“What is it about this festival?”, “why do we do it to ourselves?”, “I just washed a mug out in the outside tap after my coffee”, “I yelled because I put an unkoshered pot down on the table cloth” - so went my morning chat with an old friend this morning. Passover is a mad, mad festival.
And yet it is rich and totally beautiful, it is the rich and vibrant spring clean, the purging our houses and our lives of excess. The house looks really nice afterwards and everything feels just a little less cluttered. But Passover and its preparations are also about immersive preparation for freedom – ‘as if we ourselves left Egypt’. There is something vibrant and crucial about the hard work and long hours of preparation for our festival. For a moment we become enslaved to the prep, working and juggling as if bonded to this labour, just briefly, coming out the other side feeling ‘as if we ourselves left Egypt’. It is the immersive educational festival like no other, this is before you even get to the Seder table and soak in all of the symbols of the Seder plate.
So this past ten days have been a bit shit, I had a little operation only to find out that I have to have another one coming up in the next few months. Thank God, really no big deal but time in hospital and time to recover and get back up. Here too are lessons in freedom, a good friend said to me: “sounds like you have some tough stuff to sit with, look at and work through”. Talk about a one-liner to set you back up again! I needed to see all was gonna be ok but that past week was hard. At that moment I needed to sit with the toughness and to let it pass. To be a bit sad, to connect with some past trauma – having a small surgery on my face definitely propelled me back 20 years, a time when I had surgery on my neck for cancer back then – these parts of ourselves line up, connect with one another.
So here too the Seder, Seder is our experiential enslavement and magic moment of emancipation! It is amazing. There is a line in the Seder which I love, the four children, four parts of ourselves, four characters we have encountered in our lives. The wicked child, ‘Rasha’, quoting the Hagada: ‘רָשָׁע מָה הוּא אוֹמֵר?’, ‘what does the wicked child say?’, ‘מָה הָעֲבוֹדָה הַזּאֹת לָכֶם. לָכֶם – וְלֹא לוֹ’, ‘what is this worship/work/enslavement to you – he says to you and not to them (personally)’. It is a wow moment of the Seder, on one hand the Seder is the experiential learning paradigm of the year and the wicked child excludes themselves from this key moment of learning - perhaps the reason why they get a bad rap. The flip though is also true, the rasha is my guy, the rasha, the wicked child, shows enough passion to ask, ‘what is this all about!!’, does this actually mean anything to us today and if so what is this Avodah? Avodah here could mean one of three things, slavery, worship or the physical preparation of the Seder. I feel like the wicked child wants to get in behind why this ritual and this commemoration is so crucial and ask ‘is anyone here alive to this, truly awake to this story?’
So I am left, after a week of struggle and stress, a week of scrubbing and cooking, ready to step into Seder and freedom with some key questions: this is a festival of vibrancy, of potency, spring on the doorstep, we gotta look at our darkness, our sadness and own it but the step into our own freedom with a key and vital question what does this all mean? And how do I make this all matter, because my life is important and I got something to say!
Hag samayacha, Happy Passover
