Preparing for Passover

Tomorrow night, Passover begins. The start of our liberation. May it be so: may we all be liberated from this world filled with so much woundedness and pain… May we embrace the freedom that is our destiny if we can choose to heal ourselves and those around us. I will be leading a virtual and nonpartisan seder for the first night. Feel free to join or to livestream it to your table or connect in whatever way might help you feel liberated…

Here is the info: Monday night, April 22nd, 6:45 PM Atlantic (5:45PM Eastern/7:15PM NFLD). Please register for the Zoom link: https://urj.tfaforms.net/1378

According to ancient rabbinic tradition, the first night of Passover begins our individual and collective liberation from slavery. We are not supposed to consider this to be a historic remembrance of something that happened a long time ago to someone else. We are supposed to do everything we can to feel as if we ourselves are being liberated from Mitzrayim, which is usually translated as Ancient Egypt. It is a somatic practice where we are supposed to do certain things in order to help us to “feel” liberated. But the word: “mitzrayim” means so much more than this. It is related to “tzar” which means a narrow, restrictive or oppressive place. It is also related to “tzuris” or trouble.

In each generation and each year, we are supposed to experience our own liberation from our own troubles and oppressions. In what ways do our problems leave us feeling stuck or constrained? I often talk about colonial closets as a metaphor for the ways in which society taught us to hide our true selves and silence our voice. When we hide, our unconscious gets the message that we are not good enough or that we need to be hidden or silence. Repressing our feelings and trying to hide is itself a trauma, and often one needs to do this because of other traumas that cause us to feel unsafe and need to hide. Repression is a type of oppression: Mitzrayim represents all of our traumas and the traumatic reactions that they engender, including the shame and silencing that causes us to believe that there is safety in hiding. We try to be a false self: the good girl or the strong man or whatever label we are told will help us garner safety and affection. I can’t help but notice how gender is deeply entrenched into every label, reflecting the larger social stigmas and associations of our abusive/colonial world.

Trauma theorists posit that the many responses to trauma cause us to develop “false selves” and to do whatever we can to disconnect from the present moment so we do not need to feel. It is a “fawn response” to trauma and it is easily recognizable by the “people pleasing” or the harsh inner critic” that represents the internalizing of abusive voices that traumatized us. While initially intended to be adaptive to the traumatic situation, it can make a trauma that happened in the past continue to haunt us in our present. When we get triggered or react, more often than not, it is not about the present but what it evokes in us.

This is a form of Mitzrayim: the prison of our false selves and traumatized/traumatizing beliefs. When we can’t be ourselves or don’t feel safe to do so, this is a trauma too. Increasingly, researchers are understanding that authenticity and somatic therapies can heal trauma by helping us to reenter the body, release some of the pain that it holds and become present to the moment. This is a form of mindfulness and reflects some of the healing and liberatory work that can accompany Passover to help us to find our way out of the trauma of our own Mitzrayim.

Indeed, much of the Passover seder is intended to help us release tension and stress from our bodies. We are commanded to lean and relax, and even encouraged to drink four glasses of wine to help the body begin to unclench from all the trauma that it has absorbed and internalize. Many of the rituals reflect this idea: to reenact the experiences of our oppression and slavery so that we can also reexperience the liberation. The idea is that this reexperiencing rewires the brain to remember and believe that healing and freedom is possible. Ultimately, it is that faith and hope that actually ignites the quest for freedom. When we are burned out by the world, we might be tempted to give up. When we are dissociated by trauma, we might stop feeling and not even realize how bad things have gotten. Often, when we are dissociated, burnt out and traumatized, we may become so detached from reality as a result of our trauma, that we begin to hurt others and not even realize it. Trauma keeps us from being present in the moment: we remain locked in the past and fearful of the future.

This holiday helps us to feel and become more embodied and more present so that we can begin to heal. One lesser known (somatic) tradition used often in Sephardic or Persian communities is to beat one’s self with scallions or leeks, to remember how (in Numbers 11:5-6) the Children of Israel began to miss the food of Egypt. The rabbis comment that this is similar to addiction in that our trauma can cause us to crave the substances that will eventually hurt us and enslave us. Indeed, the word “addiction” is related to “slavery” to show the ways in which our cravings can chain us. By beating one’s self and/or one another, we recognize the ways in which we are each Pharoah to ourselves and one another. But, it can also provide some release and to diffuse an encounter by creating healing and catharsis.

The larger question is: how do we heal ourselves. Our rabbis teach that we should prepare ourselves for Passover’s liberation by doing a through searching for anything that might impede our ability to liberate and heal ourselves. Indeed, in the same way as we sometimes might need to leave an unhealthy relationship or job or environment to heal ourselves, so too must we spend some time attending to the context within which we live. A personal and collective inventory is a helpful way to begin to do this work, representing the spiritual equivalent of the religious tradition to engage in “bedikat chametz” (the searching for the leavning/chametz) and “biur chametz” (the burning of the chametz).

The legal fiction of selling chametz is one of the many traditional practices that many Reform Jews have disavowed, as an example of the letter of the law being contrary to the spirit of the law. While we may balk at these literal practices, the spiritual wisdom in them is profound. We must rid ourselves from the things that can be “triggers” to our liberation and cause us to crave that which we must avoid to stay free, no less than Passover is easier to observe when bread is not easy to access.

So, leading up to Passover, it is traditional to prepare ourselves. Many Hasidic rabbis teach that leading up to the first night, in order to prepare, we must look in ourselves and our world to find the “chametz” and become liberated from its bondage. “Chametz” is translated as bread or bread products but the rabbis teach it is the ego: anything that puffs us up (like leavening). The ego is one of the shackles of our imprisonment and locks to our closet: we become afraid and don’t listen to our heart because we are afraid of what others will think. Perfectionism is another… each of us, by virtue of our own wiring and life experiences will have our own version, but the common thread is that we cling to things that oppress us.

The word “chametz” is related to “chamootz” which means sour. What makes one sour and puffs up our ego? Trauma and shame: these lead us to hide and cause our hearts to harden. Pharaoh is within: the words we tell ourselves that keep us bitter and hurt and scared. This is the bondage from when we must be liberated, because it is this that causes us to be scared and cling to that which is actually harmful. We each have our own inner Pharaoh: the internalized task master that tells us that we are not good enough or did not work hard enough or do enough or…

This Passover, how will we liberate ourselves? What are the stories we tell ourselves that keep our hearts hardened and embittered, trapped in shackles of fear and shame? How can these teach us compassion: for ourselves and others? In the same way as the Passover seder retells the story of the Exodus from Egypt differently, so too should we find ways of retelling our story. The greatest Passover liberation is when we stop hiding and allow ourselves the blessing of being imperfect, human and fallible. Making amends and working toward healing and forgiveness: may this be the Passover that helps us become free… that we may liberate one another and bring healing to our planet.