In the coming days, God will infuse the world with an unprecedented capacity for liberation and transcendence! Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it before. Didn’t we say the same thing last year?! And yet here we are again. What makes this year any different?

One of the highlights of the seder every year is the recitation of the four questions, which are traditionally chanted by the children, and often the youngest child who is able. The questions begin with an introduction asking “Mah nishtana halyla hazeh mikol haleilos/what makes this night different from all other nights,” and then address four actions that we engage in on Passover that are different from the rest of the year: we dip vegetables in salt water, we eat matzah instead of leavened bread, and we eat bitter herbs, we recline while we eat.

The Haggadah then proceeds to answer these four questions, explaining why we perform these peculiar actions on Passover. We dip vegetables in salt water to remember the tears our ancestors cried due to their harsh servitude in Egypt. We eat matzah because it is the bread of the poor and to commemorate the fact that we left Egypt in haste and our bread did not have time to rise. We eat bitter herbs to recall the bitterness of the Egyptian exile. And we recline to signify our current freedom, as it is the way of royalty to recline as they eat.

The overarching themes of the seder are slavery and liberation. We remember the servitude of our past, and we celebrate the liberation that God granted us nearly three and a half millennia ago. But this is not to be a mere history lesson. It is a call to action. It is not simply our past that we recall, but our future that we envision in order to make it manifest.

Immediately prior to the recitation of the four questions, the Haggadah makes a striking statement: “Now we are slaves. Next year, may we be free men.” If this were simply a celebration of a historic liberation, then it would have stated that “we were formerly slaves and we are currently free.” Instead, we recognize that we are presently enslaved, and we collectively visualize the imminent end of our servitude and our long-awaited emancipation.

But how do we get there? We have been repeating this ritual for over 3300 years, and still we have not achieved freedom from the worldly forces that constrain us. This, perhaps, is the deeper meaning of the “Mah nishtana” that we recite every year at the seder. While the simple question is ‘how is this night different from all of the other nights’ of the year, the more essential question is how will you make this seder night different from all of the other seder nights that you have experienced throughout your life?

Will you simply go through the motions again, or will you finally decide that you have had enough of this slavery and resolve to make a genuine change? While the words are chanted by our children, it is the question that God is asking us through their lips. Will your offspring grow up in a world of conflict and constriction as you have, or will you make the changes necessary to usher in the new age of peace and boundlessness that has been awaiting you?

The mystics have always whispered to us that we are the masters of our destiny. On the verse “G-d is your shade,” (Psalms 121:5), the Baal Shem Tov taught, “a shadow always follows precisely what the owner of the shadow is doing” (Kedushas Levi, Naso). Liberation and peace are therefore only as distant as we envision them. In the coming days of Passover, God will indeed infuse the world with an unprecedented capacity for liberation and transcendence. The question for each of us is whether we will grasp the opportunity this time around.

— Pnei Hashem is an introduction to the deepest depths of the human experience based on the esoteric teachings of Torah.  www.pneihashem.com

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)