Happy Passover
Passover conjures up a host of Jewish memories: Bubbies and Zaidies; matza ball soup; cousins running around; staying up too late amid sticky grape juice and strains of Dayenu. If there's one epically memorable Jewish holiday, complete with the songs, sounds, and tastes, it's Passover.
And for good reason: Passover is, quite literally, the birthday of the Jewish people. The Biblical stories of G-d taking His people out of Egypt with an outstretched arm is really the story of a divine Parent birthing a nation. We continued, as a people, to need to grow up, to work through our immaturity in our faith and our inability to truly trust, but we did, and as we worked through our stuff, we made it, limping, to the Promised Land. The Seder is the ultimate birthday party.
To me Passover is best captured in the Haggadah's words:
A person is obligated to view himself as though he truly, personally, emerged from Egypt.
The Haggadah is essentially the world’s oldest medium: the telling of a story. We gather ‘round, we tell our national story. If we’re smart, we’ll combine it with our family’s story, and with our own stories. Stories of pain and release; stories of hardship and redemption; stories of fear and gratitude. We’ve all been there.
We tell our stories, interwoven with the faith of a people who has been to hell and back in the past several thousand years. We’ve seen pain and destruction, but we are still here. For in every generation they rise up against to destroy us, but G-d saves us from their hands.
We all struggle with faith. We all wonder, sometimes, what's the point of it all, where's the meaning, why is this happening. Each of us individually needs to "leave Egypt." In Hebrew the word for Egypt is mitzrayim, which means "narrow places." We all have our times and spaces where we feel squeezed, wheezing and barely breathing.
As we ourselves grow and mature in our faith, in our understanding of this universe, we must personally "leave Egypt" - leave those narrow spaces and spaces, and we pray in the beautiful words of King David, "anani ba-merchav kah" - G-d, answer me with expansiveness. Give me space. Cut me a break. Gift me with the ability to breathe.
The birthday of our people is the symbol of the birth of ourselves. With each year as Passover comes, we celebrate our national birthday with cousins and grandparents and too much grape juice, but we ought also take stock and ask ourselves how our maturity is doing. Hopefully, older is wiser, more stable, more secure.
Hopefully, each Passover, as it comes around, will allow us to take stock as a nation and examine our relationship with our faith. And also, as we view ourselves going out of Egypt personally, take stock privately and ask ourselves, how is my personal exodus going? How is my journey from constriction to expansiveness?
Shabbat shalom & happy Passover,
Ruchi
