בכל דור ודור
חייב אדם לראות את עצמו
כאילו הוא יצא ממצרים
In each and every generation,
a person is obligated to see herself
as if she left Mitzrayim (Egypt/narrow straits).
(From Magid in the Haggadah)
Some thoughts on this passage:
1. It matters how you view yourself.
We often think what matters in life is only how we act and how we treat others. When are we ever taught how to view ourselves? And that it actually matters what you think about yourself? This is radical, the instruction here — a person is obligated to see herself in a certain way.
2. Do not identify yourself with your trauma.
A person should see herself as having left Egypt, having left her constraints, her past traumas and conditioning and wounding. Now most of us have not yet completed this task, and perhaps never will. We are all to some degree still in the process of leaving and healing from the past. But that is not the question here. The question is not the reality of where you are on your journey, but rather, how you view yourself, even when parts of you may still be stuck in trauma. Do you understand your own self identification as primarily a limited one, constrained and conditioned and disempowered by your previous programming and conditioning, or do you identify with the Self that has already left, the Self that is beyond such wounding and distortion, that is always already whole and healed? Even if you still have a lot of brokenness, even if there are parts of you that still hold trauma, can you feel that you are more than that and can you view yourself from that transcendent place? That is the road to freedom.
3. The move away from constrained conditioning is an obligation.
We often think of the inner work of healing and freeing oneself from trauma as a luxury, something perhaps we have permission to spend time on, but as a kind of bonus, an extra, to the real work of living a good life. Not so according to this passage. Here such work is understood not just as permissible, but as obligatory. It is incumbent upon each and every person in every generation to leave their particular Egypt, whatever keeps them enslaved and disempowered and constrained. We are gifted with life in order to live into ourselves in the fullest possible way. Freedom is not an option, but the reason we came here, to free ourselves from the past traumas that stand as obstacles to our fullest fruition as humans.
4. We have an obligation not to view ourselves as perpetual victims.
Again, the obligation here is to view yourself as if you have left Egypt, not that you are still in Egypt and in danger. This is important because when a person suffers such trauma, and a people suffers such trauma for hundreds or thousands of years, the sense of victimhood becomes entrenched and a part of one’s identity for oneself, one’s children and one’s grandchildren through many generations, a lens of vulnerability and victimhood through which we view the world and what happens to us We remain stuck in the sense of ourselves as helpless victims long after that is no longer the case, and we in fact have a great deal of power.
This is dangerous because when we are stuck in an unhealed trauma lens, we don’t view the current situation accurately, and we tend to re-enact the old trauma again and again because that’s all we can imagine.
This is also dangerous because victimhood blinds us to our own moral responsibility and agency. Victims are acted upon, without any power of their own, thereby excusing them from normal moral considerations; a victim’s only concern is protection and survival, not ethical action. In such a climate, extreme violence and cruelty may not even be seen for what they are, blinded as we are by our own sense of ourselves as endangered victims, eternally stuck in Egypt.
The obligation to view ourselves as having left our trauma applies even if there are still ways in which we may still be living in it, still experiencing some level of wounding. Still, the obligation is to view ourselves as having already left, to remember the truth of our own unshakable power, to see ourselves as fully capable whole human beings with responsibility for how we act. This is how we redeem ourselves and the world, ironically, by viewing ourselves as having already been redeemed.
