Koby loved Passover 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.