by Sherri Mandell. Passover, 2002

Passover this year is bittersweet. I long for my oldest son, killed by terrorists on May 8 near our home in Israel. Koby loved Passover. He would learn for the seder and then eagerly engage in the conversation about the Hagaddah.

Ask any grieving person and they will tell you that the holidays are like a knife in the most tender part of the heart. Yet I find pleasure in Passover, even now. Living in Israel means that as I prepare for Passover I feel that I am not alone. I am preparing with the whole country as we clean out the chumetz, the leavened material, from our houses and, also, from our souls. The food stores are changing their shelves, their wares, and you can see people carting trash at all hours of the day and night. There is the feeling of upheaval. Of transformation. People are shedding their skins and starting anew. We are trying to begin again. We are trying to be as humble as the simple matzah, with no filling. We are trying to become our best selves--our insides and outside congruous.

The Torah tells us that Nissan, the time when the people of Israel were released from their servitude, should be counted as the first of months. Chodesh, the word for month, has the same root as the Hebrew word that means new. Each month we have the opportunity for growth, for change, for renewal-- like the moon . We can become better, more giving, more generous, more loving. We can leave the confines of our narrow vision. Nissan, the month of our redemption, can be a month of budding new life.

But before that growth can occur we need to clean out. It's surprising that the preparation for a holiday about freedom centers around cleaning. But as I clean, I understand that cleaning is about going behind and under, going into what is usually hidden and dark to expose the underbelly of our surroundings. We see what we don't usually see. It is the first step toward change-a deep consciousness of what is, the situation in which we find ourselves.

Grief also makes you pay attention to what you normally don't see. When you are in grief, you see what is usually in shadow-the darkness under the bed, the cobwebs in the ceiling, the shadows that make us afraid and remind us that we too will die. Only when a grieving person faces his pain, can he or she begin the slow process of healing.

Here in Israel, we are living through a time of what feels like Biblical suffering. When we sit at home or drive on the road or go to a cafe, we are targets for terror. We have seen the monster under the bed, the things that go bump in the night,. I have seen it personally. Missing my son has forced me to lift the rock under which the maggots lie. It's forced me to be intimate with evil and horror.

On seder night, we make a blessing on the bitter herb. On every other day, we don't bless the bitter. But on Passover, in blessing the bitter, we say that even the bitter can be redeemed.

In Israel today we are drinking the bitter liquid. That bitterness can lead us toward redemption if we don't become enslaved to our pain. We need to keep dusting ourselves off and moving toward the light, even though the light hurts our eyes. We need to release the bitterness and weave it into a song that praises God. We try to believe that even our suffering has meaning, has a seder, is in order. In spite of our pain or maybe because of it, we cry out to God to heal us. That is our hope and our redemption. Passover teaches us a difficult lesson: redemption is only experienced after great suffering, after entering the darkness.