I will say that one year I attended a Catholic Good Friday service where the congregation was informed by the priest that they were the ones who killed Christ. So, I guess that in that way one might call it the history of a people. (In that case, an on-going history, as we did something that happened 2000 years before we were.) In a way, that may be similar to the seder, where we are told it is as if each of us left Egypt.

In general, though, the rap from Judaism that I was taught, was that traditionally Judaism is about the group, while Protestantism is about the individual. (I was often told that I held ideas that were too Protestant, although more liberal branches of Judaism have more tolerance of individuality.) My “new member” classes before I became baptized bore this out. They emphasized the role of individual conscience in being a Protestant. Becoming a Protestant as a Presbyterian also emphasized the importance of democracy (although a slightly elite one.)

I was quite shocked to find out that many Protestant church movements are not very democratic (I mean not even democratic on paper.) And that I often found myself afoul of “the group” – but not really THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION – rather the rules and mores of an individual church. I sometimes feel betrayed by this – as if these churches did not read the textbooks on what they are supposed to be… but of course, it sometimes was a Jewish idea of being Protestant that was being denied.

Moses: Hey, Pharoah, let us go out in the wilderness for a few days for, you know, a religious festival. We’ll come right back, honest. Wink wink.

Jesus: You can kill me, but you can’t keep me in the grave! Ha ha, joke’s on you.

I think it’s very interesting, of course, that the Passion and Resurrection story was seen as a Passover story, not a Yom Kippur story. Notions of sin and atonement didn’t get layered onto the death of Jesus until later. A lot of the Protestant individualism Ula is talking about comes from the refocusing of Christian theology on personal salvation for personal sin, but this is certainly not the only way to read the story.

Jews tend to read the Passover story while identifying with the Hebrew slaves. For Christians, I think the analogy is to read the Easter story while identifying with the Disciples. From the Disciples’ point of view, this story is all about hope, loss, struggle, and joy.