For Pesach: Unclenching Our Fists

How much do we control our own destiny? Particularly at times of uncertainty and anxiety, we hold on very tight. We try so hard to make things just right so that all will be well for ourselves, our families, our community and the world.

Purim celebrates these efforts. On Purim we say what Mordecai said to Esther-- “who knows if it was for this precise moment that you got to be the queen?” You have some role to play in the unfolding of history, some designated role that you were born to play. The pressure is on to know what it is and to accomplish it. You need to make an effort, to fast and organize and approach the king and fight for your own survival.

That is Purim. But Pesach feels like it takes the very opposite approach. God alone saved us, says the Haggadah -- Ani, velo Shaliah --I, God says, I alone redeemed you, and no messenger. While on Purim, it is God’s name that is absent from the story, on Pesach, it is Moshe’s name that is absent from the Haggadah.

Indeed, all the descriptions of transformation in the Haggadah have God as the exclusive agent. Avadim Hayinu, we say. “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt and God brought us out. “ Not Moshe. Not our own organizing or protesting. God alone. And our spiritual transformation, too, happened exclusively through God; we say -- “our ancestors were idol worshippers but now God has brought us close.” God?! Isn’t it that we have been seeking Him, working on getting close? But no -- the Haggadah views even our religious attachments as a pure act of grace, a gift from above. It is not our own striving that brings us freedom or that brings us spiritual enlightenment. We are in the care of God.

Pesach night is a leyl shimurim, a night of divine protection. On this night the lesson is not about human effort, but about trust and surrender, learning to actually feel the care that comes to us at all moments from above. To stop all of our human efforting and feel it, feel the embrace, trust in it and relax into it.

This posture of trust and surrender is not a natural one for most of us, and ironically, is the thing that requires the most effort of all. So it is not really that the night of Pesach involves no effort. The Haggadah makes it clear what our role is -- sippur yetziat mitzrayim, telling the story of leaving Egypt. The Sefat Emet reads the word sippur as meaning not telling, but “clarifying,”. What we do on Pesach night is to clarify for ourselves -- through this particular telling -- that God is in control. We learn to let go, to know that we are not in charge, to go with the divine flow rather than resisting it. Indeed, the one person who is thrown out of our Seder is the rasha, who is unable to do this; he is unable to make himself a part of the flow. He resists and stands apart, excludes himself from the whole. The goal here is not resistance but surrender to the whole, to the flow, to the knowledge of divine control of the universe.

Learning to let go of control in this way, to acknowledge and trust the divine flow, to make ourselves a part of it, is in large measure the work of meditation. Rupert Spira, a meditation teacher, likens the situation to a person who has had her hands clenched her entire life (most of us). Although the clenching itself takes a lot of continuous effort, we are unaware of this effort since we have been doing it for so long. Theoretically, the natural effortless way should be for us to have our hands relaxed in an open position, but because we have spent our whole lives with our fists clenched, it is the clenching that feels natural and effortless, while learning to unclench feels difficult.

Pesach night is a night to learn to unclench our fists, to relax and open and trust in the divine flow. This won’t necessarily translate into passivity in our actions in the real world. On the contrary, relaxing in this way is deeply clarifying, as the Sefat Emet intuited; it clarifies when to act and how. It helps us with the Purim task of recognizing the exact moment we are meant to act, rather than being continually clenched in an effort to resist and control the universe. Learning to relax into God’s embrace, to trust in it, also gives us the confidence and courage to act when we need to, and to act, not on our own plan, but as part of the natural flowering and unfolding of God’s plan.