The Mishnah says that on the night of the seder, we should be מתחיל בגנות – we should start with shame (Mishnah Pesachim 10:4).
Beginning With Shame
Shame: in addition to the physical toll of slavery, surely there is a long term emotional toll, the way one comes to view oneself as lowly and less than, not mattering as much as other people in the society, the internal effects of feeling downtrodden, humiliated and devalued as a human being. We aren’t slaves, thank God, but most of us do carry some of this type of shame, some sense of ourselves as flawed or less than or not fully worthwhile or valuable, a feeling of turning away from ourselves and hiding because there is something wrong with us.
Love is the Antidote to Shame
Love is the antidote to shame. Even if you don’t feel shame per se, most of us have some lack of self love, some basic ignorance around the full extent of how truly loved and valued we are in God’s eyes. And this love I think is the source of our redemption, our ge’ulah, our re-deeming, our re-claiming of our own inherent value, on Pesach.
God’s Love is Unconditional
Because on Pesach, the message is that God loves us no matter what. Tradition teaches that in Egypt we had sunk to the 49th lowest level of impurity, 49th out of 50, so really not doing well.
The Netivot Shalom points out that for God to redeem us in this state makes it an act of absolute unconditional love, ahavah she’einah teluyah badavar, a love that is not dependent on anything, and therefore nitzhi, eternal, unbreakable. If God had redeemed us when we were doing well, we would have thought – oh, God only loves us when we are performing well, when we do the right thing. But no – this way, we know that no matter how low we sink, God still loves us and cherishes us, and through that love, we are redeemed, through that love, by seeing ourselves through God’s eyes, we gradually come to revalue ourselves and to heal our shame.
We Can’t Lose It
The name “Pesach” comes from the divine act of skipping over our homes during the plague of the first born. The rabbis connect this skipping over to the Song of Songs phrase medaleg al he’harim umekapetz al hegeva’ot, “leaping over mountains and bounding over hills (Song 2:8)” and they explain that during the exodus, God was jumping over our sins – ignoring them– in order to redeem us (Pesikta deRav Kahana 5:7). God leaps over whatever is in the way, all the human reasons that occur to us about why we might not deserve to be loved or redeemed, God leaps over all those and says – in spite of everything, I claim you. The leaping over is a kind of claiming, like the placement of a flag of demarcation over our homes – diglo alay ahavah, God’s flag is a banner of love over me (Song 2:4) – God leaps over us as a mark of connection and embrace: in spite of everything, I claim you. You are sunk low, you feel small and unworthy, and in spite of everything, God claims you.
The antidote to shame is love, free flowing love for all of you. We feel so small sometimes, but God is claiming us at every moment, passing over us as we curl up in a ball of shame, passing over us as God passed over Moshe in the cleft of rock, passing over us in a full embrace of who we are with all our warts and imperfections, claiming the whole of us in love.
And We Don’t Earn It
There is more. It’s not just that we are loved despite our flaws, but also that we don’t need to earn the love through our performance. God’s love is neither stopped by our faults, nor is it brought about through our rightdoing, through our positive actions and accomplishments. We are enough, dayenu, we are enough just as we are, for God to bestow kindness upon us. Of course it is lovely to do good things in the world, and God wants us to do them, and to become ever kinder and more whole, but none of that is why God loves us. It is very important to untangle this – we are loved for free, hinam, veyehuneka, through divine grace, just because we exist. Nothing can stop that, and we also don’t need to earn it.
This is the message of the matzah, too. All year we think we need to be hametz, to be highly risen bread, to puff ourselves up with performance and accomplishment, and all of that is great, but on Pesach, what we find out is – this is not why God loves us. We can just be our bare bones essence, like matzah, take off all the makeup and fancy dresses and jazzy dance moves – let go of all that perfectionism and intense striving – and just be ourselves, loved just as we are, in our essence, nothing extra needed. There is deep rest and relaxation in this knowledge, nowhere to run, nothing to do, loved for free, exactly as we are.
But Are We Open To Receiving It?
It’s not always easy to receive such love. The problem is not in God’s giving; the problem is in our opening to it. We have parts that are suspicious and wary, that don’t trust it, that insist on our need to earn it and not lose it, that hold tightly to that conviction and to the notion of ourselves as not fundamentally entitled to it, not already included and belonging. We see this in the rasha, the wicked child of the seder. We all have such a part inside us, and its evil lies not in what it does to others, but in what it does to us, how it says to us: you are not included here; God’s love does not extend to you. Indeed, this part does hold a certain truth about how redemption works: the only thing that can take us out of God’s love, that can stop us from being redeemed, is our own refusal to believe in it for ourselves, our own refusal to include ourselves in that love. From God’s side, the door is always open. It is we who tend to lock ourselves out.
Marking Your Door As Open
Which is why the Israelites, on the eve of their redemption, had to mark their doors. The only thing that is required to be redeemed is to make a declaration of belief in the possibility of that redemption, to say: I include myself. I believe that God loves me, that, in spite of everything, in spite of my self-perceived low state and unworthiness, God still claims me and redeems me. To declare oneself, in God’s eyes, never irredeemable. I have to mark it in some way, to put blood on my doorpost, to signal concretely my faith in God’s unconditional love, and this one act keeps the door open inside me to receive it. I declare it, and in the declaration, I open the door, I open myself, in spite of everything, in spite of all of the rasha voices that say otherwise – they can also be included in the love – in spite of all of that, I open myself to God’s love. I allow God to pass over me, to claim me and redeem me as I am.
We Conclude With Praise
“We begin with shame and we conclude with praise.“ מתחיל בגנות ומסיים בשבח. The journey is not linear. We start on one plane, the human plane of shame, of our self understanding as being flawed, and, as we grow to know our own true belovedness in God’s eyes, we move to another plane, to the divine plane; we begin to see our own wholeness, and from this place of wholeness, we pour out an abundance of praise and thanksgiving to the One who loves us into wholeness. We are no longer looking at ourselves and our mistakes or even concerned with our performance and accomplishments. The scale and perspective shifts entirely. We surrender to being loved, and in that surrender, we are filled and overflowing, and we pour out that bounty to God, offering it back up in response and requital to what fills us. Our shame was, in a way, a request for love, and, as we learn to open to receiving the love, we turn around and send it back up to God in the form of praise, in the form of song, and in the form of loving each other more fully Out of the hole of our shame arises a bounty of praise. Thank You for loving us into redemption.
Chag Sameach!
Photo by Lukas at Pexel
