Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz: The Haggadah - The Plan to Achieving Spiritual Liberation

[Music] okay hi everybody uh thank you for coming i apologize for being a little bit a little bit late again our share is uh dedicated uh tonight by again by the gantry family vinyam israel and halevi a young man that we cared very much about and again we welcome the parents who are spending some time yeah we welcome their parents bin yemen's parents that are spending some time in eric israel and we hope uh it'll be perhaps a permanent aliyah uh in addition uh this is in memory of ghana laura elisa gene and this is the 16th yorth site which was on the first day of pesach and mrs levy wrote a memorial and because of the unusual circumstances i will read it uh for the your side of ghana laura lisa about asia jean 15th of nisan the murdered on the first day of pesach my only daughter was born in paris january 1983 since her early childhood her slender and fluid gestures her grace her beauty her blessed presence everything made me thank god every moment i was aware of the sacred character of her person her intelligence her sense of repartee her generosity everything in her touched on the spiritual beauty of the world her enthusiasm was very special she loved art and had been painting in a studio since the age of seven she wrote poems and later loved the world of ideas which she knew how to express with finesse she had a wonderful sense of humor she loved to laugh and to bring out the humor in each situation life for her and for us was an interesting and blessed and constructive adventure she loved studying and had learned how to concentrate she studied after high school in an academy of art to work as an art critic she flew fluent italian and english and spanish in addition to french of course she had very good and loyal friends who are still present in the mother's life she was with them like a queen and her courts and we were and are so proud of her her warm and delicate presence filled us with joy her gaze lit up the world we spent the passover seder together and the day after the 15th of nissan she was murdered she was 23 years and almost three months old let us remember laurie present enthusiastic radiant and free her joy dev gave us strength for 16 years since her physical gaze no longer lights up my world i have tried to transform this unspeakable pain into love and deep shiva and i know that in the palace of hashem she approves me and accompanies me every second this is from mrs gene levy and may god give you much much comfort and strength and what a loss it is but in shamayim uh she's in a good place and may disclose of our learning whatever little bit it is elevate and bring her in to you in a higher place thank you and in addition uh refuse leima to abraham again with the holy israel a generous contribution was made anonymously so we want to thank mr and mrs anonymous and only a few places left for the pesach seder the deadline is today but rabbi poston has medatarachamim so he will give another 24 hours to sign up that is final i said that's my edition okay uh ibanez edition distributes uh pesach funds as it's called to needy families for pesach you can contribute by credit card uh going to the website there's a link uh in the website or in the description box below i guess below the youtube video and the like and uh once again ibanez an organization that is committed to torah avodah and gamila sodium and therefore the shiorim are the torah components and the cabrusas but in addition the khasid is a very important part of the bonaire program and it's a very important part of pesach passage is about like all the amim's of him the torah says you rejoice on the yamcha but you must include the widow and the orphan and the poor because it is not possible to have a real simchat yum unless we care about others who are not necessarily able to do it on their own so this is really part of simplest itself okay so this is our uh yeah i think that's all this is our last shirt before pesach so i guess it better be good i don't know this is the last chance to get in something meaningful and i want to start with uh if one were to ask what perhaps is the most important passage of the haggadah i don't know if you had this experience i remember when i was growing up i was a kid in elementary school so we were always asked to underline the topic sentence of a paragraph like what is the theme out of which the paragraph is constructed what is the topic sentence of the haggadah this is a very hard question and the answer i'm going to give may not be the is certainly not the only answer but i think it is unanswered it is a possibility and that is a statement that appears buried towards the end of maggit shortly before the second cup so you've already been doing the haggadah for quite a long time and that is me every person must regard themselves as if they themselves were taken out of mitzrayim you're not just remembering what happened to a past generation you're not simply grateful for a past reality but rather you have to feel that you were in mitzrayim and hashem liberated you now compare this to an earlier statement in the haggadah that's somewhat similar but it's actually very different in the beginning of the market right after the manishtana we made the point ilu lohotsiya kadesh barco as i was saying in mitzrayim if god would not have taken our forefathers out of egypt hare anu vanaynu of navanee no we and our children our grandchildren would still be enslaved by pyro so that's also saying hey i'm a beneficiary of the jews being taken out of egypt because had that not happened i might still be a slave in one way or the other but that is not saying i myself was liberated that's simply saying i benefit from what god did to a prior generation and that could be true but the claim at the end of market is a stronger claim it is not simply making the claim that i benefited from what was done for my ancestors rather it was done for me and the question becomes in what possible way is that true i was not in egypt i was not even in egypt as a tourist i certainly was not in egypt as a slave in what way is it a truthful statement to say i must regard myself as if i was a slave in mitzrayim i was not a slave in mitzrayim that's empirically true so kabbalistically there are interpretations that every neshama of amy israel even those that are born thousands of years later were somehow enslaved because the six hundred thousand jews of mitzrayim represented the totality of mushamos so yes my actual nishama your actual neshama was enslaved in egypt kabbalistically that's the understanding but how do we understand it in a rational sense in a non-mystical sense so there are two explanations that are given one is the explanation of the rambam and actually there are two points the rambam makes and either one would answer this question but the points are independent the first point the rambam makes is that the rambam changes the gersa that's always an easy way out right if a certain text is problematical so just correct the text and you know hebrew is a very economical language in the sense that one letter can radically change the meaning of a word now in our haggadah it says which is taken from the mishnah of adam lee wrote every person must perceive themselves the rambam changes learoth to lahar oath each person must behave must demonstrate as if they were taken out of egypt according to the rambam's gersa in the haggadah and in the mishna actually this is not a psychological emotional feeling i'm supposed to have it is simply a behavioral idea and indeed the behavior is manifest in such rituals such as reclining showing you're a free person drinking four cups of wine fancy clothes nice table in other words you are acting as if you are a free you have been liberated so by changing the passage from emphasizing an inner emotional state to externalized behavior you avoid the problem of what am i supposed to believe if it's not true that's one point the rhomba makes but then the rubber makes another point which even works with the psychological girsa and the rambam focuses in what you might call the power of imaginative thinking the power of imagination if i could use uh maybe a secular or pop culture reference uh many of you might have heard of method acting whether it's marlon brando or lee strasberg and method acting is a kind of a situation where you if you have to play something you play a doctor you play a lawyer you play an unwed mother you play a drug addict so you have to emotionally put yourself in that moment so you literally the role takes you over you're no longer playing a role you become that person in fact it sometimes has some psychological problems i mean uh it is said there was a certain actor who played a very very degenerate and disturbed person i think was a joker one of the batman movies forgive me for all these references and um he committed suicide shortly after the role now you know that one could speculate one could guess one of all sorts of things but one of the things that was reported was that he was so into that role of probing the utter depravity of this severe condition that he took him over and it possessed him and it destroyed him right that's kind of the dark side of method acting but method acting is to put yourself in the experience in fact if haskell levinstein one of the great bali musser said a good bomb musser has to have a good visual imagination that when we think about matantora we have to imagine what it's like and picture in our mind what it means to stand at the foot of mount sinai and hear hashem say a good mom user envisions kriyatyamsuf and you'd see asmitzrayam because if you're able to visualize something it has power it moves you so the rambam seems to say that the kai of adam leros is really an exercise in creative method acting in order to be grateful to god you have to imagine yourself as a slave feel the pain feel the humiliation imagine what it would be like to be enslaved and imagine the joy you feel when you're finally free you know sometimes that saddaram unfortunately where we're losing the generation sometimes there may be a bubby as 80 an older uncle or aunt who is a survivor of the holocaust and they might be able to describe what it was like to be liberated and they really have a sense of an utter slavery along with the risk of death and the feeling of being liberated so the rambam says you've got to use your power of imagination in order to experience the exodus which means according to the rambam second shot and this is keeping the gears of lee wrote leroy does not mean it's an existential truth it doesn't mean i was in egypt and it doesn't mean i was a slave but i must use my imaginative faculties in order to feel the pain of the slavery so i then get the joy of freedom and redemption so this is two points of how the rambam would address this problem but there's another thought from the balatanya the altarebe that's a very very positive thought that's really a key to many many things and he says mitzrayim has multiple meanings mitzrayim can mean egypt of course but mithraim comes from the word mithsarim maitzar boundary constriction blockage inhibition david says in tehillim i call out to god from the narrow confining places of desperation maitza the three weeks between shiva surpatamus and the ninth above are called bain ahmed between the constricted boundaries seen in this way the bala tanya says every jew and indeed every person has their own inner mitzrayim a person can have him that which inhibits my connection to hashem my connection to other people my connection to myself the person can have the mitzrayim of arrogance the mitzrayim of selfishness of egotism of either excessive pride or self-loathing depression or or despair of loneliness and isolation anger all of these things at once more than one that's our own inner mitzram and as the old saying goes it's easier to take the jew out of mitzrayim than it is to take mitzrayim out of the jew so here's what the balatanya says you know in kabbalah there's an important concept that time sacred time in particular does not move in a linear fashion it moves in a circular or spiral fashion meaning in a linear fashion past is past you go from past to present to future et cetera you're kind of moving in a line in cyclical time you're actually experiencing the very same moment when pesach has said to me zaman fei routaino that means when pessah comes the very same spiritual emanation of liberation that took place on the 15th of nisan so many years ago it takes place again and if i tap into this i'm able to become liberated from my mitzrayims because the same heiress comes into the world this actually explains an interesting facet of the jewish calendar which is relevant this year we know that the jewish calendar is primarily a lunar calendar the definition of a year is 12 lunar revolutions around the earth uh as opposed to the uh gregorian calendar julian calendar which is solar right day the earth going around the sun is approximately approximately uh we can work with approximations 365 and a fourth days 12 lunar revolutions are 354 days sometimes 55 if hechman has an extra day and as a result therefore a lunar a pure lunar calendar is 11 days shorter than a solar calendar that is why any given year a hebrew date will be 11 days earlier than the english date and then 22 days earlier earlier earlier earlier that's why people say oh pesach is early this year rosh hashanah is early this year so if you want to be a wise guy you could say oh really i always thought it was the first of tishrei is rosh hashanah earlier than the first of tishrei is pesach earlier than the 15th of nissan i don't think so but it means it gets earlier in terms of the solar dates so if year one let's say this year peso is april 15 then next year it'll be earlier so the problem is going to be of course that eventually pesach is going to be in the winter if you keep on keeping a lunar calendar without a solar adjustment so pace up will be april 15 then the next year it will be april 4th then the next year it will be march you know 20th and then the next year march 15 then it'll get into february in january and december just like ramadan the islamic calendar is a pure lunar calendar ramadan can be any time of year which works out well for the arabs because it's better for them when ramadan is actually better for us too for various reasons when people are fasting in long hot summer days their tempers flare up but that's why ramadan could be summer winter fall spring but the torah insists that pesach be in the spring so whenever pesach gets too early we add a month to the jewish calendar to push pesach later into the year making it into the spring and the way the calendar works it's very intricate but it's basically seven out of 19 years are a leap year so it's an average of between two and three years you have a leap a leap year now here's the question my route asks a question by the morale is prix but he actually is the great great grandfather of the balatanya that's why the morale is treated as an honorary khasit in shabbat and other by other because uh in fact for many years now morale is a very popular uh author but for hundreds of years morale's works were neglected were real cabal but in haciendas it was always preserved morale asked akasha why is it so important for pesach to be in the spring what's wrong with pesach in the winter i mean after all we commemorate things based on their dates 15th of nisan so whenever the 15th of nisan is should be when pesach is who cares if it's winter or spring the answer is morale says that we have to understand that the cyclical rhythms of nature are responding to the spiritual vibrations of the earth spring the reason why spring is spring is because it is the time of freedom because what happens in the spring the plants and the flowers and the trees and the fruits they get liberated from the dormancy of winter in places where you have a lot of snow that's very apparent you have snow the winter is dead but even here in eritrea where we typically don't have a lot of snow but still there's a dormancy a lot of things are happening beneath the ground so to speak but it's as if there's an imprisonment so the morale says pesa has to be in the spring because if you celebrate pesach not in the spring you're commemorating a historical event but you're not experiencing the sacred time of liberation and yamim tovim are not about commemoration they are about experience and therefore you have to coordinate the hebrew date with what is going on in the natural world because the rhythm the rhythms of nature are following the spiritual vibrations now you may ask me akasha wait a second here what about australia what about the southern hemisphere where pesach is not in the spring so what about that the answer is when we talk about the physical phenomena of the earth our mirroring spiritual phenomena we are referring to yerushalayim every er eric everything starts marriage israel so when it's spring here it is the time of freedom and liberation and then it peters down to australia and to new zealand and all those other south africa all those other southern hemisphere countries okay so the balatanya says the statements of rava that each person must regard themselves as if they were taken out of mitzrayim does not mean each person must regard themselves as if they were a slave in egypt because that's not true but each person must identify their inner mitzrayim and believe that god is giving them the capacity to become liberated from the mitzrayim that enslaves them that's a very powerful and beautiful idea because what that tells you is when you read the haggadah there are two narratives that are going on at the same time the first we will call the common narrative the narrative of what happened to the jewish people and that's our great history that is took us out with miracles and hashem remembered the covenant that he made with avraham yitzhak and he gave us a torah and he made us his nation and that is the loving history that we pass down to our children and we share with our families and this is a story that is so powerful and so beautiful that even jews who are very far from all of the traditions of judaism have almost a compulsion to get together to recount that story because that is the story of our peoplehood of our nation of our connection to god i call it the common story because that is the story that all of us share as jews but in addition to the common there's a personal private idiosyncratic story that each person has maybe you share it with others perhaps or maybe you don't maybe it's your own private story in understanding your mitzrayim and understanding that you'd see at mitzrayim put into the world a color that you can be liberated from your own mitzrayim a wonderful thing we have inhibitions we have blockages we have chains we have constrictions and this is a time where to a greater or later or greater or lesser degree we can be liberated and redeemed from that slavery a wondrous thing so there is a public haggadah and there is a private haggadah as they say sometimes you'll want to share the private and sometimes you won't want to share it but that either way that does not take away from its great powerful importance this is by tanya's idea just to give you an example of how rich the tanya is he says this in around one and a half lines so you would miss it if you didn't read it carefully but such a powerful idea of adam leeros now if i could quote again i've been already not quoting but i've already been referring to marlon brando and lee strasberg so i might as well go for broke let me refer to a well-known i think he's still a well-known black entertainer mr t uh who was a rapper and uh a uh what do they call a bodyguard a bouncer right kicks people out of a big big big guy a professional wrestler and i want to quote an insight from mr t a kiddish from mr t that i think would be an interesting thing to think about one of mr t's schtick one of his personas is he wears a lot of gold jewelry so he was once asked why he wears so much jewelry so he said something that i thought was profound maybe unintentionally profound but it said something to me and he said i wear all this jewelry all this metal because my ancestors who were taken from africa to the united states and sold as slaves also wore all sorts of chains so i wear chains the difference is their chains were iron on their legs and my chains are gold around my neck that a gold chain around your neck can be every bit as enslaving as an iron chain around your leg a person can be enslaved to many many things i can be enslaved to my selfishness as over my diving my arrogance my materialism my hedonism one could be enslaved by their own self-worship their narcissism so mr t is saying what difference does it really make if the slavery is somebody else isn't slaving me or i'm enslaved by my yates or hara by my typist and the like right so the gold chain can be a slavery as well you know people work on this treadmill i mean now i understand in manhattan uh although it's hard for me to believe they have these exclusive kindergartens that have a five-year wait list now that's interesting people enter kindergarten when they're five years old so that basically means as soon as mom gets pregnant or maybe even before she got to submit an application to guarantee a place for her child down the road why is that important what i mean you know i mean obviously you want a good gun or a good kindergarten for your child but no why is it important that it be that kindergarten it's because this is where the best families go you want to make connections early in life and then people trying to go to the best if they have money assuming the best private school the best high school best college best graduate school best job and you're running and you're running and you're running and then at some points you can call it midlife crisis whatever you want to call it it hits a person like a ton of bricks what am i doing this for what am i living for what do i do with the rest of my life you know at every point at some point in everybody's life we kind of reach a point which is as far as we're going to go professionally at some point we know we're not going to win an olympic gold medal we're not going to be on either the us or the israeli supreme court you know if you're a lawyer uh you're not going to win the nobel prize in whatever the field is right so what do you do with the rest of your life what do you do like what stay what's my life because i'm always looking for a goal and again i'm most familiar with law students i was a law professor for many years and certainly burnout is a very very common problem uh in the legal profession as it also is by the way in the ravenous that's another another issue as well and this comes from a sense well perhaps it might be a different problem but but generally speaking because not cultivating an inner life when life got defined in terms of accomplishments there's a certain finite nature to that because at some point you've accomplished already you know like a lawyer there's a saying in the legal profession you know when i'm on my deathbed i'm not going to regret not doing another merger and acquisition okay you did it okay for hashem but you know uh is that going to be gee i wish i did one more you know that's not going to be that type of situation so all of this is slavery we can be enslaved by so many things so based on this idea that the haggadah is a double narrative every element of the haggadah can be seen as a pathway to achieve my own spiritual liberation okay that's an important key so let's examine a few features we're not going to go over the haggadah passage by passage hopefully the seder will have a chance to do that but just to go over structurally some of the main kudos of how the agata is structured element number one that i want to identify is the haggadah must be conducted via a question and answer format derek that's very important number one the torah itself describes the haggadah when your child asks you but you know the mishna says even if you're all by yourself people sometimes used to ask what type of situation would it be that a person would have to spend a seder all by themselves the truth of the matter is there have always been those situations but i think with covet we've become much more aware of it indeed there were people who had to spend seder by themselves hopefully this year bezrus hashem will be far fewer people in that situation but is question and answer is so important that even if there's nobody asking the question you must ask the questions of course sincerely they say when your son asks you or your child asks you that refers to the inner child within yourself that you have to be child like in wanting to know about the world and be excited about the world that's why you know the manishtana is really cheating ideally the seder should be structured on the questions that children themselves ask but never if you can't think of questions so we'll give you some questions but ideally it should come from the audience themselves like i sort of i mean i i remember this as humorous when i was just a little kid when i was very young i remember between seven eight nine i'm not sure exactly what age so my family we were invited to a friend's seder i think was the second seder so i still remember i thought this was terribly funny even at the time that the kids of the house who were a little older than me they were peppering their father with questions about pesach and dad got annoyed and dad actually said will you please stop asking questions we have to conduct the seder you know that's it to say he was missing the point the whole point is questions barak hashem you're asking questions and the like so the question is why is asking questions so important why is there such an emphasis on questions in fact somebody once asked me in a general way a beginner in arsenal how come every dvar torah starts with questions i think about it a person gives it to our torah says there's a question here just i mean the guy asked me seriously says why don't you just say what you want to say why do you have to have a question so one answer i think is that unless you're answering a question i really i'm not interested in what you have to say you're going to get up and tell me about your philosophy of life you know what do i care about it shouldn't be if you're going to answer something all right you're giving me something right to simply get up and pontificate uh i think the meaning of judaism is you know so and so and so right so one answer is questions stimulate interest because there's a problem here you're coming to address a problem even if it's a technical problem even if it's not a global problem but you know you're addressing a problem so let's see what you're going to say without a problem it's just a pontification even if it's very valid at the same time okay that's one answer but on the deeper level which is really kind of overlapping with the simple answer is a question indicates a certain tension like a piece of music right they talk about music builds up to attention and then there's a release i don't know i don't remember what the technical term is but you know it's kind of the what's it called resolution that's right right so the same thing questions create tensions sometimes they're microscopic tensions because it may not be a great great question but even microscopic tension you know creates a little bit of unease i need a resolution questions also indicate that you want to go beyond your comfort level that you're hitting a wall and you want to go beyond a wall so the idea of the idea of a question is a desire to go beyond where i am and that is a very important level of spiritual growth i am willing to go beyond my comfort level i'm willing to go beyond my box i want to be a seeker of wisdom i recognize that what i am is not what i have to be always what i was does not have to define who i am and what i am does not have to define what i can become you know there was a well-known german jewish philosopher franz rosenspike who was a very brilliant academic late 19th century i think early 20th century uh he and martin buber actually translated the whole bible in german and although i don't read german but the nakamalibuts testified this was actually very very good excellent translation and rosensweig came of age in a generation of german jewelry that was almost totally assimilated in fact officially to get an academic position you had to become a member of the state church which was which was the lutheran church now they didn't care if you believed in jesus they didn't care if you went to church all you had to do was sign a paper and pay your annual tax i am a member of lutheran church so tens of thousands of german jews converted to christianity not because they believed it but they had no real jewish identity so they figured for professional reasons they'll be members of the lutheran church rosenstein was a person of integrity he knew nothing about judaism but he didn't want to sign the paper until he walked into a synagogue one time in his life he figured he'd walk in he'll see it was nothing and then he'll sign the paper unbeknownst to him the one day that he chose was yom keeper he didn't he never heard of yom kippur unbeknownst to him the one synagogue he chose seemingly at random was the only hasidic synagogue in berlin where the prayers were very passionate and he walks in and he sees everybody dressed in white the men and the woman and he sees people crying and praying and pleading and he couldn't believe it he had no possible imagination that judaism had such power and he decided not to sign that paper and for a while his career was not moving eventually he was able to get it on track and eventually he became he started the process of chuva that's when he got involved with the bible translation uh he died relatively young multiple sclerosis so he never became oh is it also okay he never became fully observant but became more and more traditional so one of the stories they tell about him was that his jewish friends who were assimilate as assimilated as he was they thought he was crazy they really thought he was absolutely nuts associating with these polish and russian primitive you know people you know uh not sophisticated not educated and one of them hurled what is the ultimate insult to roselle's life says i bet you even put on film as if that would be the absolute most ridiculous thing in the world and rosensweig responded not yet and it's been pointed out that not yet is a qualitatively different answer then no no says i am what i am not yet basically says as the t-shirt saying goes life is a journey not a destination and that is it's a process not yet says i'm willing to check things out i'm willing to explore i'm willing to grow i want to see what's out there i don't know where what i'll be and what i'll decide but i want to go beyond where i am and that's a tremendous thing and that is the the magic of the question i want to go further than where i am i don't simply say ah question okay that's it let's try to investigate and uh they in fact they tell the story i don't want to mention the community because it may involve a little la shinhara but there was a great great rabbi who came to the united states uh after world war one rabbi eliezer-silver who literally became one of the great the golem of america uh he lived most of his career was in cincinnati but beforehand he was a rob in some other places and his very very first robonus in america he was actually fired from the show it was the early 1920s and they fired him because they said he was wasting electricity at night in the synagogue and they said you weren't costing us money we can't afford it so when he protested and he said but i'm in the show learning torah they said to him ah that's another reason to fire you we thought we hired a rabbi who completed his education we're not going to pay you a salary if you're still studying this stuff well we just had one of the great great gaonem refraim kanyevsky who died comparatively young for argued at 94. and you know you can see how ridiculous the story is a person who learned yeoman balila for basically 90 years i mean he started very young and so life shots over and over and over and over again the infinite depth of the torah new insights new ideas right so that's what questions are i am a seeker of wisdom that is why a learned jew is called talmitham which literally means actually the translation is actually a little ambiguous and he can either mean a wise student or a student of the wise uh different ways of translating it that would depend what the plural is because if it's a student of the wise so wise is going on the teacher then the plural will be tomidei and since we say tell me day even then the the tummy day is a little awkward in the hebrew construction why students okay but whatever it is the operative word is talmid now why would you call the great rabbi a student that's a little pejorative a student you're not a student yes you are because the greater the rabbi the more they understand that life is about learning and it's about growing and you never simply sit on your laurels and say i know everything already i once had a conversation with a very very famous american academic happened to be jewish and he said something like the first 20 years of my life i listen to what other people say but from then on i don't listen i just talk he said it without any sense of embarrassment he just said i just talk and they listen meaning there's nothing for me to learn from other people at that point okay so that's the question and answer format now there's another element of the seder that we got to consider and this the mishnah lays down in four words you begin with the bad with the shame the degradation and you can conclude with the praiseworthiness which basically means that the mitzvoth of slippery and fierce mithralian it is not enough to talk about the good part you gotta talk about the bad part the slavery the idolatry the paganism the torture you gotta begin with the bad if i just talk about the good part of the story i'm not the out say the mitzvah so the haggadah is structured based on that requirement why do you need to talk about the bad so so once again you can give a simple reason and then there'll be a more complicated deeper reason the simple reason is it's the nature of life that we don't appreciate good unless we contrast it with the way things were for example a person appreciates their health much more if god forbid they were sick than a person who was never ill those of you who have family who came from persecuted environments whether it be nazi germany if older or it be the former soviet union or other environments that were difficult they appreciate freedom they become much more patriotic than a native-born person in a western democracy because they know what life is like the other way so the simple reason why we have to talk about the bad is because talking about the bad fosters appreciation for the good in a much stronger way but there is a deeper reason and the deeper reason is that the so-called bed is actually part of the redemptive experience itself it's not simply remember the bad so you appreciate the good but you actually understand that the difficulties the adversities and the suffering brings out within you qualities that you otherwise wouldn't have had in the egyptian exile we see this as well the torah says the torah talks a lot about loving the gayer loving the convert but literally don't forget the literal meaning literally gare means love the stranger because you were strangers in the land of egypt meaning look at your past as a slave where you suffered where you were humiliated you were the bottom person on the totem pole you had no protection you had no influence you were a nobody now you're high in money you're in your land you're in your culture and you meet other people who are weak and vulnerable remember your experience and that will be the source of your empathy and your compassion the quality of the jewish people which ghazal say is rahmanim compassionate by shane which literally means bashful but it refers to the kind of humble gom those who want to do we get that from two sources there's like two streams that come into that river there is the moreshet of ots particularly abram and sarah the paradigms of loving kindness and the other is you'd see not yet see at the tribe the the the dalots mitzrayim this is a gift that we got from the egyptian exile because when a person goes through difficult suffering that can give them the empathy and the compassion for others who are suffering it's an important perspective on victimhood and victimization you know unfortunately in the world people are often victims of various things sexual abuse emotional abuse physical abuse various abuses that happen and that's an awful thing and we have to try to eradicate that we have to hold people accountable but sometimes what happens when a person is abused is they become so concerned that this never happened again to them that they develop a hard shell where their whole life is occupied in protecting themselves from victimhood now i i am not going to sit in judgment in that response because sometimes that may be necessary for survival literally and nobody can criticize another person but the torah is suggesting that at some point the highest level is not to immunize yourself from your pain but to remember your pain experience your pain and use it as the springboard for the empathy and compassion that you can show others by remembering what you went through now this is a lesson that goes beyond mitzrayim and it applies to our private midterms that in every life there's adversity and challenge sometimes it's very very tragic and i know that there are people in the room that know this very close hand other times it may not have tragic dimensions but it could be very heavy on us i didn't get into the medical school i hope to get into god forbid a marriage didn't work out or people have infertility whatever it would be or sickness things don't always work out the way we hope the way we want the way we prayed yeah it's a real problem why does god do those things this was the cry of job this was the cry of moshe and hashem didn't give him a complete answer the short answer is we really don't know but as victor frankl eloquently beautifully reminds us coming out of his own experiences in the holocaust we may have very little control over what happens to us if you believe in god so god does if you don't believe in god whatever it is you know we don't know why things happen and we don't have control over things that happen but the one control we always have is how do we choose to respond to that moment we can choose the pathway of love and resilience and courage and determination to push on and try to bring light to the world or we can succumb to negativity and hatred and despair and we just shut down and that is really the lesson of material messiah to recognize this is connecting to the spiritual liberation that even in the adversity there are redemptive potentials that it's not just light at the end of the tunnel but there is light in the tunnel itself the zoa is an amazing expression the zora calls suffering the black light the light that's black now that's kind of a contradiction but he says there's a light in the blackness and just like seeing infrared light you have to have special glasses special goggles there's a black light that a special perspective can enable you to penetrate so that's the lesson of matrix let me mention quickly three more lessons of how the pesach seder is a uh is a plan a blueprint for personalized spiritual liberation let's go to robin gamlio which is a very important part of the state remember says anyone that does not explain three mitzvoths has not fulfilled their obligation of haggadah you have to explain the corbin pesach you have to explain the mitzvah of eating matzah and you have to explain the mauro so let's go over them in reverse order i'll explain at the very end why i'm going to go in reverse order marwar is tasting something that is bitter and it reminds you of slavery bitterness slavery well the lesson here is that the first step to achieving your freedom is to acknowledge your slavery to be honest enough to acknowledge the bitterness not to put things under the carpet to acknowledge i have an anger problem i have a selfish problem selfish is from my relationship problem acknowledge it again i'm not talking about public statements you know to yourself to whoever you need to talk to taste the bitterness don't live in a state of denial now i remember i lived in silver spring maryland and i would teach in baltimore at the university of maryland law school which is not college park law school was in baltimore so if you know the map you know that you're going north right from silver spring maryland to baltimore maryland is north and the main highway is 95 north 95 south takes you to virginia so when i first began to drive and i was not so familiar with the roads i would be driving and there were there was once one time i remember that all of a sudden i noticed the washington monument the lincoln memorial the jefferson memorial which you only see when you go into virginia that there's a turn off to 95 south and i wasn't watching and i find myself out there now i didn't know how to correct myself i didn't know how to get back so i can't even explain this process but i'm going to tell you i didn't want to admit i was on 95 south i didn't so i started telling myself you know maybe you do see this from baltimore on the way to baltimore you just never noticed it before maybe just noticing something on the road i didn't want to admit i was lost because if i admitted i was lost i didn't know how to correct myself but one thing is for sure until i admitted that i was lost there was no possible way i could get back on track people make this problem mistake all the time this is the famous good money after bad money you know you put money in a rotten investment and everything you're losing everything maybe if i put more money in it'll work out then we have einstein's famous statement insanity is to do the same thing over and over again thinking you'll get a different result not going to happen so morar says be honest enough to yourself to admit your slavery don't live in the world of denial stare it in the face and if you stare in the face maybe it'll be less powerful than you might think it is but then we come to matza again i'm going in reverse order i'll explain why now we know that matzah has many many lessons but one of the lessons of matzah is and i mentioned this i think last last week is matzah represents action khames represents inertia because when flour hits water and you do nothing it'll become hummus after 18 minutes you don't need yeast you don't need a starter you don't need a sourdough the requisite fermentation that defines chromates is automatic matzah requires action so mama like this moro is the cognitive awareness of my problem matzah says do something about it there are people who go to psychoanalysis for 50 years they have insight into everything in their life that ever happened from infancy to pre-birth trauma birth trauma pre-birth from maybe even preconception trauma okay whatever it would be but what do you do about it right that's behavioral therapies and the like so matzah tells a person it's not enough to have insight you got to do something practical take action you know there are moments in life that all of us get inspired but inspiration dissipates very quickly unless it's unless it's concretized in virtuous action and then it gets strengthened it gets internalized mitzvah gore you know uh we've all had this experience um let's imagine there are times uh it's before i'm kipper and you want to make up with someone that you've had a fight with and every once you've been too embarrassed too inhibited every once in a while you say i'm gonna go with the phone right now but you know unless the phone is right next to you by the time you reach the telephone they'll say ah maybe tomorrow that's how fast it goes i've mentioned that i think a number of times the story with robert hutchins the prodigy president of the university of chicago that somebody wants to ask them mr dr hutchins why do you ever desire why don't you exercise more don't you ever have a desire to do something physical he says i certainly do but but i know if i lie down it'll pass i don't let it bother me that's true for exercise and it's true for ruchnius as well so marar identify your slavery matzah do something about it and finally we have the carbon pesach again over the reversal of the order pesach has many many lessons but i just want to identify one little lesson that is the carbon peso cannot be eaten in isolation even if you have a little tiny lamb that's only a month old and if you have a big appetite and you can eat the whole lamb yourself we possibly can locus in the gemara you cannot check the carbon pesac by yourself you must bring it with other people they can be your family or they can be your friends or you can become part of a family you cannot bring the korban pesach by yourself that is even if you could eat the whole thing yourself the lesson there is in achieving spiritual liberation we have to find people that we can share our journey with ideally it would be our family our spouse our children ideally sometimes that doesn't always work out but we find friends we find a show we find a group that we connect to that shares commitments that give strength to each other and malik said in cohes two are better than one because when one falls down how will he pick himself up with two people one falls down and three is even better and this is not just talking about slipping on ice although that's true also but in all in life all the time there are moments of weakness moments that we falter moments that it's hard for us to go on and when you have friends whether it's a loving spouse or friends in a broader community or both ideally they will give me strength in my moments of weakness hopefully i will give them strength in their moments of weakness we have to be here for each other so just a final point in the seder we eat matzah then we eat more now according to this analysis we should eat more first because marwar is i got this problem matzah i'm going to do something about it so why are you eating matzah which signifies corrective action and then you eat the mara the answer is very simple although it's true that you can't correct something until you know what it is but you need to be psychologically cognizant of your capacity for constructive change meaning if i began with tomorrow i might become so overwhelmed by my failures and my inadequacies that i will lose the energy to be able to constructively transform myself so first i eat the matzah which internalizes inculcates within me the capacity of virtuous change and then i'm ready to confront my inadequacies and then i combine them in the koran where i got both the problem and the solution so the upshot of all of this is this whole uh share tonight is really an expanded commentary on the balatanya the balatanya tells us that there is the inner mitzrayim that each and every one of us has from which we have to be liberated so the suggestion we're making is that every step of the seder is connected to that personal liberation question and answer equals be a seeker of wisdom see the redemptive potential even in adversity and suffering allah victor frankel pesach matsumaru moro be honest in recognizing your slavery matzah the imperative of doing something about it not just being a victim and pesach the importance of community and sharing your spiritual search with others and be ezra hashem with these types of lessons we can transform every seder into a true you'd see us mithraim not only one of historical commemoration but one of personal liberation and to the extent we can achieve a personal liberation we can turn to akarisparko and ask for the national liberation of mashiach may it harbor may it bring in the gaula shalema for am israel and for the whole world so thank you have a good good night [Music]