7th Day of Pesach - A new center
Summary: Whether we know it or not, Pesach has moved us forward to a new kind of freedom. Now the work is acclimate to a new center and start building from there.
***
Rebbe Nachman tells a tale that ends on a strange demon moon but begins with a crippled man who has been attacked and robbed and left for dead. Unable to walk, he is forced to eat the grasses that are within his reach. When there is nothing left near him, he pulls himself to another spot. It happens to be that he discovers a magical cube at the root of a plant he harvests in that new spot, but the very fact that he got to that new spot is in fact more interesting.
This short moment in the story seems to indicate just how much energy and effort it takes to get to a new position, a new center - and that vast rewards await us there.
This might not seem important because we might be unaware or under-aware of the nature of our starting point - the basic mood and perspective with which we face the world. We might not know just how much it affects us, guides us, forms us, and characterizes. And we might not know how much it limits us. We get a whiff of such things when, for one reason or another - maybe the coffee was just that good; maybe Venus is rising; maybe we got enough sleep; maybe all of our soul-work has built up to this day - it shifts, and suddenly we realize that entirely new things are possible.
The crippled man moved himself to a new place. He found strength within, though he was also hungry. And there are other times, when we are picked up from where and how we are by Something outside of us and placed in a different position, a new perspective, a new set of possibilities. At such moments, a new chapter begins.
And that happened. To you. Recently. You might not know it. It doesn’t matter. You have been moved to a different place because you sat at a table and ate matzah and marror and said “Pesach!”
**
On some Thursday a few months from now you’ll wake up and you’ll feel a lot like you did on some Thursday a few weeks ago and it will seem that, really, nothing has changed, but it is not so. Consider the crippled man as proof. Assume his arms are two feet long. From his current Position A he has a range of two feet in any direction. Let’s say he extends his arm to reach point A + 2. Then, after having eaten all the grasses that he can reach from Position A, he crawls to Position A + 2, and that becomes his new center-point. From Position A + 2 he can actually reach back to Position A, his original home base.
This is true also of levels and moods. When a person is on a certain level in terms of Service or Spiritual Sensitivity or Basic Joy or Awareness of the Needs of Others, this level is not a static location. It is a range, a set of coordinates that incudes the apex and nadir of the entire arc, all the good days and bad days and everything in between. A “spiritual location” is measured by where you are plus the length of your arms - how far you can reach, in both directions.
So on that Thursday in a few months when you wake up and feel kind of meh, that doesn’t mean that nothing actually changed on Seder night. It just means that you are at the nadir of your new location, and it only feels like old place.
It is essential to remember this because there are strong forces inside and outside that want to pull us back to the old position and convince us that nothing has changed and nothing will change and we should just go back. These elements and voices want us to feel disempowered, discouraged, demoralized and sad. Just consider all the different times when the Israelites wanted to go back to Egypt.
But we have work to do. Sandwiched between the matzah and the marror was a new mission and purpose, a new charge, a new domain that is ours to direct. It was not given to us as an option, a spiritual indulgence, something that hippies and Kabbalists do but “regular” Jews get to ignore.
That would be ridiculous. Do we really think that this Jewish stuff is just for fun, and that the Seder was just an evening’s entertainment, and that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose? Freedom - what Rav Kook defines as a person or nation’s capacity to to be true to their essence - is not to be seen as optional once it is offered. It is a mandate. A demand. You are now free, whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not. Whatever you felt or didn’t feel at the Seder, this is the new real. It is upon us to figure out the lay of the land, get a sense of what has become possible, and get to work.