Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
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Lift-off!

PASSOVER EDITION 5781
SECTION A PAGE 4

My mentor and friend, Rabbi Yisroel P. Gornish says, “I love Pesach. Pesach is a different world.”

Indeed. Something as conceptually simple and counterintuitive as removing all leaven from one’s house and diet for a week changes everything. (I say “conceptually” simple because the preparations for Pesach are anything but.) Diet is a springboard to a change in soul and spirit, a shift in perception. Passover is a different world because it is a higher world.

In what sense?

Passover often gets a “bad rap” past the first day. On the evening of the second day of Passover, the 49-day omer count, which advances Passover to the holiday of Shavuot, begins. The connection between the two holidays is often conceived as minimizing Passover. We are often told that the real meaning of freedom lies in Shavuot. Physical freedom — such as liberation from Egypt — has no meaning if it does not climax in spiritual commitment, represented by the revelation of the Torah on Shavuot.

This is a bad rap.

Passover is more significant than that. This should be perfectly evident now, after a full year of pandemic. Conquest of the pandemic — a purely physical liberation — would not seem like a preliminary to something else, no matter how lofty.

Physical freedom is not a preliminary. It is a different world in and of itself — and the omer count teaches this.

If the ultimate message of Passover were the spirituality of Shavuot, we would be counting down from Passover — like the countdown of a rocket lift-off. The ultimate point is not the preparations for the lift-off, but the lift-off itself. That is why there is a countdown, “10 seconds to lift-off, 9 seconds to lift-off, 8 seconds, 7, etc., down to 0.” Boom! The rocket engines release a glowing panorama of flame.

Not so in the omer count.

With it, we count up, not down. “Today is the 1st day of the omer, 2nd day of the omer, etc. . . . 49th day of the omer.” We count from, not to. We count up, not down.

We begin, not end, with the lift-off.

The lift-off is freedom. Physical freedom. Liberation. Release from oppression. This is a different world.

It is savored not just for the first day of Passover. It is not minimized, somehow, when the omer count begins. In fact, it is savored not just for the entire seven days of Passover (eight in the Diaspora). It is savored for the entire 49-day omer period. Passover is not minimized, it is intensified, by the omer. Physical freedom is so significant that it cannot be contained by the week of Passover alone.

I am reminded of the bookends of life. We are born alone and die alone, but in the great expanse in between we can only live together, in human relationships. Passover is the great expanse between the moment of liberation and the ultimate spiritual home.

What is the message here for Shavuot?

The revelation of the Torah — spirituality — is tough to grasp if one is physically oppressed. If one is mired in poverty or living under totalitarianism, not to mention torture, Shavuot is attenuated, difficult to embrace.

Passover conveys the supreme importance of freedom. This one week without leaven creates a frame of both personal and communal history: the imperative for each person and each community to strive for freedom, or to appreciate and expand the freedom already in hand.

Ask people without freedom. They know. They will tell you: We can imagine no greater blessing than freedom.

It is a different world.

It is on this solid rock that Shavuot can then bestow the sweetness and the infinity of Torah.

Happy Passover!

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IJN Executive Editor | [email protected]


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