This week my thoughts, like those of most Jews on the planet, turn to Pesach - the Passover festival, which begins at sunset on Monday next week. Traditionally, Shabbat Hagadol - the Sabbath immediately preceding Pesach - was one of two annual occasions when a pulpit rabbi would stand and give a public sermon. The other one was Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath immediately preceding Yom Kippur. It was said that the laws concerning one's observance of these two all-important days are so complex as to require the congregation's rabbi to do something out-of-character. Obviously, it is no longer out-of-character for a rabbi to give a sermon! Today, the rabbi who only stands in the pulpit to give a sermon twice a year would probably not last long in his or her job. But there was a time when it was a regular practice to give drashot only very occasionally.
During my rabbinate, it was never my habit to offer sermons on how to conduct special observances. It's not that there's anything wrong with the practice, rather that ritual instruction was simply not my focus. Every Jew knows that you're supposed to expunge hametz, leaven, from one's diet for the duration of the Passover festival. And that you're supposed to refrain from all food and drink on Yom Kippur. I figured that, if someone in my congregation did not understand exactly what either meant, they would ask me privately.
I felt 'called out' about this in one of my last years as an active rabbi. I had a large class of conversion candidates that year, and the mandatory course I taught for them ran up to Pesach and a bit beyond. In a session close to the festival, having promised to talk about it, I focused on the why of Passover - the ancient events that have resulted in the two major rituals of the Seder and the refraining from hametz. At the end of the session, several students came up to me, anxiety on their faces. I hadn't told them how to do Pesach. As candidates for conversion, seeking to graft themselves into the Jewish people, they were of course concerned that they knew what to do, and how to do it.
Sufficiently chastened, I spent the next session - the last one before Pesach - going through the nuts-and-bolts of exactly what it meant to expunge hametz from one's life for eight days. (I didn't have to explain how to do the Seder, because all of them would be attending my 'Teaching Seder' on the first night.) During the lesson, I could see a number of anxious faces turning much more serene. If belatedly, I was giving them what they thought they needed.
But my bottom line that night - which I'm going to repeat to you who are reading this - is that Pesach is a Journey. It's a Journey towards developing a mindset that accepts the challenges of observing the festival as the means to so identifying with it that one makes the ancient narrative one's own, placing oneself squarely in the midst of the people Israel, internalizing that one was there and experienced liberation. And this is not just my notion; it comes straight from the Mishnah, Tractate Pesachim: בכל דוד ודוד חיב אדם לראות את אצמו כאילו יצאנו ממצריים - In every generation, one must see oneself as he one had [personally] been liberated from Egypt.
Understanding this, we can see the various rituals of Pesach - the cleaning, the matzah, the Seder - as being calculated to bring one to this very mindset. And the worst sin a Jew can commit regarding this observance - as specified in the Seder rubric of the rasha, the evil son - is to divorce oneself from the whole business. We're told in the Haggadah, how to respond to this sort of selfishness: one explains to this son that, had he been there, he would not have experienced redemption because he would have been too caught up in himself.
The rituals of Pesach, in particular the expunging of the hametz, are complex; the Jew who has not had a lifetime of experience in their ins and outs, is likely to make some mistakes. If this describes you, take heart! Pesach is indeed a Journey from one mindset to another. You do your best with the ritual, and if you succeed, you might experience the change in mindset that it is calculated to bring. And if you do slip up and find yourself eating something that's hametz - or even possessing it, which is also forbidden - then you can forgive yourself, learn the lesson, and keep soldiering on.
A joyous and kosher Passover to all my readers! Let the journey begin!
You have always allowed your students to be on their own journeys. And yet somehow you guided us without the use of a whip. Blessings to you dearest Rabbi.
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