For Peh Sach: God's Never-ending Speech

To feel that God is constantly involved in our lives and redeeming us, continually performing miracles on our behalf right now – that is the goal of the Seder. Not just to remember the past and be thankful, but to feel the constant Presence, care and involvement of God in our lives.

There is a famous play on the name Pesach – reading it as peh sach – a mouth that speaks. Normally we understand this mouth that speaks as our own mouth speaking the story of the exodus. The Kedushat Levi reads it differently; the mouth that speaks on Pesach is the mouth of God continually speaking. God is a constantly “speaking mouth.”

What does this mean? God created the world through speech acts. He said “let there be light” and there was light. One might think that after this beneficent act of creation, He disappeared. He set the world in motion and sat back and watched. But no, to say that God is a continually speaking mouth is to say that in some sense, creation never ended. God is constantly speaking the world into existence. As we say each morning, He is mehadesh betuvo bekhol yom tamid maaseh breishit, He is, in His goodness, renewing the work of creation each and every day. At each moment, He continually speaks each of us and every piece of grass into continued existence. Creation was not a one-time act, but a never-ending show of love.

With the exodus from Egypt, God manifested to the world this hidden continual care, says the Kedushat Levi. We normally don’t take notice of it, but then, suddenly, through miraculous interventions (the plagues and the Red Sea) that went against the natural order that He had set up, God showed that He was still involved on a regular basis. By clearly acting in the world, He manifested what is normally hidden – His continued involvement in the world He created. It is as if He popped up and said – See?! I have been here and involved all the time. I am showing you now so you can know it and remember.

On Pesach we remember that God is a constant peh sach by ourselves becoming a peh sach. We continually, each year on Pesach and each day in the Shma, again and again, speak this truth into the universe: God did not leave; God is here, Present at all times and involved in our lives. Through speech acts of remembering and reminding, we experience His continued involvement; we activate that sense of His speech through our own speech.

What does it mean to feel God’s continued miraculous involvement in our lives? We are so full of problems and suffering and worries and unbelief. How do we feel God’s continual redemption? I am searching myself but there are little inklings, and I think it is the little inklings of this Presence that Pesach asks us to notice and speak out loud – the moments when there is indeed some sense of personal redemption, when we are helped or healed or cared for or guided or given strength where there is no strength. There are also moments of revelation, moments when we get a sudden insight, a glimpse of some greater truth or understanding, what is known in Hebrew as a hiddush, “a new thought,” a gift from God’s constant work of renewal in the world. And finally there is constantly around us evidence of God’s continual care in the form of nature, the miracle of our own existence and of the beautiful universe around us. Perhaps that is why Pesach is in the spring, a time when the physical world is indeed in a time of glorious renewal, a new act of creation.

These are all little shafts of divine light entering the universe, little glimpses of God’s constant care. On Pesach we become a peh sach, a mouth that speaks this truth of God’s own continually speaking mouth. He is here now and still speaking to us. Let us pause and enter the conversation.