Modern Jew that I am, my religious practice requires extensive use of the internet. I just Googled: “Could the Israelites see the moon when they fled from Egypt?”
The results range from quoted Torah verse in italics to ancient weather reports so, in true Jewish tradition, “Reb Google” essentially just shrugged at me and said “maybe yes, maybe no.” Things really get rabbinical, though, when I query: “Could the Israelites see the FULL moon when they fled from Egypt?”
Tradition (and probably the Chumash that I don’t have handy just now) tells us that within mere hours of the final plague, the Israelites were on the move – the 15th of Nissan, which would have begun at sundown the night before.
My next internet query is this: “When does the full moon rise over my home?”
It feels like a riddle, but it’s not. The answer is 9:11 p.m on Wednesday, April 1. This is important because, after the extra horseradish is spooned back into the jar and after the final verse of “Chad Gadya” is sung, but before the little ones are trundled off to bed, I want to take them outside.
I want to wrap my sleepy children in blankets and sit them in my lap in the grass and point to the sky in the east (I Googled it — another zen koan-esque query) and say “that moon — the full, silver moon right there — is the very same moon that lit our path as we crossed between pyramids and over the sands and toward the sea.
“That is the light that God made sure shone so that we were less lost and less afraid. It’s that very moon.”
Never during our ever-spinning Jewish year do I feel closer to my ancestors than I do on the first night of Pesach.
I’m always surprised to hear that people don’t enjoy the laboriousness of a long and droning Seder, maybe because as a child, my family’s Seders were never laborious long or droning. They always felt just right.
But they also felt — and still feel — like something we do because we have to. It’s commanded. We remember, we re-enact, we teach our children, we talk and talk and talk and then eat food that no one’s that crazy about. The Passover Seder, with its pre-ordained and definitive order, with its fancy silverware, is something we do because it has kept us and will continue to keep us Jewish. We must, after all, remember where we came from.
The Seder, to me, is for the head. Certainly, kavana (intention, feeling) is found in any Seder worth its salt, hence all that marvelous singing, all that symbolic wine. I feel it in my soul when we recall the Exodus in the first-person plural: WE groaned under slavery, WE crossed the Sea of Reeds. “All that the Lord has spoken, WE will do.”
Plenty of ink and air are dedicated to making us feel the Seder.
Still, the Seder is for the head.
The moon? That is for the heart.
Wherever we are, we can dig our bare feet into the Earth while our eyes lift to the heavens.
“Just imagine,” we can say to our children, “just imagine how a desert of sand might glimmer under such a big, bright, full moon.”
Because isn’t “imagine” just another way of saying “remember?”
Egypt is never far away and, sometimes, it feels painfully, frightfully close. But on April 1 at 9:11 p.m., I can hold my children close and whisper:
“How blessed we are, that of all the nights to be set loose in the dark, God made sure we had that to light our way.”