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.

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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 participate in these symbolic exchanges, which typically reverse after just over a week, through rabbis or online, Oman, a self-proclaimed “contract geek” with a focus on legal and religious matters, saw potential for a more personalized approach.

Oman was introduced to the tradition by his friend and associate, Chaim Saiman, who holds the Jewish law chair at Villanova University and is a participant in the The Merion Shtiebel, a congregation located in a suburb of Philadelphia. Saiman arranged for Oman to buy all the leavened items from the synagogue’s 50 households. One of the congregation members, a prosperous hedge fund manager, included his secondary residence in Israel, which was stocked with chametz during his Passover observation in Pennsylvania.

“As far as I could tell,” Oman recalls, “I had a completely legal rental agreement for a lovely residence in Jerusalem.”

Oman, a business contracts and sovereign debt lecturer, knew precisely what was happening. He found the whole experience quite enjoyable.

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 attempting to develop means of leading devout and loyal lives in this contemporary era,” Oman shared with me. “The prospect of being able to assist, even in the minutest way, people to lead such a life in this age was enticing to me.”

The only drawback, as he put it, was the telephone conversation with the rabbi one hour post the conclusion of Passover, where he transferred the community’s chametz back. “Subsequently,” Oman quipped, “I relinquished my flat in Jerusalem.”

Benyamin Cohen serves as the News Director at the Forward. Follow him on Twitter @benyamincohen and subscribe to his morning newsletter.

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