In the past week, the Israelites have gone up out of Egypt with signs and wonders; the risen Christ, returned from Hell, has conquered death; the murdered god Tammuz has been reborn from the dark earth; gentle Persephone has returned from Hades and his treacherous pomegranate seeds to her mother fertile Demeter; and the Callery Pears and other flowering trees of New York have begun turning from white to green.

Barnaby Sandwich drove up to Massachusetts for a seder. There his friends Maeve and Arthur—who, at the end of college, recognized each other as Romeo and Juliet through the crowded fog of a garden square in upper Manhattan, and pledged themselves, shortly after this recognition, with their hearts, and some time later, with their words, to reenact together forever the primal commingling of male and female, to exemplify and thereby conjure into being the sexual division-in-union and union-in-division that give rise to all creation, and, indeed, which all creation depicts and expresses—live in a wooden fisherman's house in a small town by the sea. Arthur, much excited by the recent publication of the Gospel of Judas, claimed to have found a Gnostic haggadah, whose ending read "This year we are enchained in gross material form; next year may our spirits return to the Pleroma. This year we are in Egypt—next year in the realm of Barbelo!" But it was only a joke. Instead they used a Reconstructionist haggadah, which expanded the traditional four questioning children in various and beautiful directions. (The simple child asks, "What is the Lord," but it is not a simple question.)

They did, however, get into an argument that has been repeated an infinite number of times over an infinite number of meals, as the Seed of Abraham has scattered through the nations, beginning with Joseph's argument with himself in the Land of Keme, the Black Land of Egypt, the Kingdom of Death. Arthur, whose Hebrew name is Abraham, played the part of all other Abrahams before him—or rather, he was the part, for he, no less than the particular Abram we consider to be the first, and no less than all the Abrahams stretching back behind that one into obscure mists of time, he was Abraham, and his wife, Maeve, as a Congregationalist and lukewarm defender of Easter, was forced into the life and voice of an idolater.

"What is interesting," said Arthur, or Abram, son of Terah the idol maker, "is that everyone is talking about the suppression of Gnostic heresies when mainstream Christianity as we know it is completely Gnostic anyway."

"That's ridiculous," said Maeve, worshiper of Osiris, the murdered and resurrected god, and his mother-wife Isis, or Mary, the vulture woman. "Eat your haroses."

"No," said Abraham, reluctant sacrificer of Isaac, "it's true. It's completely death-centered. It's all about the importance of the afterlife, the escape to heaven from a material realm which exists only to entrap the divine soul and drag it down further into hellish darkness. What could be more Gnostic than that?"

"Shut up," said Maeve, partisan of Amun and the dead gods of Egypt. "The difference between mainstream Christianity and Gnosticism is the difference between faith and knowledge, okay? That's fundamental. Eat your haroses. As we have done since the time of Hillel, who made a sandwich of haroses and bitter herbs, to follow literally the words of the scripture, as it is written—"

"Shut up!" said Arthur. "What's important isn't eating the haroses. What's important is discussing or, better yet, reenacting the story of the Exodus, when God led us out of Egypt, the land of tombs and stone gods, the underworld, where we were slaves in a land of death, through the empty desert, sustaining us for forty years with manna, and finally to Sinai, the mountain of revelation, to give to us eternally the living law—"

"Aha!" said Maeve, "what could be more Gnostic than that?"

Abram, her husband, vouchsafed himself in his faith in the Hidden One, and declined to answer, and Maeve declared time-out and began serving the vegan kishke, while dog-faced Milo, the dog, under the table, whimpered and sniffed at the gravity of the mystical incarnation. Meanwhile, under the table, Barnaby continued reading Thomas Mann's "mythological novel" Joseph and His Brothers, very much enjoying it, but also looking forward to finishing, so that he can think in single layers again. He considered accidentally spilling his third cup of wine on it, but decided against this, largely because the Modern Library edition cost him more than forty dollars. (Nine hundred pages down, six hundred to go.)

In the car on the way back, A.J. struggled for four hours to open a bag of Sour Skittles, and Barnaby, when he got home, was so full of love and emotion that a cassette tape of "Just a Friend" by Biz Markie reduced him to tears.

Barnaby and I wish you a Gut Pesach!