Shabbat Hol HaMo'ed Pesach 5773: As if I left Egypt . . .

Our seder night is a brilliantly crafted experience:  we are surrounded by evocative smells and flavors, melodies and pictures, all designed to draw us in to the journey from slavery to freedom.  Horseradish brings to our eyes tears like those of our slave ancestors.  We conclude with joyous verses of praise to God for reaching into the black hole of Egyptian bondage and pulling us to the safety of the far shore of the sea of reeds.

One sentence in the Haggadah expresses the soul of this night:
בכל דור ודור חייב אדם לראות את עצמו כאילו הוא יצא ממצרים
In each and every generation, each person is obligated to see him/herself as if he/she came out of Egypt.

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We eat the "bread of affliction," we chop up apples and walnuts until they look (but thank God, don't taste) like mortar.  We steel ourselves for the bite of the maror and swear that "Dayyeinu", if God had only done half of what God has done for us, we would have been more than grateful.  We are trying to throw ourselves into the experience of leaving Egypt.

Our experience in the United States is generally pretty "Ashkenazic."  Most of us descend of Jewish immigrants who came from eastern and central Europe.  Other Jewish communities have their own evocative moments that help the seder participant to feel the leaving: 

In some Sephardic [Mediterranean Jewish] communities, the cloth-wrapped  afikoman [the broken middle matzah that is hidden early in the  seder] was  tied to the shoulder of a child, who left the company and then  reappeared
knocking at the door. In the ensuing scripted dialogue, he  identified himself as  an Israelite on his way to Jerusalem carrying  matzah. On entering the  room, he looked at the specially arranged  table and asked "Why is this night  different from all other  nights?"

In North African Jewish communities and in  India, it was customary to pass the k'arah [seder plate] over the heads of everyone at the table in a circular motion. Encompassing all gathered in the historic experience. It was an acknowledgment that as the world turns, first we were slaves, then we became free. www.myjewishlearning.com)

The most moving collection of seder customs I have ever experienced was in Jerusalem.  One year, I was asked to lead the seder at a battered women's shelter in the neighborhood in which I lived and led a congregation.  Women and children from Russia and Morroco and Israel and England and Ethiopia and the United States and France and Argentina all sat together at the same seder table.  Only the common denominator of having suffered violence at the hands of husbands and boyfriends and fathers could have created such a miscellaneous and yet homogenous group of people.  The women had prepared the seder meal in the shelter's communal kitchen.  Each woman had volunteered for a dish: soup, desserts, main dishes, side dishes . . . a Morrocan woman had said that she wanted to make her grandmother's special "seder soup."  Everyone was delighted, until an Ashkenazic housemate strolled by the pot, lifted the lid and stirred and asked:  "aifo hak'naidlach?" (Where are the matzah balls?).  The Morrocan soup-chef asked "What's a matzah ball?" and that started a whole rebellion!  All the Ashkenazic women ganged up protested:  How can there be a seder without matzah balls?  They came to a perfect solution:  one of the Ashkenazic women taught the Morrocan woman how to make knaidlach and when we got to the soup course, our Morrocan soup-maker proudly ladled us each a bowful of her grandmother's seder soup with an Ashkenazic matzah ball floating in the middle!

Passover is absolutely about the journey:  for these women and children, on their own journey from oppression to a new life of self-determination, that seder night was particularly evocative.  We all saw ourselves as if we each had left from Egypt . . . and found some very moving milestones along the way.