More Passover thoughts

Passover Wishes:
It may be an old story for us, but the children need to know how it happened. How the Jews left Egypt and 400 years of captivity. A community of enslaved people with the blind faith of those willing to lose the little they have and act with one purpose, to pack their bags and go forth into the wilderness. The stakes high: they had to give up the only home they knew in the hope that it would be better - there.

The story goes that the first man to jump into the Red Sea, Nachman, went against his own cautious and reluctant nature and flung himself into the breach and so the miracle happened to part the sea - of troubles.

To go against your own nature is indeed a miracle. To be released from where you were. To celebrate where you are going now. Now that you have been ‘passed over’, have escaped whatever demons that have burdened your journey thus far and are free to wander for another year in search of milk and honey - fourty years in the wilderness with just a little manna to munch. The older ones never get to the promised land, not even Moses, but the generation born in the desert, they do.

Haggadah - the next generation. It is for them we ‘tell over’ the story every year.

The rituals of Passover, fasts from the regular bill of fare, changes in habit, positions, we lean through the long suppers, reading while eating, odd ritual foods, story telling, singing. An experience of withdrawal, release from routine, even defiance as we choose to be free of the ties that bind us, to strike out on the open road, to skewer the sacred cows and eat them for dinner, sustenance for what's lies ahead: escape from oppression, our own and others, the 'pharaoh' who enslaves us with enough bread to eat in exchange for our will, hostile friends who worship false gods.

Happy Pesach.

In the spirit of human kindness, I wish you the very thing that Passover is about – freedom. The freedom to make choices, to relinquish old modes in favour of the untried in search of the ‘true’.

Cayle