Pesach: Celebrating both the Slavery and the Freedom

What seems strange about Pesach is that we actually commemorate the hardship as well as the redemption.

On Purim there are no sad symbols. We just feast and laugh. On Sukkot we sit out in our sukkahs and remember the protection God gave the Israelites in the desert and shake the lulav in celebration of a bountiful harvest. We don’t walk around in the heat to get a sense of the hardship of the desert. Tisha B’av is a day set aside to remember the tragedies.

But Pesach, what is unique about Pesach, is that we mix the two – we eat maror, bitter herbs, together with our matzah and our festive meal. We dip our karpas vegetables into tears. We take out a bit of wine to remember the slain Egyptians. It is a holiday that somehow includes the bitterness and the difficulties within the celebration of redemption. As my father was fond of reminding us, the matzah itself is a double symbol; it is both lehem oni, “bread of affliction,” or poor person’s bread, and also bread of freedom, a symbol of the blink of an eye speed with which we left Egypt, with no time to let our bread rise. Freedom and suffering are linked in this holiday, and the Seder is intended to somehow evoke both for us at the very same moment.

The Sefat Emet explains that on Pesach, part of what we are celebrating is not just the redemption, but also the exile and the slavery itself. What we are saying is that we are thankful for all of it. We understand that it is all part of God’s plan – as seen in God’s prediction to Abraham – that there was some need for the slavery to happen in preparation for the worship of God, and so the difficulties also become for us somehow a source of joy. This is a joy that comes from the knowledge that God intends it all for our benefit. The maror, too, now gives us joy, as we feel and accept that bitterness, too, has its place, has its role to play.

The sages say that we are obligated to give thanks for bad tidings as well as for good tidings, to acknowledge that they all come from the same source and that we don’t really know what is good and what is bad for us in the long run.

Many of us have had the experience that a difficult life event has helped us grow. On Pesach, we look back on our national history and thank God for all of it – for the slavery as well as for the freedom, for the tears and for the songs, and they all become part of our celebration.

It is always easier to do this global thankfulness in hindsight. Now, looking back, we see that it was all for the best. Someone once told me that this is why God told Moshe that he could only see God from the back. We can only recognize the pattern when we look back in history. In the present of our difficulties, we have to just trust that gam zu letovah, this, too, is for the best.

On Pesach, through our memory of both slavery and freedom, we learn to embrace all of life as part of God’s gift to us.