Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/religion-spirituality/judaism-religion-spirituality/page/35/)
I was a sixty-one-year-old Bat Mitzvah, clearly a few years beyond the prescribed age for this rite of passage. It took a rock star rabbi from a Buddhist tradition to turn me into a Bat Mitzvah candidate.
Eyes talked into
blindness
Should a man come into the world, today, with
The shining beard of the
Patriarchs; he could,
If he spoke of this
Time, he
Could
Only babble and babble
Over, over,
Again again
(Pallaksh. Pallaksh)
Paul Celan, “Tubingen, Janner”
The Seventh day of Passover is a holiday, much like the first day. This is true of the fall festival of Sukkot as well, where the last day is a holiday as well, however, in that case, it is considered a new holiday with a different theme and context. The seventh day of Passover, on the other hand, is thematically similar to the first day, dealing with redemption, but celebrates another stage of the deliverance from Mitzrayim (Egypt), that of the splitting of the sea, allowing the Israelites to cross, and then returned to its natural state in order to swallow Pharoah’s cavalry, which had been in pursuit of the former slaves. The goal, of course, of the pursuit by the Egyptians was to bring them back to bondage; once the armies were destroyed it was clear to the people that their liberation was complete, there were no further pursuers, and their new history as a free people had truly begun.
One day in Lent went like this: another scattered stupid day of laundry, a crazy amount of mediocre cooking, bad feelings about myself and my negligible achievements, and attempts to pull myself out of self-absorbed self-criticism. Scurry, scurry, worry, worry, and meta-worrying about worrying. Tiring. I got simple things done – a haircut, but only after wasting inordinate amounts of time surfing the web for “flattering haircuts for older women,” printing some images, doubting, looking for signs, irked at having to make all these decisions myself without clear divine commands. (Maybe the command I didn’t hear was, “Is this really important?
Both Passover and Easter have a message of liberation and hope for the downtrodden of the earth. Yet too often we fail to see the continuities between the original liberatory messages of these holidays and the contemporary need for liberation and resurrection of the dead parts of our consciousness.
I urge us to consider, in the face of the banal predictability of the national election campaigning, to discern whether voting is an expression of civic duty or is a form of collaboration with a corporate scam. Our future and the future of our planet are at stake.
The following teaching is adapted from the Partners for Progressive Israel (formerly Meretz USA) weblog:
As we sit with families and friends for the Passover Seder, we rightly celebrate the liberation of the Jewish people. “Liberation” means the legendary emergence from slavery in Egypt, of course, but also the story of the Jewish people’s national liberation, which led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. In the wake of centuries of persecution suffered by the Jewish people, Israel’s establishment was in keeping with the first of Rabbi Hillel’s great ethical guidelines, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” But, however important, the many aspects of statehood–territory, a flag, a currency, a government, an army–they do little to answer Hillel’s inseparable follow-up question, “And if I am only for myself, then what am I?” For progressive Zionists, Passover is a time when we are challenged to reconcile the tension in Hillel’s dualism: We celebrate national liberation as a Jewish success story, even as we realize today that Israel’s creation was also a Naqba, a catastrophe, for others.
The Torah tells us of four sons… One of the central passages of the seder involves a presentation of the questions of, and the responses to four paradigmatic sons. We are told of a wise son, a wicked son, an innocent or naive son, and one who does not know how to initiate a question. Each of these “sons” is uncertain, in one way or another, about the meaning of the ritual observances surrounding Passover, and for each one an appropriate answer is given, depending on the personality of the son. This haggada aggada is problematic on several fronts, and one supposes that that is the reason for its inclusion; the haggada being zen-koan-like in its textual strangeness and paradoxicality, a textual device clearly meant to provoke response (and thus perhaps the secret of its enduring popularity).
Passover approaches and a fearful angel descends upon the homes of the Children of Israel. But this is not the Angel of Death, sent to take the first born son from every household of ancient Egypt. And this time, no daubing of blood on our doorposts will tell this angel to “pass over” our homes. For this is the Angel of Ignorance and Denial. This is the angel that blinds us to our own ills, that curses us to become the very Pharaoh we say we despise.
For countless generations, we have been told that Pessach is the holiday commemorating our exodus out of Egypt and our freedom from oppression. Sadly, however, some Jews worldwide still continue to suffer and wait to be released.
I. Prelude, regarding speech and sacrifice:
This week we will discuss sacrifice, failure and speech. We’ll precede the longer theme with a short teaching that seems to forwshadow the Freudian slip (parapraxes). We will then present an unusual approach to the central Jewish concept of Teshuva, of rapprochement, particularly surprising given the rather ritual text sounding from which it is derived. Our starting text, Leviticus 7:12, (following the interpretation of Rashi), describes the ritual procedure for the shelamim sacrifice, a peace offering, brought in a spirit of thanksgiving, for an arduous journey or a difficult cure after illness.