Thursday, April 21, 2016

Passover this year- ecstatic liberation and revisited imagination

Several years ago, the meaning of Passover crystallized for me on the idea of gratitude.

Why should we revisit a story of enslavement, why should we not only tell it, but actually eat it and act it out?

I've come to think that there is no other way to truly appreciate the state of freedom in which we live now. 

For years, I obsessed about this question: how can I appreciate or even truly comprehend the plentiful food and safety that I have, my rights as a woman, the rule of law under which I live, even the caring of those near me, if that is all I have ever known? Of course in some dry theory I may understand that these circumstances are privileged. But how can I genuinely enjoy them, how can I know what is worth prizing and defending, if I don't know anything else? 

The Passover Seder addresses the issue head on with the most convincing solution I've seen yet. To enjoy our freedom, we need to empathize with the plight of those who lived before us (the sweat, the bitterness, the horror), and then we need to physically make ourselves enjoy (the four cups of wine, question #4 about reclining, the entire long ritual family meal). 

There are three new elements for me to contemplate this year:

1. The importance of the threshold between slavery and freedom, the liberation moment. In a lesson with Rabbi Michael Paley today, he discussed the Passover aim of achieving an elevated, almost ecstatic, state at the Seder, which gives visceral meaning to the idea of liberation. This adds the passion to "gratitude." 

To feel true, meaningful, alive gratitude, and not the dry sanctimonious sort, that moment of liberation needs to be experienced, even if it must be play acted or story-told, and experienced again and again lest it fade.

2. The notion that gratitude gives us the power we need to not just sit on our laurels and float, but to do something with what we have. Our security, health, well-being, love are all gifts that supply us with strength for something - something bigger than passive entertainment, even bigger than understanding and happiness- fine though they are. An active gratitude should drive us to passion, and passion should drive us to ... What exactly? The method would be acting to our fullest on the strengths we have. But the goal? That's #3.

3. I've focused on the need to see the contours of history to appreciate the comfort of what we have now, and how this gives us passion to act. To where does this passion drive?

Just as the comparison between the past and present gives more weight to both- so too we need to compare a future worth aspiring toward with the present we have. And if we can do this- we will have our direction. 

To do it, we need a prodigious and expansive imagination.

I'd like to dedicate the next part of this blog to that-- to dreaming about what I and we might have that is better than what we do now, that is not entitled and disconnected from the past, but builds upon it.

I'd like to exercise the imagination side of my brain, revisit some naive hopes, check in on quelled idealism. 

That's a Passover message this year....