This talk was delivered as a pre-Yizkor drasha at Congregation Ohr HaTorah in Atlanta, GA on the last day of Pesach 2022.
As we move towards the close of Pesach, I want to think with you about the broader concept of remembering yetziat mitzrayim regularly, throughout the year, kol yemei chayekha, “all the days of your life,” as we just read in the Torah reading and as the Haggadah discusses.
Specifically I want to think with you about the concept of remembering yetziat mitzrayim from a psychological perspective, how remembering yetziat mitzrayim might help us cope with difficult emotions and improve our mental health on a regular basis. Mitzrayim can be understood as our places of metzar, our narrow straits, our difficult emotional states, like despair or shame or anxiety or grief or any emotion that takes us over and puts us in a narrow place of suffering and stuckness. How might remembering yetziat Mitzrayim not just once on Pesach but on a regular basis help us cope with these metzarim?
We are going to approach this question through the phrase – zekher leyitziyat Mitzrayim, taking this phrase as a prescription for how to handle our difficult emotions. We will work through each word of the phrase in turn and unpack how that word’s meaning might serve as a source of guidance on how to approach our metzarim, our emotional straits or suffering.
1. Zekher leyitziyat Mitzrayim. So to start with – Zekher – zakhor – to remember is to connect, to reach across time and space and make a connection, to draw a line between ourselves and another person or being, even if they are not here, to create a current with our hearts and minds and souls that bridges the divide, that connects across distance. To do so is a mystical divine soul activity; there is nothing concrete about it. Indeed, in the Torah, it is God who is the first to remember, and what God remembers is His connection to us – Vayizkor Elokim et Noah == God remembers Noah in the flood and then, through the rainbow, remembers His covenant with humanity, and later, God remembers us in Egypt and what He remembers is His connection to us, His brit, His relationship.
To remember is to tap into a cord of connection between us and someone else. So when we are zokher, when we remember the exodus, the first part of what we are remembering is our core connection to God, perhaps even our pre-birth memory of our original connection to the divine Source. To remember is to feel the current between ourselves and God, like the angels in Yaakov’s dream, going up and down between heaven and earth To be zokher is to remember this unbreakable divine connection – something we don’t sense all the time – but to come back into that experience of a current of energy that goes up and down between us and God, like our breath, up and down.
The tefillah of Yaale veYavo, a tefillah that is all about memory, zikaron, beautifully illustrates this sense of an up and down current between us and God. First there is a string of requests for our memories to be sent up – yaale, veyavo veyigya, – a whole string of them, like angels ascending to heaven. And then there is a string of remembrances – zikhroneinu ufikdoneinu vezikhron avoteinu – a list of who it is we actually want God to remember – a string of terms that seem to pause up in heaven for a few seconds, to be remembered, and then, what comes back down is also a chain or a string of angels fluttering down to us – lefleitah letovah, lichen ulehesed . . . All the gifts that come in return. Going up, pausing and then coming back down, strings of words that represent what memory is – a current of energy back and forth between us and heaven.
The capacity for remembering God in this way, for feeling into this connecting cord of energy, is planted inside us. The Sefat Emet says that zikaron, our capacity for remembering, is our nekudah penimit, our innermost point of connection to the divine that, though it can be covered over, never disappears.
What happens when we tap into our capacity for remembering God in this way, for remembering our connection to the divine? We save ourselves. God saved Noah from the flood by remembering him. And we save ourselves from floods of emotion when we remember our connection to God. The exodus has been compared to a situation in which we are down in the bottom of a pit and God throws a lifeline down to draw us up. That’s what it feels like to us sometimes emotionally. We get stuck down in a pit, but we don’t see that there is a lifeline. To be zokher, to remember, is to come back into awareness of the lifeline that is right there waiting for us to notice it.
When you begin to see and remember your connecting cord to God in this way, two things happen to your suffering; first, you are no longer alone with the pain, with the difficulty. You have the comforting sense of accompaniment, and a sense of being held by something larger that expands the space and gives you room to breathe. Second, and equally important, it’s not just that you are not alone with the pain. You are not the pain. You are no longer identified with the pain, but instead identified with the larger you that is capable of remembering and connecting to the divine. You don’t just remember God, you remember who you are – you remember that inner point that the Sefat Emet talks about, and you become larger than the pain, you become the one who holds the pain, rather than being identified with the pain itself. You remember who you are, and who you are is a being with a direct lifeline to God.
2. Zekher leyitziyat mitzrayim. Moving on from the word zekher to the word yetziah, leaving, let us consider more carefully what in particular we are remembering here, what aspect of God’s presence in the world we are calling to mind – it is the capacity for yetziah – for leaving the narrow places, not just a lifeline, but a lifeline that is capable of drawing us up out of the pit.
What we most need to remember when we are down in the pit is the possibility of leaving it. We can’t leave unless we believe we can leave. To remember this possibility of leaving – leaving the pit, leaving the narrowness, leaving the suffering is to feel hope. The power of hope cannot be overestimated. Hope brings light, space, movement, the beginning of a feeling of getting unstuck. The experience of despair is the experience not just of the present difficulty and hurt, but also the added layer of feeling that it will never end, this is the way it will always be, no possibility of change, that there is no door out. To remember the yetziah is to remember that we are never stuck, that no matter how long we have been feeling a certain way, no matter how long the patterns have gone on for, still there always remains the possibility of leaving, of change, of being drawn up out of the pit. There always is a door out. Bnay Yisrael were enslaved for hundreds of years – they were entrenched in slavery – but we are never so entrenched that we cannot leave.
Hope facilitates change because it opens us up to imagining it, to allowing it, to letting it unfold. The yetziah from Mitzrayim did not happen through our own striving and effort, and our release from painful emotions does not happen through our own effort either – other than the effort of remembering that it is possible. Release happens not through our effort but through our opening to the unfolding divine process of healing that wants to happen inside us. It is God who does the work of drawing us up out of the pit; we merely open to it through hope and faith in its possibility.
3. Zekher leyitziyat Mitzrayim – Coming now to the last word, Mitzrayim, we turn to the difficulty, to the suffering itself. The pain, whatever it is, demands attention. We cannot deny its existence or push it away or run away from it. That only makes it grow stronger. We have hope now, the hope of leaving, but before we can leave the suffering, we need to feel it, to know it, to listen to its story, to allow it inside us.
So turning now to Mitzrayim – this, too, is an integral part of the healing process, whatever the difficult emotion is, anxiety, despair, restlessness, anger, fear – whatever it is, turning towards it and allowing yourself to feel it. We now have a container that can hold that pain – the container of our strong connection to Hakadosh Barukh hu and a confidence in our own capacity to hold steady in that connection within ourselves – it is into that connected steady space that we invite the difficult feeling back into ourselves, to be fully felt and heard.
This is what we are doing in tasting the salt water of karpas and the maror – we are feeling, in our bodies, somatically, the suffering, allowing it in, even making a bracha on the maror, on the bitterness – saying to it – yes, you, too, are part of the process, part of human experience, and I welcome you, too, into my system. From a place of wholeness provided by our divine connection – zekher – and a place of optimism provided by our knowledge of the possibility of leaving – yetziah – we can allow ourselves to feel and welcome the Mitzrayim, to acknowledge that it is there and not fight it. Here you are, Mitzrayim. I am willing to feel you.
This is a delicate art. We don’t want to get flooded by pain, but we also don’t want to push it away. So we feel it, but within the holding space of a comfortable, spacious joyous seder. Within the safety zone of a leyl shimurim, a night of protection, we say to our Mitzrayim – I am willing to feel you. We frame the difficulty with cups of overflowing wine, and in that space we allow ourselves to taste the bitterness.
To sum up:
Zekher leyitziyat Mitzrayim. zekher remember your divine connection
Yetziayah – hope – to believe in the possibility of leaving, of change, of healing
Mitzryaim – within this container of hope and connection, we allow ourselves to feel the difficult emotion.
The phrase can serve as a kind of mantra, a reminder to remember – 1) connection 2) hope and 3) to feel the pain.
I want to spend our final few minutes expanding the circle of whose Mitzrayim we include in this container of hope and connection. Zekher leyetziyat Mitzrayim is a tool not just for dealing with our own emotional difficulties, but also a tool for dealing with the suffering of others, whether they be people we know and care about or people that we read about from across the globe. We can let in their pain, not from a place of overwhelm, which happens so easily, but from this steady zekher leyitziayt Mitzrayim place, staying connected to God and keeping faith in ultimate salvation.
Zekeher leyitziyat Mitzrayim is also, of course, a tool for coping with the trauma and suffering of our ancestors, from the slavery of Mitzrayim itself to the holocaust to all the suffering between and since. This is our container for all of time. To be zokher, to remember, is a container of eternity, beyond the bounds of time. Bekhol dor vador, we say at the seder. Every generation is present at the seder, as we invite into this safe connected optimistic container all the suffering of our people from across time.
This is part of what we are doing in continually remembering the exodus from Egypt – we are continuing in each generation to offer some holding and perhaps also some healing from all the traumas of our people, inviting in the pain, the Mitzrayim, the maror, of each trauma of our history, inviting in their suffering and letting it float inside this connected hopeful container of zekher leyitziyat Mitzrayim. In this way, we begin to heal the past, and perhaps also to heal the future; we refashion the memory of slavery and hardship into one of hope and optimism for the future, we train ourselves and our children to feel the pain, but always in a holding container of hope and divine connection.
We have an impact on the past, on our ancestors. We know we do. We say so in the Yizkor tefillah – that God should remember and take care of our loved ones by the merit of our good deeds here on earth. We have the possibility of retroactively healing – bringing tikkun – to those who came before us. This is part of what it means to remember the leaving of Mitzrayim – to continue the work of healing our collective trauma alongside our personal difficulties. .
So this Yizkor, I invite you to sense inside you the cord of connection to those who are no longer here, and to feel that connection as a current that still runs between you, like the angels of Yaakov’s dreams, like an electric current, flowing back and forth between you. The holding, the current of loving energy runs in both directions – those who are gone still hold us and strengthen us, we can feel that energy coming in, and at the same time, we also send some energy back to them – we hold them, too, and perhaps, in the holding, in the remembering, we even begin to heal whatever needs to be healed in them.
This is redemptive work, this type of remembering and learning to care for our own and our ancestors’ metzarim, and it brings us one step closer to the Messianic age. The Haggadah cites two explanations of what it means to say that we should remember the exodus from Egypt, kol yemei chayekha, “all the days of your life.” According to one opinion, the word kol, “all,” comes to include nights as well as days. According to the other opinion, the word kol comes to include the Messianic era as well as this one. The words that are used there are: lehavi liyimot hamashiah, which in rabbinic Hebrew means – “it comes to include the Messianic era.” But we might read it slightly differently – lehavi liyimot hamashiach – what happens when we learn to remember the exodus from Egypt, when we create a way of living with and healing from our Mitzrayims – lehavi liyimot hamashiach – we bring about the Messianic era. To remember in this connected, hopeful way is the work of redemption, of ourselves, our ancestors and our children.
Photo by Mo at Pexels
