Why did this Mormon drive 10 hours to buy whiskey? To help out a Jewish friend for Passover
Nate Oman and his pre-Passover haul. Photo by Nate Oman (courtesy)/iStock
By Benyamin Cohen April 18, 2024
At any given point in time, Nate Oman has two bottles of wine in his kitchen, one red, one white. No more, no less. He only uses them for cooking, since he is a devout and lifelong member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which prohibits imbibing alcohol.
So it may come as a surprise that the day before last Passover, Oman, a 49-year-old law professor at William & Mary, drove from his home in Williamsburg, Virginia, to Philadelphia to purchase dozens of bottles of whiskey.
And vodka. And gin. And tequila.
Also Fruit Roll-Ups, Entenmann’s donuts and a bunch of half-used boxes of breakfast cereal. There may have been some flatbread from Costco. After a while, Oman said, it was hard to keep track of his haul.
He made the 10-hour round trip in his “somewhat battered” black Toyota RAV4 to participate in the annual ritual of Jews selling their chametz, or leavened products, to a non-Jew for the eight-day holiday of Passover, when they are forbidden not only from consuming but also even owning such things. And he is hitting the road again on Sunday, to do it all again for this Passover, which begins on Monday at sundown.
While most observant Jews do these symbolic deals — after all, the transaction is reversed after just over a week — through their rabbis, or online, Oman, a self-described “contract geek” who specializes in law and religion, thought it’d be neat to make the whole thing a little more personal.
He’d learned about the ritual from his friend and colleague Chaim Saiman, the chair in Jewish law at Villanova University and a member of The Merion Shtiebel, a congregation in a Philadelphia suburb. Saiman set Oman up to purchase all the leavened products from the shul’s 50 families. One congregant, a wealthy hedge fund manager, included in the sale his second home in Israel, which was filled with chametz while he was spending Passover at home in Pennsylvania.
“As I understand it,” Oman recalled, “I had a perfectly valid lease on a really nice apartment in Jerusalem.”
‘Get him the alarm code’
Oman, who teaches classes on business contracts, and the occasional seminar on sovereign debt, understood it perfectly. And he enjoyed every bit of the experience.
Arriving the night before the planned transaction, he stayed at a Hilton hotel so as not to interrupt the Saiman family’s pre-Passover scrubbing and vacuuming. “You don’t want your weird non-Jewish friend to show up in the middle and complicate that,” Oman noted.
The next morning, Oman and a few others gathered in the backyard of Rabbi Itamar Rosensweig, the head of the shul and a judge on the Beth Din of America. Rosensweig called Oman “an ideal chametz buyer” because “he appreciated this interface between ancient law and modern commerce.”
Indeed, he delighted in the details, like when he realized upon reading the contracts that he had the right to walk into congregants’ homes during the holiday and pillage their pantries. “If he wants to access any of the homes,” Rosensweig said in an interview, “I’m duty-bound to get him the key, to get him the alarm code to any of those properties.”
For the purchase, Oman gave the rabbi $200 — in coins, to eliminate any doubt of the validity of paper money in Jewish law — plus a handkerchief, to close a halachic loophole that could potentially negate deals involving money with non-Jews. “That obviously would not be required under Pennsylvania property law,” Oman said.
The backyard handshake, the ancient holiday, the half-eaten Cheerios: It was all special for Oman.
“As a Latter-day Saint you grew up sort of thinking, ‘Boy, we’re really strict,’” Oman recalled. “And then I go to my Orthodox Jewish friends and I always feel like I’m a poser.”
For him, the journey was the physical manifestation of a thought experiment.
And what about the whiskey? Luckily, Latter-day Saints are allowed to own it, just not drink it. Which, of course, he didn’t.
“I’m hugely sympathetic to people who are trying to come up with ways of living pious and faithful lives in the modern world,” Oman told me. “Being able to sort of help, in some little way, people live that kind of life in the modern world was appealing to me.”
The only downside, he said, was the phone call with the rabbi an hour after Passover ended, in which he sold the congregation’s chametz back. “And then,” Oman joked, “I lost my apartment in Jerusalem.”
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