Pesach Torah
Where can we find the true freedom?
Reflection by Ariel Ariel Yisraelah Hendelman, the Or HaLev Team:
"On Seder night, we encounter many iterations of the number four – four cups of wine, four questions, four children. Perhaps, this points to two other sets of four – the four seasons and the four Kabbalistic worlds (Asiyah, Yetizrah, Beriyah, and Atzilut). If we turn the lens inwards, we are being invited to journey through every season of our inner life, where the Divine is sometimes more and sometimes less revealed.
If Pesach is the remembrance and celebration of our miraculous, collective exodus from the narrow place, it also an invitation to inquire what inner freedom is all about and how we might make contact with it. To take this journey, it’s helpful to look at what the obstacles are along the way. To do that, we might ask four questions of our own in preparation for seder night, bringing them into our meditation practice and listening deeply for the answers that the still, small voice gives in response. (These questions have been adapted from my teacher Rabbi Shefa Gold.)
How can we free ourselves from judgment and reactivity?
How can we free ourselves from shame?
How can we free ourselves from the prison of sorrow?
How can we free ourselves from anxiety and ambition?
We might notice that within each of these questions is an even deeper one: how can we access freedom from the illusion of separation?
It is this exodus that splits the sea of our hardened hearts and shows us that truly there is no separation; we are bound up in the most intimate embrace with the Source of Life every moment. The act of maggid, the central ritual of the seder night, where we tell and retell the story of our freedom, is a kind of teshuvah, just like in our meditation practice. We return again and again to the breath of the story of our liberation, no matter how many times we forget that it is our story happening now, no matter how many times we get distracted or tired or hungry, we return to it because in it, we find the true freedom we have been longing for – to love ourselves, our lives, and each other."