Readying Ourselves for the Journey: Thoughts for the Second Seder

Second Day Passover 5777 / 11 April 2017

The seder experience is filled with so many opportunities for learning and growth. We could have a seder every night for a month and it would still have more to offer us! Thankfully, we don’t have a whole month of seders, but unlike in Eretz Yisrael, we will celebrate with a second seder tonight. I’d like to suggest a frame for thinking about tonight’s seder that is distinct from last night’s, a frame that could help us get the most out of the sacred work of the week and weeks ahead.

At the first seder, for the first time since last year, we put ourselves back into the exile of Egypt and we savored anew the moment of our shocking shift from servitude to freedom. We read ourselves into our ancestors’ story and experienced the glory of God’s liberation. Last night we explored the Pharaohs that afflicted us and that continue to afflict, we marveled at, and reveled in, our newfound liberation and discussed how our liberation can inspire the future liberation of ourselves and others. At tonight’s seder we’ll continue to do all of that. And it’s also an opportunity to move forward beyond the moment of the Exodus and ask ourselves, “Now what?”

For centuries our people lived an onerous but familiar life of servitude. We had no rights, and others controlled even our time and our bodies, but we knew our place in Egyptian society and we knew just what to expect. With the the liberation from Egypt we step over the threshold into a new and unknown existence. Tonight we prepare ourselves for the journey into the midbar, the wilderness.

Of the weeks before Annie moved to Philadelphia, what I remember most is the sorting. In over three decades of life to that point, I had never left my little island of the Hudson indefinitely. With the exception of a few years in Jerusalem, and summers in the Catskills and Poconos, I had lived my whole life in Manhattan. As I prepared to leave New York for a new start in Philly, I sorted through the accumulation of material remnants amassed over the years, deciding what would come along with us to our new home and what would be donated or discarded. Each item carried memories- of old friends- some of whom I still hold dear, some with whom I’ve drifted apart, prior jobs, schooling and achievements; of lost loved ones. But I couldn’t take it all with me. I had to focus on what was essential, to create space in my life, literally and metaphorically to establish a new home, and enter a new phase of life in Philadelphia.

For the second night of the chag, a key image is a verse from the instructions in Exodus 12 of how the Israelites are to prepare and eat the paschal lamb in Egypt. God has Moses tell the people: וְכָכָה֮ תֹּאכְל֣וּ אֹתוֹ֒ מָתְנֵיכֶ֣ם חֲגֻרִ֔ים נַֽעֲלֵיכֶם֙ בְּרַגְלֵיכֶ֔ם וּמַקֶּלְכֶ֖ם בְּיֶדְכֶ֑ם וַאֲכַלְתֶּ֤ם אֹתוֹ֙ בְּחִפָּז֔וֹן פֶּ֥סַח ה֖וּא לַיהוָֽה׃ “This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly: it is a passover offering to the LORD.” At some point late this evening I will redeem you, my people, God says. You won’t know exactly when, but be ready to set forth into the wilderness of Sinai, for when the moment of liberation comes it will happen swiftly.

At the end of the night tonight we will count the first of 49 days of the Omer. Seven weeks from now we’ll arrive at the foot of Mt. Sinai for an intimate encounter with the Infinite One that will be the basis for our new existence in the Land of Israel. Right now, though, Sinai feels like worlds away. The paradigm has shifted, and we are stepping forth into the unknown.

There is a theory about how individual and groups experience change and transition that was developed by the author William Bridges. According to Bridges, transitions happen in three stages: ending, the neutral zone and beginning. Change often happens very quickly. Transition, the internal process of accepting and integrating the changes, happens much more gradually.

Passover marks a major ending for our people. God granted us freedom from our oppressors, and we left Egypt behind us. Even though it brought to an end to an existence that was crushing our bodies and our souls, leaving it still brought a sense of loss, disorientation, anger and fear. Shavuot marks a new beginning, full of a renewed energy and openness, and the fundamental understanding of our identity as a nation in a relationship of covenant with God.

The period between Passover and Shavuot is, in Bridges’ terms, The Neutral Zone. It can be a time of confusion, impatience and uncertainty around identity and roles. After the Exodus, there is no going back to the way things were before, but the path to the future has not yet manifest itself. As I said earlier, tonight we begin to ask “ Now what?” But there is no clear answer yet, only mystery. And that can be deeply unsettling. What we once knew to be true in our lives is over, but what will replace it has yet to arrive. At this stage, we do not know what that is going to look like, how it will feel, who we will be and whether it will be any good at all.

This stage can also be one of great creativity, innovation, and renewal, if one is willing to try new ways of thinking or being in the world. It can be liberating (and sometimes terrifying) to not be constrained by old ideas about who we are, what our lives are supposed to be like.

The next few days can be for us a time to prepare for the midbar, the liminal wilderness time of becoming, of not-yet knowing which we will inhabit for the next several weeks.

As we prepare for the journey we can look to our ancestors to see how they prepared to leave, what they carried with them out of Egypt, and what they left behind.

On the fourteenth of Nissan at twilight, we had slaughtered lambs at the thresholds of our homes, marking the doorposts with their blood, both rejecting the false gods of Egypt and acknowledging that we were setting forth into freedom solely through the grace of God. All too often we cling to things that give us a false sense of security or potency. They may be material possessions, money, pleasure, prestige, or something else. This sort of clinging keeps us grasping to the identities we hold dear, even when they don’t serve us any more; they keep us from an acceptance of our vulnerability that will allow us to step forward into scary and generative spaces of growth.

In the middle of the night we left behind the only homes that we had known, purging ourselves of all of our possessions, save for our most essential possessions that we could carry with us.

We carried with us our Matzahs, the bread of resilience and adapting to change, the bread that is at once the bread of our adversity and our liberation. The bread that we break at yachatz like our desperate enslaved ancestors, and which we eat in celebration remembering the meal we ate en route to freedom. The taste of matzah is the taste of our deepest suffering mixed with our soaring redemption. This modest flatbread is a vehicle for transmitting the story of our people with all its ups and down.

Marshal Duke, a professor of psychology at Emory, studies the way families tell their stories. He has found that children who know about their family’s story are more resilient. This is particularly so for children whose families share what Duke calls an “oscillating family narrative,” that convey both the ups and downs of their family’s history. This is the lesson of the matzoh.  

Another item that we carried with us out of Egypt–or at the least the Israelite women did–is the tambourine. As we will read on the last days of Passover, while we crossed the Sea of Reeds the women pulled out their tofs– probably small hand drums with a drumhead and cymbals, like a tambourine- and began to sing along with Miriam. There must have been many other things that they had wanted to bring with them from Egypt, and yet they chose from among the few possessions to bring timbrels. As a percussionist I can understand the desire to have a good drum handy. But there was barely enough time to take food as they fled from the Egyptians toward a wall of sea. Was that really a priority? The answer is yes. The little timbrel was not simply a musical instrument, it was an instrument of radical resistance and hope. They held onto the faith that there would soon be reason to sing and dance. The women with their tambourines offered strength and hope to all of Israel in the face of despair.

As we get ready to sit down to our Passover seders tonight,  I invite you to reflect on what changes you, your family and your community are facing? In what ways would you like to open yourself up to the possibility of change? What will you leave behind and what will you take with you on your journey? What do you need to be able to settle into the unknown, the mystery of the wilderness with vulnerability, openness, resilience and hope? How can you use the ritual of the seder and first counting of the Omer to prepare you for the journey?

As Rabbi Rachel Barenblat wrote in the poem with which I began: