Pesach is our festival of freedom. It is a time for celebration and for hope, a time to appreciate our blessings and to dream of a perfected world.

But not all of the Pesach seder is sweet. A key moment in the ceremony is eating the bitter herbs. Later, we say that in every generation someone rises up who wants to eliminate us. We have the segment of the four children who ask their questions. One of the children is naïve or perhaps simple, one is wicked. These are not four perfect children – they are not all the children that every parent wants.  Even the songs at the end of the evening, which can be sung in a spirit of light-heartedness, have some dark overtones, allusions to our impotence and the inevitability of death.

The Pesach seder requires us to be a little uncomfortable at the same time as we are adjured to lean as we eat, as rich people do, and to feel as if we are nobility.

Matzah, the “bread” we eat to commemorate the moment of our liberation, also is called the “bread of affliction.” One explanation is that this is the bread we ate in Egypt – although technically, according to the Torah narrative, this is the bread that we took with us on our escape from slavery. The dual nature of the bread – a poor man’s bread, the bread of slaves, but also the bread of freedom – is symbolic of the entire seder.  On the one hand, we are victorious: good overcomes evil, darkness becomes light and slavery is replaced by freedom. On the other hand, we are still plagued by enemies who want to destroy us; our freedom is incomplete.

I had the privilege of hearing Rabbi Michael Melchior speak on shabbat morning. He spoke about the law that the water used for making matzah must be “rested” overnight. The word used for “rest” is unusual, and Rabbi Melchior connected it to the story of Jacob, when he fled his father’s home, in fear of his life, and “rested” in the place where he had his famous dream of the ladder reaching from earth to heaven.

That was far from a “restful” experience.

I remembered that a word using the same root letters also appears in the story when Moses and Zipporah were on their way to Egypt and G-d wanted to kill Moses until Zipporah circumcised their son. This was another case where the word that means “rest” or, in this case, an inn or place to rest, is connected with threatening circumstances and fear.

Rabbi Melchior’s point was that the water used for making matzah might not be “rested” but rather, might have to contain elements of fear and consternation. He compared this water to the tashlich ceremony on Rosh Hashanah, when we symbolically throw our sins into the water. There, we are releasing ourselves from fear and guilt by means of water; on Pesach, it is as if we are drawing in our fears and painful moments, through the water used to make our matzah.

We do not tell the story just of our escape; we also tell of our enslavement and refer to the “shame” that brought us there.

Why do we do that? Why not just share the glory of our liberation?

One answer is that we can only appreciate freedom if we understand what it is to not have it. Another is that our liberation is not complete and that we need to feel that we are still struggling to attain it. We can add to these a message about the propensity of humans to behave badly. According to our narrative, we brought about our own slavery and an evil Pharoah made it worse. It is a cautionary tale about what we can do to ourselves and what others can do to us.

In addition to those answers, perhaps we can understand that in one night at the seder, we tell all of Jewish history and, through it, all of human history. The Pesach seder is both about and not about one event in history.

Our focus is firstly our pivotal narrative – the story of the exodus and the miracles that were performed to enable our escape.

My great teacher, Nehama Leibowitz, taught that we need to remember that we were slaves in Egypt as a backdrop to the most oft-repeated commandment in the Torah (36 times) – not to oppress the stranger, because we were strangers in Egypt. The suggestion is that retelling the story of our oppression will help us clarify the moral standards by which we must live.

But then, it seems, she contradicts herself. “Do past memories and experiences of strangeness and slavery, really prevail on and influence the newly liberated and independent, to adopt an attitude of tolerance and love to the stranger living among them? Do we not often find the opposite to be true? The hate, persecution and shame the individual or community experiences, in the past, do not act as a deterrent, preventing them adopting the same attitude to those entrusted to their power. … The fact that “you were strangers in the land of Egypt” is certainly no adequate motivation for not oppressing … the stranger …” (New Studies in Shemot: Exodus, p. 384).

So, it is not automatic that telling this story will make us empathetic or kind. The retelling has another purpose. Stories are not transformative unless we go beyond the events themselves and ask the right questions. The story of the exodus is much more than a single event. It is a paradigm for the radical changes in circumstances that a people can experience. It teaches that we have no idea what is possible, we do not have the ability to understand what our experiences mean, we should not take our good circumstances for granted nor despair that our suffering is insurmountable.

If we can acknowledge that with every victory, there is a price, for every gain, there is sacrifice, for every moment of joy, there is a struggle, then perhaps we can understand that out of every struggle, there can be joy and from every sacrifice, there can be a gain. The story boils down to a simple word: “hope.”

And, as another teacher, Yitz Greenberg, wrote many years ago, the Pesach story is the ultimate story of hope. The Children of Israel had been slaves for generations; people had been born into slavery and died as slaves. Then, when it seemed that there was no hope for anything different, a liberator appeared and their lives were changed.

Everyone who is in pain or who is oppressed can find hope in this story. Things do not have to be as they are now. In time, we will be able to look back on our struggles and see the sparks of light that were already in the darkness.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)