Time is a tyrant. It plants a "One Way Only" sign on the road of
life, another dictating "No Stopping, No Standing", and mercilessly
enforces both rules without equivocation. It wrenches us away from our past and
holds off our future behind a wall of ignorance, making compost of our most
treasured moments and a mockery of our predictions.
We might overthrow political dictators, cure diseases, overcome poverty; but
if we want to be free, we must conquer time. For of what use would it all be, if
we remain imprisoned within a sliver of present, sliced so thin that anything we
have and everything we are already was or hasn't yet been?
That is why Passover, the festival of freedom, is predicated upon the power
of remembering. Memory is our answer to the tyranny of time. Reclining at the seder,
eating the matzah and the marror and drinking the four cups of wine, we
ingest history into our very flesh and blood, tasting -- and becoming -- the
bitterness of our slavery, the triumph of our Exodus, the faith that carried us
from Egypt, and the commitment we entered into at Sinai. Time's bounds fall away
that night; the past becomes current, history becomes now.
But if only the roadblock to the past were lifted, ours would be only a
partial victory. If time surrendered only one of its frontiers on Passover but
maintained its blockade of the future, we'd be only a half-free people, masters
of our past but prisoners of the unknowable to-come.
That is why Passover has two parts. The "first days" with its seders
and its reliving of history, and the "final days" with its messianic
themes -- days that herald the divine goodness and perfection which, the
prophets promise us, is the end-goal of creation and the fulfillment of our
present-day lives.
There is even a Chassidic custom, instituted by the Baal Shem Tov and further
developed by the Rebbes of Chabad, to conduct a "mirror-seder" in the
closing hours of the last day of Passover, complete with matzah and four cups of
wine. These are hours, say the Chassidic masters, when time relinquishes its
last hold upon our lives; when the future, too, can be remembered, and the Era
of Moshiach tasted and digested as the Exodus is on the seder night.
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