Passover 2009
Regarding the Seder night Maimonides writes, “In every generation a person is obligated to see themselves as if they, right now, have gone out from the slavery of Egypt. So does the Torah write, “remember that you were a slave,” meaning it is as if you yourself were a slave and have gone out to freedom and were redeemed.” (Mishnah Torah laws of Leaven and Matza, 7:6). What Maimonides is describing is not the normal way of remembering, but an actual reliving of the transitional moment of slavery into freedom.
I have always found it curious that the moment we constantly refer back to as Jews, the seminal moment for our people is not the experience of receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai or of entering the Promised Land, but the moment of freedom from bondage. So much so that many things we do in Judaism are in memory of the going out of Egypt, from treating the stranger well, to keeping the Shabbat, all refer back to Egypt and to our redemption from there. In fact we are commanded to remember the going out from Egypt not only on Passover but twice each day in the Shemah prayer, (Mishna Berachot 1:5). This moment is more than our redemption as a people from Egyptian bondage it is the moment of our birth (Medrash).
At the Seder we not only remember leaving Egypt, we put ourselves there, we actually become slaves emerging into freedom. This is why it’s only on Passover that we have a Seder. Every holiday has a symbol to be used, the shofer on Rosh Hashanah, the sukah on sukot and matza on Passover, so why not just eat matzah? On Passover we do more, we have a seder. Not only do we ingest many foods to let slavery and freedom become an actual part of us but we take ourselves through a set experience, a process of transformation. It is only through order that we find freedom. The Seder is to be a reconstruction of the process of transition. It is a dance of slavery and freedom. We drink the wine of freedom, then the salt water of slavery, the wine of freedom and the bitter herbs of slavery, the matza of slavery eaten before our meal when we are starving and the matza of freedom eaten after our meal when we are full.
The sturdy and precise architecture of the Seder is necessary because only through that do we create memory that can be relived. “Imposing form on a period of time is what beauty demands, but so does memory. For, what is formless cannot be grasped or committed to memory.” (Kundera, Slowness p.39)
Rabbi Yehudah Leib alter of Ger writes in his book Sefat Emet, that “Passover is the time when our inner point of memory is renewed… On every Passover A Jew becomes like a new person, like the newborn child each of us was when we came forth from Egypt. This point (of memory) is called lechem oni, the poor bread, matza, because it is dough itself without any change and without any expansion (3:99).”
May all our community experience a freeing Passover.
