Notion Of Redemption Research Articles

Zionism’s Redemptions: Images of the Past and Visions of the Future in Jewish Nationalism by Arieh Saposnik

Reviewed by: Zionism’s Redemptions: Images of the Past and Visions of the Future in Jewish Nationalism by Arieh Saposnik Noam Pianko Arieh Saposnik. Zionism’s Redemptions: Images of the Past and Visions of the Future in Jewish Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 300 pp. Arieh Saposnik’s Zionism’s Redemptions: Images of the Past and Visions of the Future in Jewish Nationalism confronts a delicate historiographical dilemma: How should scholars interpret the centrality of redemption rooted in messianic visions of Jewish salvation within Zionist ideologies? Ever a flashpoint in debates about nationalism and liberalism, this question about Zionism’s historical relationship with notions of redemption cannot be easily separated from the contentious politics surrounding the post-1948 Jewish state. This book offers readers a [End Page 229] much-needed path through this politicized terrain to look closely at a critical trope in modern Jewish nationalism. Messianic and redemptive political visions do not map simply onto a secular nationalist movement with democratic aspirations. Indeed, scholars tend to view messianic impulses in twentieth-century politics, whether explicitly a call for an extrahistorical religious transformation or secular efforts to reimagine the world through a singular lens, as closely linked to totalitarian movements. Visions of future forms of social and political redemption thus stand in contrast to liberal ideals of multicultural and pluralist societies. An exploration of Zionism’s redemptions must acknowledge, and grapple with, the complex backdrop that modern historians bring to the study of ideologies that espouse very particular political visions of redemption. The strength of this book lies in the nuanced framework that Saposnik adopts to unpack the complexity of redemptive tropes across various Zionist ideologies. The study rejects the bifurcated historiographical legacy of this theme—to read references to redemption as symbolic language disconnected from traditional Jewish notions of messianism or as an embrace of messianic ideas that illustrates the extrahistorical, and perhaps even totalitarian, proclivities within Jewish nationalism. By avoiding the polarizing interpretations, Saposnik opens new ways of categorizing the centrality of visions of redemption in Zionist thought. Zionism’s Redemptions offers the “redemptive dimension” of Jewish nationalism as a novel category for reframing the conversation. Based on this reconceptualization, Saposnik argues that Jewish nationalism’s emphasis on redemption often served to capture a deep yearning for actively engaging in history to bring about universal ends and liberal objectives. Redemptive visions imbued Jewish nationalism with a radical desire to return to history through a variety of ideological perspectives (rather than messianic calls to transcend history). Zionist ideologies, Saposnik argues, turned to this discourse of redemption as a shared backdrop to explore a variety of political, social, and cultural directions—from exclusivist nationalisms that emulated aspects of European totalitarians to utopian ideals of human redemption. The discourse of redemption also served as opportunity to negotiate the relationship between Zionism and contemporary political and religious forces, including European nationalism, Christian notions of salvation, and Jewish religious traditions. Zionism’s Redemptions captures this diversity through textured and nuanced case studies. These case studies illuminate the multivocal conceptions of redemption woven through Zionist ideologies. Readers have the chance to consider this trope across subjects ranging from Diaspora-oriented Jewish nationalists such as Israel Zangwill to Zionists grappling with the presence of Christians who connected their own redemptive visions to the Holy Land. From these examples, Saposnik demonstrates that redemption served as a shared vocabulary for articulating deep internal ideological fragmentations within the Zionist movement. (Thus the significance of the book title’s reference to Zionism’s “redemptions” in the plural.) Saposnik’s study provides a much-needed alternative to viewpoints that perceive particularist nationalism and progressive universalism as inherently [End Page 230] mutually exclusive forces. In contrast, Zionist thinkers developed ideas of redemption that offered national movements as the ideal path toward cosmopolitan objectives. Many of the figures included in this study held these opposing forces together in their visions for the future. Certainly, the historical success of these objectives is a topic of debate. Nevertheless, Zionism’s Redemptions serves as a site to study the complicated relationship between striving for humanistic ends and advancing a nationalist agenda. This book thus sets the foundation for engaging the relationship of nationalist ideologies...

Original Sin and the Fall: Five Views

Original Sin and the Fall: Five Views

Redemption Restored: The Star in the Context of Modernity

AbstractIn retrospect of a century, the philosophical and theological concepts of Franz Rosenzweig’s New Thinking, as developed in the Star of Redemption, are in many aspects a milestone in modernity, reflecting the crisis of the modern Jew and Judaism both historically and politically. The notion of redemption serves here in fact as a paradigm for modernity itself, where the individual attempts to position himself in the tension between religion and secularism, tradition and modernity. This contribution analyses Rosenzweig’s “Jewish journey of redemption”, not only from the perspective of Jewish Messianism, but in the context of modern Jewish thought as a cultural critique (Kulturkritik) in Western tradition, in its philosophical, theological, historical and political aspects.

The price of redemption: Sin, penance, and marginal deterrence

The threat of loss of the afterlife as punishment for sin is a fundamental tenet of nearly all religious traditions. Most religions also contain a notion of redemption, or forgiveness of sin, but they differ as to whether or not redemption requires atonement, or penance. The possibility of redemption allows sinners to be rehabilitated, but in so doing potentially undermines the incentive for them to refrain from sin in the first place. We show that a properly calibrated form of penance as the “price” of redemption can both deter people from committing early sins, and provide an incentive for those who have previously sinned to refrain from committing further sins. In other words, it achieves marginal deterrence. Such a system requires strong belief in the afterlife. When belief is moderate, we show that a regime of free redemption may be optimal. We conclude by examining the implications of the analysis for after-death redemption, the Catholic Church's practice of selling redemption (indulgences), and the Protestant doctrine of Predestination, which was in part a reaction to the Church's “commodification” of redemption.

Dancing in the Dark: Marcella Althaus-Reid and Negative Queer Theory

In this article, I confront Marcella Althaus-Reid’s thinking with the recent ‘negative turn’ in queer theory, as observed by Judith Halberstam. What remains when the belief in our world as such, and in the future of it, has to be totally rejected, as some queer theorists like Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman, for example, claim? Or, in theological terms: what could the categories of redemption, salvation and liberation still mean if one wishes to think God within history, but at the same time rejects this history? I investigate these questions by focusing on two central concepts of Althaus-Reid’s indecent theology, incarnation and redemption. First, brought into dialogue with negative queer politics, I argue that Althaus-Reid helps us to develop an understanding of radical incarnation in the flesh on the ‘underside’ of society. Second, I look at Althaus-Reid’s critique of the traditional Christian understanding of redemption and her alternative of a notion of redemption that is connected to love, solidarity and reciprocity, instead of to a one-way act of grace by a transcendent God. I conclude that a ‘negative queer theology’, when developed in line with Althaus-Reid’s insights, necessarily maintains an affirmative undercurrent, a belief in an unknown life.

A Decade of Teaching Classics in a Massachusetts Prison

A Decade of Teaching Classics in a Massachusetts Prison CHARLES ROWAN BEYE From 1972 until 1982, I volunteered as a teacher in a degree-granting program of liberal arts at the college level in Norfolk State Prison, a medium security prison in Walpole, Massachusetts. Medium security means that the men were not confined to their cells except when there were routine security checks, such as taking attendance which occurred several times a day, or at night when there was a lights-out policy, or whenever the surveillance system of the prison went on alarm. Other than that, the men could work in various shops, or in the prison garden, or, among other things, they could take classes. The men who were incarcerated at Norfolk had been determined not to pose too great a threat to the other inmates, nor to be liable to try to break out in escape attempts that would damage others; the more intractable men were in the maximum security prison down the road, confined to their cells. There had always been shop classes or other kinds of instruction which would train the men into skilled manual labor. I taught in a program that was radically different. It was the dream of an extraordinary woman named Elizabeth Barker who was an old fashioned lefty, a woman of the old money Brahmin class of Boston society, who like so many of her kind had no money any longer, the only indication of her social status being a marbles-in-the-mouth accent, an indifference to money, clothing styles, social distinction, and an arrogance that made her assume that the rest of the world hung on her every word. She was the soul of kindness and generosity, one of the few persons I have met who deserved the accolade of a “true Christian,” although she was insisarion 26.3 winter 2019 tent upon proclaiming her militant atheism. She was also a tremendous bore. I once had the misfortune to drive her back from the prison to Boston. Talking incessantly, in a kind of monotone, relentlessly insisting upon a position that I had agreed with when we started the drive, it was all I could do after a half hour to keep from reaching over, opening the door, and pushing her out. But, God love her, she performed a miracle at Norfolk. Mrs. Barker subscribed to a belief that I soon adopted once I started teaching in her program which was that all people, apart from outright psychopaths, are redeemable, that a teaching relationship offers compassion, instruction, and most of all, a belief in the student, that in itself redeems the student, in this case, the prisoner, from self-hatred, lack of esteem or purpose, and general despair. Conventionally, prisons are run on a mixture of punishment and rehabilitation. At the crudest level you have the concept of solitary confinement , then there is the idea of “at hard labor” where prisoners spend their days breaking rocks under supervision, or as in England at the turn of the century, spending the entire day walking endlessly up a revolving drum with stairs. The lightest so-called punishment is simply the fact of incarceration. The theory is that if you are confined to a prison for so many months, years, the horror of this endurance makes you into a better person because you have had time to realize that you don’t want this to happen again. Relatives of a criminal’s victims are often on hand at parole board hearings because they want the sentence to go on longer, for the prisoner to “suffer more.” Rehabilitation, on the other hand, usually involves teaching skills, on the most basic level, reading and writing, then woodworking, metal work, car repair, on the theory that many males commit crimes because they have no legitimate way to earn money in our economy. Mrs. Barker saw a higher kind of rehabilitation that led into her notion of redemption. The liberal arts, art, music, literature, philosophy, science were in her mind the nourishment of the soul without which no one can truly be said to live. The idea, as you can imag2 a decade of teaching classics in...

“A Holy Warfare against the Age”: Essays and Tales of the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine

The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine offers a case study of cross-influence and collaboration between a tightly knit group of editors and contributors. Its contents manifest a non-doctrinal, secular, and art-catholic approach to religion and faith in the power of intellectual inquiry and art to effect social transformation. The contributors’ progressive aspirations for education are particularly apparent in Godfrey Lushington’s essay on “Oxford University” and William Fulford’s proto-feminist “Woman, Her Duties, Education, and Position.” By contrast, several of the magazine’s tales, among them R. W. Dixon’s “The Rivals,” Edward Burne-Jones’s “A Story of the North,” and William Morris’s “The Story of the Unknown Church,” memorialize artistic sublimation and the notion of redemption through loss. An exception is William Fulford’s “Found, Yet Lost,” the sole tale told from a woman’s perspective, which offers sarcastic commentary on established religion and the class system. Although it failed to reach a popular audience, the magazine served a significant purpose in concentrating the intellect of a group of strikingly gifted young men.

Bonhoeffer's notion of maturity and the possibility of redemption

This article discusses implications of Bonhoeffer's notion of maturity (being of age), particularly for the notion of redemption and the ethical self. This is done through a reading of the relation between maturity and redemption in Kant, Nietzsche, and Levinas, which again is compared with Bonhoeffer's late thought as we find it in his Prison letters and his Ethics. All three philosophers share with Bonhoeffer the important premise that otherworldly redemption is downplayed to the benefit of a strong demand put on the self. At the same time, their notions of maturity show important differences, with subsequent consequences for their notions of redemption; Kant's notion is based on ethical autonomy, Nietzsche's on aesthetical autonomy, whereas Levinas presupposes ethical heteronomy. The reading of Bonhoeffer shows that he shares premises with all three thinkers, but particularly with Levinas. This is shown in the analyses of religionless Christianity as a turn to the practical dimension of faith, in the messianic structure of the ethical self, and in the turn to the Old-Testamently and the arcane discipline. Bonhoeffer's high estimation of the worldly and the aesthetic, however, also illustrates his affinities to Nietzsche.

Globalization, Redemption, and the Dialectics of Courage

This essay explores forms of religious narrative that shape self-understanding and engagement with the world through the idea of redemption. An analysis of the landscape of religious perspectives within the context of globalization shows a bifurcation between competing notions of redemption in fundamentalist and postmodern narratives. Where fundamentalism uses meta-narrative that is hyper-theistic, postmodernism uses contextual narratives that deconstruct narrative and can lose a sense of the transcendent. The purpose of the essay is to show how these two competing notions can become entrenched and destructive to the very redemption they seek. Using Paul Tillich’s understanding of courage, these positions are placed into a dialectical tension that points to a third understanding of redemption as the perpetual mediation between the desire for belonging to a community and the desire to recognize the limitations of any individual or community’s perspective and understanding of the world in relationship to the holy.

With God on my side: The paradoxical relationship between religious belief and criminality among hardcore street offenders

Research has found that many street offenders anticipate an early death, making them less prone to delay gratification, more likely to discount the future costs of crime, and thus more likely to offend. Ironically, many such offenders also hold strong religious convictions, including those related to the punitive afterlife consequences of offending. To reconcile these findings, we interviewed 48 active street offenders to determine their expectation of an early demise, belief in the afterlife, and notions of redemption and punishment. Despite the deterrent effects of religion that have been highlighted in prior research, our results indicate that religion may have a counterintuitive criminogenic effect in certain contexts. Through purposeful distortion or genuine ignorance, the hardcore offenders we interviewed are able to exploit the absolvitory tenets of religious doctrine, neutralizing their fear of death to not only allow but encourage offending. This suggests a number of intriguing consequences for deterrence theory and policy.

Islam, nihilism and liberal secularity

The theme of nihilism offers fertile avenues for exploring the antinomies of classical liberalism. In its instantiation as violence, nihilism challenges classical liberalism and its recognised political settlement, notably received arrangements harnessed to cultivate uncontrolled passions or religious fervour. In its affinity to Islam, nihilism defies the secular settlement through its appeals to transcendence. By seeking legitimacy in the sacred, nihilism disrupts established boundaries between the religious and the secular. Nihilism exposes the difficulty of forging worlds of transcendence on the modern register of immanence. Transcendence affords the possibility of escape, immanence closure. The two can be reversed in politics, as the experience in several Islamic Cultural Zones (ICZs) suggests. Appeals to transcendence seek to reorganise the social world in the name of escaping it. Immanence, on the other hand, can rework notions of redemption and salvation into secular stories of progress. This paper explores how the presumed nihilistic tendency appearing in the ICZs destabilises the liberal settlement, not in the conventional sense of presenting a religious counterpoint, but in reworking religious themes into secularity. Nihilism illustrates both the contradictory character of modernity and modernity's potential to generate varied societal projects, including those informed by the sacred. The recognition that modernity can spawn discordant impulses in reconciling religion and politics helps rethink post-secular lives under the long shadow of disenchantment.

Garveyism and the Eschatology of African Redemption in the Rural South, 1920–1936

AbstractThis article explores the ways rural followers of Marcus Garvey crafted and adapted a theological understanding of African redemption in the South during the 1920s and early 1930s. Members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association rarely spoke in concrete terms about the process of redemption or African state-building. Rather, when rural members talked of African redemption, they did so in eschatological terms, that is, as a theory of the end of the world. Above all else, they understood “redemption” to mean both their own individual salvation and the collective deliverance of black people. Their interpretations ranged from postmillennial visions of a climax of the history of the race bringing earthly peace and prosperity to a premillennial interpretation that plotted sudden, often violent, deliverance of the most race-conscious. These variant and seemingly contradictory readings of African redemption reveal an ontological shift among black Christians in the rural South during these years. African redemption provided rural Garveyites an existential language for reappraising notions of redemption, retribution, and the fate of the race in this world and the next that had profound implications for ongoing efforts to seek political and economic justice. This struggle over meaning and purpose lay at the very heart of rural black politics in this period as both an ideological constraint and a vehicle for innovation.

Conceptualising Religious Health Assets Redemptively

The role of faith-based organisations in health is the focus of the African Religious Health Assets Programme (ARHAP), which seeks to understand the scope, scale and significance of religious health assets. This article discusses the link between health and the notion of redemption, which also broadens our understanding of health. It argues that health discourse is helpfully inclusive in ways that other discourses are often not. Finally, distinctions between religion, assets and faith-based organisations are clarified and the conclusion is reached that religious health assets are redemptive elements of our life together in society, and in need of development and strengthening.

GERSHOM SCHOLEM’S DIALECTIC OF JEWISH HISTORY

This paper aims to analyse the historiosophical assumptions of Gershom Scholem’s interpretation of Sabbatianism. Scholem’s work is based on the “dialectical” understanding of Jewish history. The concept of dialectic has three different aspects in his works. First, the notion refers to the historical relationship and mutual influences between Sabbatianism (and Judaism in a wider sense) and other religions, notably Christianity. Second, dialectic is understood as the internal structure of Jewish history, in which contradictions are resolved on a higher plane. Finally, the internal dialectic of Jewish history and the external dialectic of the Jewish religion’s relationship to other religions points to the undialectical (unmediated) character of the notion of Redemption in Sabbatianism. This paper discusses these three aspects of Scholem’s understanding of the notion of dialectic, and gives an account of his polemics with R. J. Zwi Werblowski, Baruch Kurzweil, Hans Joachim Schoeps and Franz Rosenzweig.

"Por coi la pucele pleure": The feminine enigma of the Grail Quest

This essay will address the ambiguous inscription of a feminine presence in twelfth- and thirteenth-century French texts narrating the Quest of the Holy Grail, focusing in particular on the anonymous prose romance La Queste del Saint Graal (ca. 1220). My enquiry will track the evolving position assumed by women across the Grail texts, from Chretien's Perceval (ca. 1181) through to the prose Tristan (ca. 1250), and proceed with an analysis of the figure of Perceval's sister in the Queste. In order to investigate the narrative treatment of gender-bias in the Queste, I will seek to reassess the notion of redemption, which will illuminate the ambiguous position occupied by women in this text. A simultaneous inscription and erasure of feminine presence is operational in the Queste, hinging on the erroneous predicate that a reduction of woman's visibility within the narrative frame coincides with a diminishing of her import. I ultimately seek to argue that woman represents the constitutive outside of the Quest, the very exclusion which represents its fundamental condition of possibility.

The Redemptive Instant: Bachelard on the Epistemological and Existential Value of Surprise

The notion of redemption was first used by Bachelard when developing his conception of time and consciousness in L'Intuition de l'instant (1932), as he engaged in a polemic with Bergson.1 He used it again two years later in "Idealisme discursif" when reflecting on human being.2 This essay will examine what lies behind this notion and also its consequences, in particular in relation to surprise. It will argue that Bachelard's idea of the redemptive instant is bound up with his epistemology and central to his conception of human existence. At first glance, the idea of redemption formulated by a philosopher of science might well seem suspect, best played down for the sake of academic respectability. If though we conquer our discomfort, we shall find in this idea a guiding thread into important aspects of Bachelard's thinking. He refers to redemption a number of times towards the end of L'Intuition de l'instant, perhaps most strikingly in the following lines: "The full force of time is condensed in the innovatory instant when, by the pool of Siloam, our eyes are opened at the touch of a divine redeemer" (95).3 There is a curious movement here from definition to story. The phrase "the innovatory instant" clearly sums up Bachelard's conception of discontinuous time: why then does he add the story? The context of this book provides the key. L'Intuition de l'instant is ostensibly a study of a work by his friend and colleague Gaston Roupnel, entitled Siloe, hence the reference to Siloam.4 It is not however meant to be an objective study, as Bachelard makes clear in his introduction, in which he refers to his "deformations" of Roupnel's arguments (8), arguments he uses-or bends-in developing his own theory of time against Bergson. Thus, he explicitly takes the idea of redemption from Roupnel, for whom Art-with a capital A-is the way of redemption, redeeming being by creating it, by renewing language, perception, emotion, spirit, and surprise (97-98). At the root of this redemption, Bachelard says, is the instant, the Roupnelian instant being what he terms "an intensity of consciousness," intense because it is the synthesis of contradictory emotions (99). Bachelard holds on to this notion of the redemptive instant, transforming it however, and with it the associated ideas of consciousness and being. For him, it is not art but reason that is redemptive; it is consequently in terms of reason that time, consciousness, and being must be understood. Given that reason, or more precisely the nature of reason in twentieth-century science had preoccupied Bachelard's epistemological work prior to L'Intuition de l'instant, this metaphysical-and metaphorical-turn may well seem baffling.5 I wish to argue however that it is a function of his epistemology, and more specifically of his ideas of rectification and approximate knowledge. In his first work, his Essai sur la connaissance approchee (1928), Bachelard rejects deductive, a priori reason and with it idealism because these can neither explain "the continual movement, the continual progress of scientific knowledge" nor account for "the fundamental incompleteness of knowledge" that he regards as "an epistemological postulate" (13).6 In his attempt to understand how reason works in modern science, we note his emphasis on "the undeniable existence of error," error that "by its very nature cannot be eliminated," so constituting "one of the strongest objections to idealism" and obliging us "to make do with approximations" (13). This notion of ineradicable error is important in Bachelard's thought, underlying the conception he develops here of the interdependence of reason and reality, a conception he will later dramatize by the metaphor of redemption. Why though insist on error when surely accuracy is the aim of science? The answer lies, I suggest, in Bachelard's ideas of newness and surprise. The word "surprise"-etonnement-is used just once in this book, but tellingly.7 Referring to microphysics, Bachelard declares that "The infinitely small is the geometric centre of our surprise. …

L'abbé Gauchat : un apologiste des Lumières

In 1768, when abbé Gauchat's Accord du christianisme et de la raison was published, the conflict between defenders of the Enlightenment and those of religion had reached its height. But behind these criticisms, we can see common principles. Thus, Gauchat is willing to accord an important place to the physico-theological proof of God, referring to Newton. The principle of causality is part of the reflection of many enlightened thinkers. Likewise, the moralisation of Christianity, in a utilitarian perspective, used the philosophes' arguments against the risk that Christianity represented for society. Finally, the use of the principle of non-contradiction was similar to the principles of the rationalists. Gauchat's position was based on a Christianised cogito from which the notion of Redemption had disappeared.

The idea of emancipation from a cosmopolitan point of view

R. Rorty uncouples cosmopolitanism from emancipation and rejects the latter on both phylogenetic and ontogenetic grounds. Thus: 1. There is no human nature to be emancipated, and 2. The notion of a rational, transcendental and conditioning subject (presupposed by traditional theories of emancipation) is obsolete. He preserves the idea of cosmopolitanism, which, in an effort to avoid foundationalisrn, he associates only with the development and progress of liberal societies. His cosmopolitanism relies on the distinction between persuasion and force and his preference for conversation over rational discourse. In this paper, I discuss Rorty's claims and trace residues of biologism, positivism, and behaviourism in them. By putting forward an immanent critique of Rorty's account of cosmopolitanism and emancipation, I defend a non-foundationalist notion of redemption as self-realization and propose a new justification of Rorty's distinction between force and persuasion.

Inscriptions of Exile: The Body's Knowledge and the Myth of Authenticity

The body is an overdetermined concept, burdened with religious and philosophical as well as psychoanalytic, sexual and racial meanings. Since Greco-Roman antiquity, when its beauty and health were emphasized by the sculptors, the body has occupied an important place in Western culture. In the Christian era, the symbolism of the body undergoes a profound transformation; now it is the wounded and suffering body (emblematically presented in the form of the crucified Christ), which inscribes itself in a new ideology, one that emphasizes the notion of redemption through suffering and death. The body thereby becomes a text on which pain can be read as a necessary physical step on the road to a higher moral state, a destiny, or a way of being. This in turn reveals a radical transformation (generally considered positive) in the initial state of the individual or her community.

Ritualizing the Seder

IN THE STUDY of rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity, the principal problem is how to transcend written texts. Since the texts constitute the only source that directly attests the activity of the rabbis, it is difficult to place the rabbinic trends within a larger historical or religious context. Moreover, since exploring and commenting on the Written and Oral Torah were central acts of rabbinic piety, scholars have tended to maintain that religious developments were shaped heavily by a dynamic of the encounter with the text instead of by non-textual and nonexegetical factors. The case of the post-mishnaic (200-500 C.E.) revisions of the Passover seder, however, indicates that the rabbinic interpretive stance, in this area, at least, may be attributed not primarily to a response to a text but to a ritual process. To appreciate the ritual expansion of the rite, let me clarify the core meaning of the celebration. The Mishnah (ed. ca. 200 C.E.), which sets out the rite's basic framework, transforms a biblical sacrificial meal that had centered on the passover offering and that, at least since Second Temple days, was a pilgrimage festival celebrating the national redemption from Egypt as a national day of independence. In response to the Temple's loss, mishnaic rabbis made the seder independent of the sacrifice and, by reaching back to biblical accounts that predate the centralization of the cult, turned the celebration into a kinship gathering in the home instead of in the capitol city. In this transformed rite, the unleavened bread (massah) and bitter herbs (merorim or maror) became central objects and not just appendages to a sacrifice, as specified in Ex. 12:8 and Num. 9:11, and the meaning that they represented was raised to the cognitive level. A major ramification entailed the shift in the notion of redemption, for now the festival's traditional significance contradicted the social reality of living in an unredeemed world. Hence, the celebration became an opportunity to reaffirm that the message of redemption was ongoing. Israel was redeemed from Egypt by God, it continued to benefit from that divine act, and it owed God an expression of apprecia-