My Notebook

I don't always remember to keep my notebook with me, and I don't always remember to write things down in it, and I seldom think of paging through it to see what I wrote.

Passover Thoughts - Two Months Late or Ten Months Early

Before our Seder, I went over the story of the Exodus with my grandchildren, and that made me realize that the telling, rather than the Exodus itself, is the main experience. Since all of the Israelites who actually left Egypt and crossed the Red Sea died in the desert, the ones who actually entered the land had only heard about the experience.

You don't have to believe in miracles, in divine intervention in history, or even that the story of the Exodus might be based on some kernel of historical truth to appreciate the power of telling the story. One wonders: why did the ancestors of the Jewish people tell this story about themselves? Why did they want to "remember" that they were once slaves? And why did they locate the story of their redemption in the past?

We (whoever "we" are - everyone who identifies with the story of the Exodus from slavery in Egypt, perhaps) certainly didn't manage to stay redeemed. The Bible says it's our fault: we lapsed into sin and idolatry. A cynic might say: what can you expect? That's human nature. But a religious person can't accept human nature (which may be why I can't honestly call myself a religious person). Religious life is a life of yearning, yearning for the restoration of past perfection, yearning for the realization of future redemption. And also yearning for another kind of human nature.

Ritual is the effort to create a temporary state of redemption in the here and now. Every once in a while that works for me.