 22 Apr 2005 @ 07:53, by Judih Haggai
This is spring. This is agricultural transition. This is vacation from school. This is a dip into acrylics and colours and glues and scissors and timeless wandering.
This is a day before Passover. This is a kibbutz gathering itself for a communal Seder, in a communal spirit. This is me feeling apart within the whole.
This is an area hovering before chaos. This is a calm before an upheaval. This is being in distant touch with family. This is telephone deliverance. This is being far away from DNA.
Passover is tomorrow evening. The commemoration of the release from slavery. The praise of human beings in their quest to survive. The act of a mother to save her son from being slaughtered by a pharoah's edict. The act of a Royal Princess to save a baby in a basket, a baby who most assuredly was suspected of coming from a Hebrew family. The act of a Pharoah to raise a strange boy as a son and then the act of the son to discover who he truly was and to toss aside all royal education, garments, falsehoods. The act of a stuttering humble human being to engage the forces that some call "God" to do the impossible, allow his enslaved nation to flee from bondage.
This is an act of a people to have faith that wherever they would go, no matter how strange or bizarre, was worth relinquishing scepticism and pledging their trust. Freedom still exerted her magic enough to outweigh inertia.
And this was an act of the Egyptian nation regretting their weakness but being powerless to change history, and having the curtain fall upon them.
All this is spring. All this today. All this before the rest of our lives. This drama that plays yearly in the homes of Jewish families all over the world. The story that gets re-told, the symbolic food that gets served to remind people via their senses that the story must be ingested. Slavery must again and again be experienced even for a few hours in order to elevate freedom to her highest eschelon.
The people come together to celebrate freedom. Spring.
And as for me and my family? Tomorrow evening, will I be going to the Passover Seder at our kibbutz? I don't yet know. If my son performs, I'll go. If not, I'll take it upon myself to cook something - giving G a break considering he cooks for 400 people everyday and this past week, 400 people plus all the food for the Seder. (Yes, I do not normally cook. I bake bread - something that is not traditionally part of Passover. I make rice, something that no doubt will be a part of this new tradition)
It's a powerful season. Wesak approaches. Pilgrimage in the air. The time to walk the earth (figuratively) in search for release from past delusion, a cleansing from old histories, old shackles. This is the time for spirit soaring purification.
Good Pesach to all,
judih
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