Most of us live in a very small slice of time.

The Haggadah refuses that smallness. Its demand is not to remember the Exodus but to relive it: “In every generation, a person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally left Egypt.” Present tense. You, tonight, at the seder table.

This is the difference between commemoration and experience. Commemoration keeps history at arm’s length: we observe, we honor, we move on. Experience collapses the distance. The Seder is not designed to inform you about what happened to your ancestors. It is designed to make something happen to you.

Matzah is how it does that.

The same unleavened bread that marked slavery becomes, hours later, the bread of liberation. You eat both. Not as symbols, as food. The before and the after pass through the same mouth. Your body doesn’t represent the transition from bondage to freedom. It experiences it.

And the story doesn’t end when you leave the table.

The Exodus was not a completed event. It is a direction. The distance between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be is the space we are still crossing. Matzah doesn’t let you watch that crossing from a safe distance. It puts you inside it, not as a spectator of someone else’s redemption, but as a participant in one that is still unfolding.

That is what Passover offers: a horizon vastly larger than the one we normally inhabit. Not the narrow present, but something that stretches back to Egypt and forward to a world not yet finished.

Eat the Matzah. Feel the freedom. Stay in the story.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)