TIME FOR JOY
It’s been seven years.
Seven is an important number in many practices, cultures and religions, including ours. It’s a number often cosmic meaning, though it is understood as a practical division of the lunar cycle.
This year, I’m thinking in solar terms. That is: it has been seven years since we hosted our very last pre-global pandemic seder. Seven years since the collective shattering of some fundamentals. Seven years since we began to wonder if we would ever do certain things the same way again.
We figured it out. Through much suffering, fear, and loss, we came out of that narrow passage, and like the women with Miriam on the far shore of liberation, are again singing and dancing.
The capacity for joy, indeed any aspect of human resilience, is astonishing. Whether we turn our gaze inward, or to those closest to us, or to the communities whose challenges are apparent right in our neighbourhood, or to the panorama of world warfare, what we see can easily shut us down, bring us low.
For making meaning in this global moment, and making meaning Jewishly, we have the gift of Passover and the seders. We’re invited to dive in – no matter how long we sit at the table, whether or not we eat kitniyot (legumes) or refrain from hametz (yeasty stuff) beyond the seder meal itself – and consider weighty matters. Freedom. Responsibility – collective, inherited, trans-historical or current. And yes, miracles. And oh yes, joy.
Here is a teaching I received this year, along with my Reconstructionist rabbi colleagues and others receiving messages from Rabbi Katie Mizrahi’s CaringBridge. For those who are not familiar, the Caring Bridge website offers a platform for folks and caregivers to share news around an ongoing challenge. She explains:
“So often I teach about the Israelites, at the moment of the Exodus, singing with Miriam as they crossed through walls of water. It’s tempting to imagine that they sang and danced because they knew they were safe once and for all. But even if we readers know that now, they surely didn’t have such luxury. It was messier and more dangerous living through it. The splitting sea around them could have drowned them at any moment. Pharaoh’s army chased them from behind. Ahead was complete unknown.
“And yet they danced.
“To me this means we must find joy along the way, even if we haven’t yet “won.” Even if the dangers are real and the story hasn’t reached its happy ending.”
We can choose joy, in the great and small moments, living through uncertainties and even threatening errant cells. The rabbi adds: “I think again about Miriam dancing through her dangerous moment. I wonder if it’s not so much a victory dance as a joy practice, like the gratitude practice that has sustained me all these months – bits of joy deliberately sprinkled in.”
With timbrels or while listening to your most reliably energizing track, find a moment this Passover to get up and boogie with joy. We are together – dance! We have enough – dayeinu! Shehecheyanu – we are sustained, vekiyemanu – we have been kept strong, vehigianu lazman hazeh – and we have reached this very moment – our sacred festival of freedom.
Hag pesah sameah – have a joyous Passover.
Rabbi Liz
