of Passover are not fixed. Christianity uses a solar calendar. To add interest, the Jewish lunar calendar has a periodic “leap month” when Easter and Passover occur a month apart.

To me, it’s a miracle that Passover occurs at all, since a people who can’t agree on a recipe for matzo balls can’t be expected to agree on important holy days.

I will recuse myself from further discussion of the observance of Good Friday and Easter (based on my limited experience) except to wish my friends a meaningful holiday. And to note that both traditions celebrate the egg, as a symbol of spring and rebirth. For Easter, people dye hard-cooked eggs gorgeous colors and scatter them outside to be found by children. Very lovely.

At Seder, Sephardic Jews take brown eggs, boiled for eight hours, and then blow them out of the shell through a tiny pinprick in the end. I have actually witnessed this eggstacy, and it is quite impressive.

Although I don’t know for sure, my hunch is you can’t rewrite a Catholic mass just because you feel like a change is in order. Although different individuals may choose to observe in different ways, the liturgy is set.