Pesach

A Tradition has it that as Moses sat in conversation with The Eternal,
Who had already revealed ehyeh asher ehyeh: that "I Am That which
ever was, ever is and is becoming, Source and Destiny" he contemplated
in silence the burden of a responsibility he did not consider himself
adequate to meet nor ever could be.

The voice of the Lord woke him from his fixed concentration.
The bush before him was just a bush now, but its light had never left his eyes
since the day he'd found it surrounded in flame without being consumed.
Now this voice with its stern force aroused him within himself out of the stillness.

"Moses, are you with Me?" came the question very plainly, and suddenly.
Already on his knees for hours and in dedicated attitude toward this Presence,
addressing him, a mere man, with a mere voice out of the unlimited Absolute
– he answered, “Yes, I am here.“

Abraham could answer like that, he was called The Friend of God, but Moses
was slow of speech and slow of tongue, he wasn't the best choice for the task.
"But Moses, are you with Me?" This confused him, he had answered.
"Yes, Lord, I am here, I am with you." What does He want from me, I'm here!

"Moses..." came the voice so naturally it shook him more than calmed him.
"If you are really with Me, remove that stone just to the right, behind you."
This he did, already perplexed, feeling foolish, he moved the stone there aside.
Out of the hole under the stone hopped a common frog. So simple. Who knew?

Still perplexed, Moses feeling like a carnival shill, God spoke very gently to him:
"Moses, you aren't with Me. You're with your family and with your flocks, you're
with your people, indeed you are with them and their suffering. You are all that,
but you are not with Me." Moses got it. He collapsed with his face in the dust.

"Moses, when will you get it? I am sending you forth because I alone know you,
but know : I alone am doing this, it is in My hands entirely."
The entire Pesach Tradition gives us, among other things – like a great Seder – this:
that this Relationship is not circular and redundant, but taking one somewhere.

 

That was revolutionary for its time. Not the Egyptian bondage is central, but the Exodus;
not the desert wandering, but Sinai, not the calf, but the formation of a people
with an identity among the nations. Just so, not the ghettos and the pogroms,
nor the Shoah, but the Enlightenment and the liberation – from bondage, from pogroms,
from ghettos and from concentration and death camps. Not losing but gaining a Home.

"Are you with Me?" is asked of each, now and every moment, while everyone
is overwhelmingly concerned with debates ad nauseum, over "whether He is with us"...
In this there is no faith, only religion, only repetition. The proof for this people,
however, is in the continuum, ever moving, ever in development, ever growing.
In this maturation lies the real Pesach.