For Pesach: On Human Effort and Dependence

We work so hard for this holiday.

And yet, on some level, the message of Pesach is that we are taken care of. God took us out not because we deserved it; we didn’t. He redeemed us simply because we are His and He loves us. It is a leil shimurim, a night of protection, this seder night, not a time when we have to do anything to protect ourselves. God is in charge. In the Haggadah, we emphasize that it was God alone who redeemed us; we don’t mention Moshe’s name, because the emphasis on God is key; on this night, we need to know that we are dependent on God alone. We recline at the table like someone who is totally relaxed, secure in the knowledge that Someone else will take care of things, that we have “Someone to lean on.” We do not pour ourselves wine, but the custom is to be the recipient, to feel for one night that we have no worries over the replenishing of our cup; it will happen without our effort.

So why on this holiday, when we are meant to feel that we are totally cared for and protected from above, why is this the holiday that actually requires the most effort on our part to prepare for?

There is some deep psychological truth here, some connection between all this work and the feeling of total dependence that we aspire to.

There is the dependence of the child, an unexamined dependence which (hopefully) passes with time as the child becomes more independent. And then there is a deeper sense of dependence which we can only come to after some experience of independence and some experience of great human effort on our part.

It reminds me of the first two steps of Alcoholics Anonymous – first, we admitted that we were powerless, and second, we came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. We have to first bottom out with human effort; we have to first work really hard and try as hard as we can to do everything, to get it all right, to get our lives in order. We have to go that route and only after we have gotten to the point of knowing that even with all that effort, still, on some level, we are powerless to control our lives and make them work the way we want, only after we have come to that realization, that knowledge that “we can’t” – only then will we be really open to the One who Can, to the truth of our dependence on Him, to the appreciation of our gifts and the peace of not being in charge.

So both the effort and the feeling of being taken care of are part of the package on Pesach. Perhaps this is the meaning of our movement from slavery to freedom; we begin as slaves to our own human striving and work capacity and we move toward a feeling of the freedom and peace of knowing that ultimately, whatever work we do, however important it is, we are held in a larger cushion of divine love. Such knowledge of our dependence is a kind of freedom; it frees us from our enslavement to our very human projects and gives us a taste of something larger, more eternal.