I walked out my door this morning and saw the first daffodil blooming on my front lawn. On the way home, I saw, all along the way, green grass, yellow forsythia, ornamental trees covered in flowers, and the new turkey chicks of our neighborhood flock. Somehow, again, Pesach has snuck up on me. Even though, or maybe because I’ve been so focused at home on the indoors, straightening up, cleaning, kashering, and beginning to cook, it feels like the holiday is suddenly on the doorstep. At school we’ve been getting ready too, singing Pesach songs, rehearsing the four questions, telling and retelling the story in different ways, and this year, focusing on the ten plagues that led to the liberation of our people from slavery.
Pesach really shouldn’t be a surprise. It comes every year, bringing along its rituals, the reliving of the foundational story of our people, and all the work it takes to prepare. But there is something about it, the reenactment of our hasty march to freedom, that makes it feel right to approach in a state of anxiety, uncertain that we are truly ready.
The first Pesach, I imagine, felt similar. Our people, having lived as slaves to Pharaoh for generations, have seen many a strange thing happen in Egypt. From the return of Moses, to the series of terrible acts of God that have afflicted their Egyptian neighbors, while the Israelites watched safely from their homes in Goshen, their freedom must seem both unimaginable and imminent. And just before the last plague, they are given warning, and an instruction to prepare, to set aside a lamb for the Pesach meal days in advance, to pack their bags and eat their meal in their traveling clothes, all ready to go. But the actual call to rise up, leave everything behind and go free, still takes them by surprise. The bread is not baked, or even risen. They leave in haste, bequeathing us the traditions of eating matzah and of entering the holiday after many days of preparing, yet feeling largely unprepared.
The pediatrician my kids saw when they were very young once told me that he had a significant rise in sick visits in the week before any holiday. Jews before Passover, Christians before Christmas, etc. Somehow our anticipation of the joyful times finds a way to express itself in seemingly unrelated ways.
The expression “the calm before the storm” should, I think, have an equally true opposite, “the storm before the calm,” At my house this week, there have been anticipatory plagues, leading up to the liberation to come. There’s been a plague of tension, a plague of argumentativeness, a plague of whining and other unpleasant sounds, a plague of meals made of the remains of the chametz, a plague of random headaches. At school there’s been a feeling in the air of routines disrupted, of nervous anticipation. But these, as the plagues in the story of our exodus from Egypt, I know to be the storm before the calm. If you’ve been plagued this week, too, hang in there. Liberation is coming, exactly when you expect it, but somehow, with its own element of surprise and wonder. Liberation is coming and freedom is sweet!
Wishing you and your family a chag sameach, and a zisn pesach, a happy holiday and a sweet Passover