(Originally published in January 2021)
The Israelites stand in the portal to freedom on the night of the fourteenth of Nissan, as the first-born plague rages around them. Their portal is marked by blood, the blood of the sheep they just sacrificed, but also, symbolically, the blood of their years of suffering. They are poised for redemption.
And on that night, at a very precise moment, exactly midnight (as only God can measure it), at the peak of darkness in the world, they experience a divine revelation; their bloodied history turns into a doorway for them, a doorway to a truth that is beyond this world, a mystical meditative moment of great intensity.
While their neighbors scream in terror, swirling in chaos, there is a moment of utter silence in the Israelite homes; dogs, with their special hearing, can sense the otherworldly presence that has revealed itself, and they become quiet. The dough that was rising falls flat. The King of Kings has appeared and all that is extraneous blows away like chaff.
This is a moment of great clarity for the Israeiltes. The sense of protective love which is normally only a vague hope, if felt at all, is now manifest and palpable. We commemorate this experience with the word Pesach, named for God’s action on that night over the Israelite homes. Normally translated as “pass over,” it is also understood by some to mean “protected” or “had compassion” (see Rashi and Onkelos). The experience surely was as undefinable as the word itself — an experience of divine compassionate protection that felt something like a hovering embracing presence, passing over and coming back and forth, like a pulsing energy field of connection or, as Song of Songs has it, like the passionate energy of a lover skipping over hills to reach His beloved. Intensity, compassion, protection, connection. Whatever the exact nature of this Pesach motion, for the Israelites it was a moment of clarity and revelation, of knowing in an embodied way that God was with them.
This doorway also opens up for them another kind of knowing — an understanding of divine time. Standing at the cusp of change, with the blood of suffering still fresh in their bones, they are opened up to a knowledge of eternity. The text signals this shift in perspective by suddenly moving from a purely historical narrative about the past to mixing in instructions about the future commemorations of this event for generations to come, a hukat olam, “a law forever.” It is as if the Israelites, standing at that precise moment in their bloodied portals, can see out into the far distant future, to the generations that will tell this story and continue to relive it. All of that — the laws of the matzah and the festival and the future children asking — it is all contained in that moment of the present for them. They have so fully entered that present moment of Presence that it has opened up for them all of time in a moment, as if each moment, lived in full presence, is actually a doorway to eternity, containing in its depths all of time by being beyond time.
This experience, too, is an experience of divine revelation, a moving out of self into something larger. It is as if their bloodied doorways opened up to a field that stretches out endlessly before them, and this spaciousness is a manifestation of God Himself.
My sense is that these two elements — the sense of loving protection and the experience of eternity — are not really separate. When we move out of fear into a feeling of loving protection, what we are experiencing is a large expanse of space and time, a knowledge that things may seem difficult at the moment, but that eternity will bear out the triumph of goodness; we are entering this moment fully, yes, but in doing so, we are also entering another zone that puts this moment into an eternal context of divine love, stretching out before us without end, more solid than the temporary fear that preceded it.
How do we access such portals to the divine? The Israelites were at a pivotal moment. They were still slaves and had been through much suffering, but the road ahead was looking hopeful and they had enough strength to trust what was unfolding, to trust that they were indeed being redeemed by God. They did not side-step the suffering, but turned towards it, turning it — through the blood — into a doorway to something larger. That blood became both a sign of their past suffering and also a sign of their current trust and hope in God, as they flagrantly disregarded Egyptian norms in the slaughtering of a sheep. The midnight darkness of the night and the emphasis on eating the festive meal al merorim, “with bitter herbs,” are reminders that part of the experience involved fully embracing the suffering, even as they anticipated and believed in the possibility of an imminent redemption.
This combination — entering the darkness, not avoiding, but actually going through the doorway of suffering, and at the same time doing so with some hope and trust — this combination seems to be the key to accessing such an experience of the divine, of knowing with clarity God’s eternal loving protection. To stand at such a portal, entering the suffering but also believing in redemption — is to enter into a vast spacious field of compassion, to suddenly find that this field was always waiting for us, wanting to heal us and care for us, waiting only for us to have the courage to pass through the doorway with faith.
