Shabbat HaGadol
SING: Kadesh, Urechatz, Karpas, Yachatz; Maggid, Rachtzah, Motzi, Matzo; Maror, Korech, Shulchan Orech; Tzafun, Barech, Hallel, Nirtzah.
Next week, we celebrate the holiday of Passover. Though we will be apart, we will all be connected as we move through the structure of the seder together. Each part of the seder will reveal a facet of our collective story; taken as a whole, it will provide a map of our journey toward freedom.
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While we as a people have had years to understand our experience of slavery, and can retell its story in a way that helps us find new meaning in it, the challenge we are all experiencing now is new: we don’t know how we will tell its story, or what meaning we will find in it months or even years from now.
As we live through this particular chapter, many of us are feeling a kind of discomfort -- deeper than our inability to hug our children, or see our friends, or order the food we want. This discomfort has a name: grief.
In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, David Kessler, the world’s foremost expert on this topic, describes the grief we have experienced for weeks now: the loss of normalcy, the economic toll, our loss of connection. We add to this the devastating loss of some in our own communities.
And then there is the grief we feel about the losses to come.
Unlike the Passover seder, the traditional stages of grief don’t happen in order, but they can help us name feelings that are often hard to recognize.
They are:
Denial: The belief, “This virus won’t affect us!”
Anger: “You’re making me stay home, taking away my activities, and feeding me lousy sandwiches!”
Bargaining: “Okay, if we social distance for another week everything will be better, right?”
Sadness: “I don’t know when this will end…”
Acceptance: “Okay, this is really happening – I have to figure out how to proceed.”
Acceptance is where our power lies right now. We can find some control in it: I can wash my hands, I can stay home, I can call or learn to video conference with those I love. Another way we can all find a little seder, a little order, in our lives, according to Kessler, is to find balance.
Maybe we do this by naming five things in the room. Or perhaps we use our senses to notice what we feel. Or taking a few deep breaths, we can realize, in the present moment, nothing we’ve anticipated has actually happened.
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The seder is our people’s way to create meaning out of an otherwise devastating chapter in our history -- one that felt hopeless, chaotic, meaningless.
Though we are living again in a time of deep uncertainty and fear and cannot yet tell the story of how we will get free from it, we must recall the power we do have:
The power to find balance, to remember what we can do; the power to acknowledge our grief. As we name the losses we are experiencing may we feel what’s inside of us, so that feeling can move through us, and we can make room for the next feeling.
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We’re all in this together: I hold you in my prayers – for safety, well-being, ease, peace, and even joy. For one feeling after the other to move through you, so you can begin to find some seder in this uncertain time. As I pray for you, I ask you to also pray: for me, for the staff, and for the OC community.
Amen.