A feast celebrates the positive character of existence. In the face of evil and pain, feasts proclaim the goodness of creation and the freedom to enjoy the world because God made it.
A feast is a statement that the world is a good place because human beings can enjoy it and because God made it. Unwittingly, and prior to any reflection on the point, the celebrants of a feast relate their activity to independent but interrelated poles: human beings, the world, and God — human beings as subjects who are good, the world as an object that is good, and the divinity as the foundation of the two goodnesses. A feast brings out the fact that the world is good and human beings can dwell in it as their native place because it is willed by and founded on the sacred. Here is the heart and secret of every feast; in the celebration of a feast, we reappropriate, beyond and despite appearance, the positive character of existence as a space filled with fruition and making.
Feasts As Rejection of the Negative
As an interpretation of meaning, a feast can be seen as having three moments or phases. First, it is a rejection of negativity and death. The lives of individuals and groups are marked by pain and privation, poverty and injustices, violence and absurdity. Instead of displaying the original harmony, life seems to be under a constant threat that frustrates all efforts and undertakings. Instead of being drawn by a beneficent telos (purpose), it seems driven by a maleficent demon that has donned the hands and eyes of thanatos, or death. A feast represents a suspension of this entire order of things, a profession of faith that this world, in its present form, is not the true world (kosmos) but is negation (chaos) or counterfeit; it is not a home for human beings but an unrewarding wilderness. A feast challenges the primacy of evil and its claim to be ultimate reality; it is a rebellion against evil’s perverse power and its claim to have the final say; it is a sign—that turns into a certainty—that evil can be dethroned and overcome. Therefore feasts are the greatest wealth of a people, especially the poorest among them, for feasts with their myths and rites preserve in concentrated form the most fruitful seeds of hope and struggle that human history contains. As long as people are able to celebrate feasts, they will also be capable of life and commitment.
Feasts As Rejoicing and Sharing
Second, a feast asserts the quality of life and defines its positive side. But what is this “quality” that a feast expresses, not conceptually but in a concrete, corporeal way? Many terms are used to describe this quality, but one seems especially important: you. “You shall rejoice in your feast” (Deut. 16:14 NASB). But the rejoicing here is something other than what is usually understood by the term in our affluent societies. The passage in Deuteronomy continues: “ … you and your son and your daughter and your male and female servants and the Levite and the stranger and the orphan and the widow who are in your towns.” Rabbi Elie Munk comments on this passage as follows:
People should eat meat and drink wine because it is these things, especially that contribute to their gladness. But when we eat and drink, it is our duty to provide the necessities for the foreigner, the widow, and the orphan, that is, for all who are in need. Those who double-lock their doors and eat only with their own families, without helping the unfortunate, will not experience the joy of the mitzvah but “only the satisfaction is given by their meal.” This is why the prophet Hosea [Hos. 9:4 rsv] says: “They shall not please him with their sacrifices. Their bread shall be like mourners’ bread; all who eat of it shall be defiled; for their bread shall be for their hunger only.” (E. Munk, Le monde des prières [1970], 295)
This passage summarizes the two basic aspects of the joy a feast proclaims and bestows: the enjoyment of things (“eating and drinking”) and fraternal sharing (“providing the necessities for the foreigner”). Instead of understanding joy in a purely psychological or pseudospiritual way, a feast emphasizes its corporeal element and its necessary connection with the fruits of the earth; instead of making this joy something self-centered, a feast asserts its comprehensive and nonexclusive character. True joy is born of two encounters: with the fruits of the earth and with our brothers and sisters. Where one of these two is missing, a feast changes from being an end to being a means; it ceases to be an expression of life and becomes a means of obtaining satisfaction. The joy proper to feast is, in reality, the plenitude of being that is in harmony with the things of this world and with this world’s inhabitants; it is the fruit produced by a recovered Eden, in which the original Adam and Eve, representatives of men and women of every age, live reconciled with each other, with the garden, and with God.
Feasts As Affirmation of a Higher Order
The third and most important aspect of a feast is that it is an assertion of that which is the ontological foundation of the goodness and meaning of the human person. Are the rebellion against the power of evil and the proclamation of the victory of the positive over the negative simply an expression of impotent and deceptive desire, or are they an echo of the truth that conquers falsehood and triumphs over self-deception? A feast reveals its full depth when understood as the assertion of the second alternative: human life has meaning, beyond all its historical failures and despite all its privations, not because it is subjectively given meaning by each individual, but because it is objectively founded by and on the sacred.
A feast thus asserts the existence of meaning and at the same time sets the conditions for the attainment of this meaning, meaning that grows and flourishes because it is located within a different horizon—the horizon of the divine, the sacred—which transcends that of the profane. By means of its mythical narratives and re-actualizing rites, a feast calls to mind and makes present again this foundational root; by returning to this root, human behavior overcomes fragmentation, conquering chaos and recovering kosmos, that is, order, strength, motivation, the human ideal. A feast indeed abolishes the established order (we need think only of the violations of standard norms that are to be seen in every feast), but it does so not for the sake of libertinism and chaos but in obedience to a higher order that is closer and more faithful to the divine intention. A feast overturns the world and re-creates it according to the divine model.