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Ariel Ben Avraham

Reflecting on Pesach

1Every year, by direct Divine Commandment we commemorate the Exodus from Egypt with specific instructions to recall that extraordinary event for our children’s learning and awareness of its significance. Interestingly, we recall that miraculous episode not only once a year but every single day in our Jewish daily prayers. And the reason is quite simple: every day we pronounce the same crying out to our Creator for Redemption made more than 3300 years ago as slaves in the land of Egypt.

In our daily prayers we make ourselves aware that God’s Love delivers us from the dominion of our materialistic beliefs, ideologies, thoughts, emotions, passions and instincts (represented by the land of Egypt, and the Egyptian high officers and soldiers), and the ruling of ego’s desires (Pharaoh). We cry out laud to our Creator, appealing to His abundant loving kindness, compassion and truth, when we are fed up, bored or unsatisfied by the emptiness of the illusions derived from materialism, and realize that there must be something more meaningful and transcending in life worthy enough to be experienced every every moment of our lives.

Also when the emotions and the body tell us that we are sick-and-tired to be sick-and-tired of the same “reality” in which negative patterns dominate the “order” imposed on our daily life, such as the way in which people do business, engage in politics and bureaucracy, corruption, destructive competitive practices based on pride, financial profit, prestige, to have power over others, et al. And, in a less mindful approach, when things get so worse that our emotions and body can’t handle the negativity derived from a wrong attitude toward life.

In other words, this occurs when our intellect (the capacity to reason and conceive the interaction among each other and our environment), our beliefs (the ideas, conceptions and thoughts that make us approach life and the world), our emotions (the way our feelings and senses experience our beliefs), and our body can’t relate anymore to the status quo, the state of affairs, the material reality we are surrounded by.

These causes that compel us to cry out to God were experienced by our ancestors in ancient Egypt, and are the same causes that we experience now and during centuries in between. These causes exist as long as we live exiled among the nations, those other lands similar to Egypt where we were dispersed after we chose to separate from our Creator. Our God didn’t disperse us in exile from Him, because His Love does not disperse or separate. We did it and we do it every time we choose to live in the illusions of “foreign lands”, and not in the truth of our own Promised Land which represents our consciousness of God’s Love. As long as we live in this sublime awareness, we will never be separated or exiled.

Every year we recall the Exodus and teach our children why and how God’s Love delivered us from the land of Egypt. We tell them that the miracle happened because our ancestors chose to return to their God, and He answered their call. Not only for their freedom but with the promise to make them His Chosen People in His Holy Land. And His promise was fulfilled.

Let’s teach our children this is why every day we remember the Exodus from Egypt as a way to appeal to God’s Love, to redeem us again from the illusions that separate us from Him, His ways and attributes. And let’s pray together to make this the Final Redemption, and again be One with Him.

About the Author
Ariel Ben Avraham was born in Colombia (1958) from a family with Sephardic ancestry. He studied Cultural Anthropology in Bogota, and lived twenty years in Chicago working as a radio and television producer and writer. He emigrated to Israel in 2004, and for the last fourteen years has been studying the Chassidic mystic tradition, about which he writes and teaches. Based on his studies, he wrote his first book "God's Love" in 2009. He currently lives in Zefat.