The definition of redemption
Before our Passover seders, I wanted to share my drash from this past Friday night.
Shabbat shalom.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about what I might say tonight – about the meaning of Passover, and what it might bring to bear on our lives in this moment. But, I have to be honest. I’ve been struggling for words in a way that – as you may well know by now – is atypical. This is ironic, because, as I learned earlier this week the Chasidic text Likutei Halachot teaches that one of the main lessons of Passover is the celebration of the power of speech. The power of speech was in exile while the People of Israel were in Egypt. The redemption allowed them to speak freely once again, thus “Pesach,” the Hebrew word for Passover, hints at the words “Peh Sach” — the mouth that speaks. And, at the same time, the Mishnah teaches that we don’t start telling the story of Passover until a question has been asked. That is, we’re quiet, even on Passover, until a question sparks our telling – our maggid – of the miracle.
So this year, the challenge of Passover, the question of it, is how we tell a story of redemption and salvation in a world, that, right now, is so blatantly and painfully unredeemed. When the kidnapped are sitting in tunnels in Gaza. When hundreds, even thousands of our soldiers, will not be at seder tables, their chairs, like Elijah’s, empty, as they fight Hamas. And the even more challenging thing about this is that we know, we are in fact explicitly told, that we are commanded not just to retell a historical story of the Exodus from Egypt, but, spiritually, we are meant to reenact and manifest it, to feel as though, we too, are leaving the narrowness of Egypt and oppression and violence and injustice. And, how do we do this when, in the Passover story, God radically intercedes to redeem the people – and in Gaza and in Israel, there has been no such divine intervention.
In short, how do we find the words, and the power to speak about redemption at a time when it feels so far away? Wednesday morning, I was listening to a Hartman Institute podcast that was a conversation between Yehuda Kurtzer, the President of the Hartman Institute, and Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, the Dean of Hebrew College. And Rabbi Anisfeld was describing visiting her brother, Steve Cohen, a Rabbi in Santa Barbara, a few weeks ago. And, in a Torah study she attended, she recounted that Steve explained that the definition of redemption for Jews is that when it looks like you are completely trapped, and cornered, and there is no way out or forward, just the Israelites at the red sea with the army at their back - there’s an opening. There’s some small opening, a little path forward. That, for Jews, is what redemption is. And even if we can’t see it now or imagine it, with the sea on one side, and our enemies on the other, we can tell the story of how, once, it did happen. And so our Passover seder, our retelling, is an extended prayer that it might happen again. And that, trapped between an army and a sea, with no way to escape, we still might manage to.
Shabbat shalom, and chag sameach v’kasher.