Rabbi Guy Tal: Passover and the long journey to redemption

By Rabbi Guy Tal

(Edmonton) – “Good morning,” said the little prince. “Good morning,” said the merchant.

This was a merchant who sold perfected pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You swallow one a week and you no longer feel any need to drink.

“Why are you selling those?” asked the little prince.

“Because they save a tremendous amount of time,” said the merchant. “Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week.”

“And what do one do with those fifty-three minutes?”

“One does what one wishes with them.”

“As for me,” said the little prince to himself, “if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.” (Excerpt from The Little Prince)

Efficiency, the shortening of processes, speed, optimization, productivity, thrift, effectiveness. These are synonyms for improvement and progress. Yet, they may also serve as ciphers for the disregard of the path, of inner maturation, and of those protracted processes that construct a new and enduring reality.

“And they hearkened not unto Moses for shortness of spirit, and for cruel bondage” (Exodus 6:9).

“Whosoever is straitened in his spirit, and his breath is short, and he is unable to prolong his breathing” (Rashi, ibid).

But great things are fashioned through long and profound procedures of essential change in the nature of reality and the spirit of man. Redemption is not built in a day, nor is the human spirit transformed in a single hour. At times, speed signifies superficiality, and efficiency represents a self-concession that abandons the full scope of creation. One cannot hasten the formation of the fetus in its mother’s womb; one cannot leap forward the maturity of the soul or the capacity for internalizing truth. “Forasmuch as this people refuseth the waters of Shiloah that go softly” (Isaiah 8:6).

“I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly,” she said. “If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he’d say” (Fahrenheit 451)

The Mishnah in Tractate Avot, Chapter 5, delineates a list of matters pertaining to the number ten. Thus, for example, the chapter opens with the statement: “By ten utterances (mamarot) was the world created,” meaning that ten times the Holy One, Blessed be He, commanded a thing to be brought into existence, such as “Let there be light.” Later, the Mishnah also notes the Ten Plagues. The Sfat Emet cites his grandfather, who connects these concepts:

“My lord, my grandfather, my teacher and master, of blessed memory, said: that the necessity for the ten plagues was to remove the husk (klipa) and the concealment from the ten utterances, in order to transform them into the Ten Commandments.”

Once, in the depths of history, the world was created by means of ten utterances. The words of G-d Himself are the very essence of pure holiness that became substantial within reality, the Divine spark dwelling within every creature and every being. Yet, it is shrouded and hidden by many layers of evil, darkness, and wickedness. Generation after generation, humanity contends with the removal of this husk, which seems only to broaden and thicken. And behold, after a profound internal process, thousands of years and especially two hundred years of darkness and servitude, a process of forging the Nation of Israel like a fetus in its mother’s womb, the time arrived for holiness to be revealed and to burst forth. But the husk would not permit it to break through, gripping it with force. Thus, the Lord intervened, peeling away the evil, husk after husk, stumbling block after stumbling block, revealing the holiness hidden within existence. This is the procedure leading from the Creation of the world to the Giving of the Torah. In this manner, the Ten Utterances – the unilateral Divine proclamation, a declaration unto a reality without a recipient – are transformed into the Ten Commandments: a discourse, a dialogue, granted to the People of Israel at the Revelation of Mount Sinai.

However, the process was too rapid, and superficial. The change emanated from above rather than from internal labor, appearing artificial and forced – as if “He suspended the mountain over them like a tub.” The husk of stone and the evil clinging to reality did not vanish in a single day, nor through a process of several months. Immediately following that exalted standing, the People of Israel fell into the Sin of the Golden Calf, which illustrated the current reality more than it created a new one—the process of repair remained long and intricate.

Therefore, the rapid and Divine process is replaced by a long and exhaustive human educational one. It is a struggle and deep internal building spanning generations. “In every generation, a man is obligated to see himself as though he went forth from Egypt.” Every year, we sit at the Seder night, reliving those same experiences and recounting those same stories, discovering the Commandments within the Utterances, or the Utterances within the Commandments, praying, expecting, and yearning for the complete repair, the Tikkun of the world, and the coming of the Messiah; for “eye to eye shall they see, when the Lord returneth to Zion.”

In the midst of this long, wearying, and arduous process, one must not throw up his hands or surrender to despair. In one way or another, the good shall be revealed, shall triumph, and shall endure. This faith is the immense internal force that leads us from destruction to redemption, from the Holocaust to the establishment of the State of Israel, from the seventh of October to the striking of our enemies hip and thigh, and shall soon lead us unto the complete Redemption.

Yet even within this long journey, a journey fraught with ascents and descents, destruction and rebirth, we must guard ourselves against “shortness of spirit.” We must not allow the race for victory or “efficiency” to make us forget the beauty of the path. Even if the way to the spring is far longer and more taxing than those fifty-three saved minutes, it possesses a value that no pill can replace: the ability to notice the flowers by the wayside, the internal ripening that is born of the walking itself, and the knowledge that the water will be sweeter and purer precisely because of the thirst that steadily built within us along the way. Redemption, it seems, is not the final destination, it is the capacity to walk toward the spring at leisure, step by step, without forsaking a single moment of the journey.

Rabbi Guy Tal is the Rabbi at Beth Israel Congregation in Edmonton.