A Pesaḥ message from Rabbi Jacobs

​As I write this, the brisket is cooling on the counter, my fridge is overflowing, and I’m beginning to wonder how I’m going to get it all done. For those of us who host Seder for our family and friends, a significant part of the preparation for Pesaḥ lies not in ruminating on the deeper spiritual essence of the holiday, but in the hard work of reorganizing our kitchens and dining rooms and cooking a seemingly endless array of symbolic and nostalgic foods. 

This past week at school, we held our annual Learning Festival, a three day event during which teachers develop out-of-the-box classes on a specific theme. This year’s theme was “Hidden Worlds.” My class was on exploring the infinite worlds hidden in the words of our sacred books and creating Midrash through the lens of the Haggadah. My students chose from among several texts from the Haggadah and then followed a specific process before turning their ideas into paintings, poems, playlists, collages, or stories. The first step in the process, after reading the text carefully, is to ask probing questions. Their answers would then become the kernels for their midrashic work.

One of the texts I offered them was the well known instruction at the end of the Maggid section: “In each and every generation, one is obligated to see themselves as if they left Egypt.” Over and over again, the students who chose this text asked a question that I didn’t expect. Why should we envision ourselves back in Egypt, when it was so terrible? Focusing not on the imperative to see ourselves in the Exodus, they all wondered why we had to imagine the experience of being enslaved in order to celebrate being free. 

The students who chose this question as the basis for their Midrash went in different directions with their answers, but most of those answers focused on how the experience of being enslaved in Egypt is essential to Jewish identity. And they’re not wrong. One of the - perhaps the most significant - core tenet of being Jewish is knowing that we were enslaved in Egypt and were then freed by God’s strong hand and outstretched arm. We don’t simply spend hours on the topic at our yearly Sedarim, we include this principle in our daily prayers, speaking of it multiple times daily, and it appears throughout the Torah, not only in the first 15 chapters of the book of Shemot. It’s a powerful story that resonates with us so deeply because we know it’s about us. 

Imagining ourselves in Egypt can be a powerful experience. I, for one, can’t get through the “There Will be Miracles” scene in The Prince of Egypt without bawling. However, I think there’s more to the requirement to see ourselves as having left Egypt than retrojecting ourselves into the story from so long ago. After all, the Haggadah instructs: “In each and every generation…” We are meant both to put ourselves into the story of the Exodus and see our lives today through the lens of leaving Egypt. 

This isn’t always easy to do. While slavery, tragically, still exists in our world, most of our lives are so far away from that reality that we cannot even fathom what it would be like to be freed from enslavement. To fit the lens of the Exodus over our lives today, we need to understand it metaphorically. To find meaning in this instruction, we need to figure out for ourselves a  contemporary corollary for leaving Egypt. 

At base, the Exodus is a journey from extreme constraint to freedom - not boundless freedom, but the freedom to exist in divine relationship. The questions, then, that we need to ask ourselves, center around these ideas. What are the challenges we are facing? How do the limits of our world as it currently is hem us in or make us feel constrained? Where do we see fewer possibilities than we would ideally want? What in our lives opens us up? Who are the people in our lives who help us feel most like our best selves? What new opportunities lie ahead for us?

Amid all the work of getting Pesaḥ ready, it’s important to take a little time to get ready for Pesaḥ. Especially with the intervening day of Shabbat this year providing a bit of a buffer, my wish for us as we enter the holiday is that we find our own answers to these questions, so that we can truly see ourselves as having left Egypt.

Shabbat Shalom and a zissen Pesaḥ to us all.