On Passover

Pesach - Passover. Rise of Moses - fall of Pharoah. Genocide and the Creeping Death. Miracles and Tragedy. A short meditation on what it means.

Pharoah's rebellion was expressed as tyranny,oppression and genocide against the Jewish people. God took an active hand in his destruction and used that destruction to effect the liberation of the Jews. It is by celebration and continuous remembrance that we resist our own decline.

Maimonides, Mishneh Torah Chametz 7:6 In every generation, a person must show themself as if they personally had come out now from the subjugation of Egypt, as it is said: “And [God] took us out from there” (Deut. 6:23). And regarding this, the Holy One Blessed be God commanded in the Torah: “Remember that you were a slave,” (Deut. 5:15), which is to say, as if you yourself had been a slave, came out to freedom, and were redeemed.

“Haggadah means narration, and tonight’s celebration insists on the moral

seriousness of the stories that we tell about ourselves. [...] It is not enough to merely tell the story, but we must live inside of it, blur the boundaries of our personal narrative so that we spill outward and include as part of our formative lived through events that took place millennia before we were born. It is the imagination alone that can extend the sense of self, broaden our sense of who we really are.” - Rebecca Newburger Goldstein