What is Passover? How can I liberate myself? Applying Passover lessons

The most memorable Passover seder I ever hosted was not with relatives and it was not in Israel. It did not even consider location among Jews. Rather, it was a clandestine celebration in Bethlehem, involving 50 % a dozen Christian Palestinian and intercontinental mates gathered about my table for meal and reflection — not just on the story of Exodus and what it intended for the ancient Hebrews but on the themes of freedom and redemption and what that meant for ourselves as people today. 

It was the spring of 2014. On the table was a seder plate and, for each individual guest, a haggadah, the Jewish text utilized for Passover seders that includes the Exodus tale. There was also one thing much less classic along with each and every plate: a supplementary haggadah I’d manufactured myself that pulled with each other excerpts from Exodus and Psalms, as properly as prices from Khalil Gibran’s reserve “The Prophet” and the Derek Walcott poem “Love Following Really like.” 

On Passover just about every yr, Jews browse the tale of how God brought us out of slavery in Egypt and into freedom. We are commanded to assume of the story as both equally our ancestors’ and our personal. We’re not just studying a text about the ancient Hebrews earning a journey — it is as though we are also sojourners earning the transition from oppression to liberation. 

So, that night time in Bethlehem, right after recounting the tale of Exodus, we took an internal journey. We talked about our very own individual Egypts and what it would consider to absolutely free ourselves from these spots of suffering that exist deep within of us. We contemplated the stories we ended up telling ourselves and how effectively those narratives were serving us. How could they be tweaked to develop into gentler, extra handy?

Eight a long time later, I have my self-fashioned haggadah future to me as I publish this and as I prepare, mentally, for the getaway. Leafing by means of the webpages, I see the topic I desired to share with my close friends encapsulated in Khalil Gibran’s poem “On Joy & Sorrow”:

“Your pleasure is your sorrow unmasked./And the selfsame very well from which your laughter rises was frequently stuffed with your tears.” 

Pleasure and sorrow, Gibran argued, are “inseparable.” The exact same cup that retains our wine, he wrote, “was burned in the potter’s oven.” 

The line reminds me of some thing I have read from lots of religious Jews: “Nothing undesirable descends from earlier mentioned.” The trick is to find the blessing hidden in even the darkest moments or circumstances — therein lies pleasure. 

The strategy is not to flip absent from the significantly less appealing areas of ourselves and of lifetime, a stage driven home by Walcott’s poem, which extols the reader not to be a stranger to themselves but, relatively, to welcome that stranger to the desk. (Caring for the stranger is an additional concept of Passover and is the most-generally repeated commandment in the Hebrew Bible. We assume frequently of caring for the “foreigners” between us. But what about the foreigner that dwells within?)

Our dialogue that night time was mainly about striking the stability concerning accepting ourselves and our circumstances even though continuing to do the job to adjust them. This is a message that is woven into the tale of Passover, too. In the haggadah, we are reminded that “The stone which the builders turned down hath come to be the main cornerstone.” 

What portion of ourselves or our life are we rejecting? And how are those features basically strengths? How can people realizations guide to self-acceptance and a journey out of self-alienation and suffering towards a freer and fuller life? 

The lesson is anything Jews and non-Jews alike can implement to by themselves, personally. What do we want to be free of? What do we want to make peace with? What, on the inside of, are we enslaved to? And how can we crack totally free of people chains? 

Passover is a powerful time to dedicate to change. It’s one particular of 4 Jewish new a long time contained in the Hebrew 12 months (if you uncover this entirely complicated, do not get worried, I do, far too). Study reveals that folks are the most probably to make adjust when they have a blank slate, a phenomenon talked about in Katy Milkman’s e-book “How to Modify: The Science of Receiving from The place You Are to Where by You Want To Be.”

So take into account this Passover — this Jewish New Year in the course of which we commemorate and celebrate our independence from bondage — your blank slate, your probability to crack free of what ever chains you. Your probability to commit your self to alter. Or it’s possible no alter at all. Probably just self-acceptance.