Imagination, empathy shape Seder experience
There was a time when I would only go out of my way to listen to speakers older and more experienced than I. More recently I have sought out younger rabbis and teachers whose ideas feel fresh and often right on target, shaped by a rapidly changing world.
Once, during a visit to Israel, I sat in on a series of lectures which were designed to prepare the audience for the upcoming Passover holiday. The speaker, a brilliant young rabbi, spent most of his opening lecture elaborating upon what he considered the most difficult task with which we are all confronted on the first night of Passover. The task is described in the following famous passage:
“In each and every generation, a person must see himself as if he personally left Egypt. As it is written, ‘And you shall explain to your son on that day that it is because of what the Lord did for me when I went free from Egypt (Exodus 13:8)’.”
The requirement is explicit in the biblical text: the L-rd did it for me, when I went free from Egypt.
The young rabbi candidly confessed that he had never been able to fulfill this requirement. Indeed, he didn’t think it was possible to envision ourselves as if we personally had experienced slavery and redemption.
“This,” he insisted, “is the most difficult task we are faced with on the Seder night.”
I was struck by his assertion. While I had always found it easy to imagine slavery and to feel the joy of redemption, his words lingered. Was it truly so simple?
As I reflected, a long-forgotten memory resurfaced — a lecture I had heard years earlier from Rabbi Yekutiel Yehudah Halberstam, the Klausenberger Rebbe, a Shoah survivor who endured Auschwitz and lost his family.
He recounted a mentor who claimed he could vividly remember the slavery in Egypt — the backbreaking labor, the squalid conditions, even the faces of his tormentors.
The Klausenberger Rebbe confessed that when he first heard his mentor make those claims, he had difficulty believing them.He thought that his mentor had made such a claim just for the effect it would have upon his listeners. He stressed that sometimes it is justified for a speaker to resort to hyperbole to make his point more dramatic and more graphic.
But over the years, the rebbe said he had come to realize that his mentor was telling the absolute truth.
“It took the experiences I had during the horrible years of the Holocaust,” he exclaimed, “for me to realize why my mentor was able to recall his experiences in ancient Egypt’s tyranny.”
• • •
The rebbe explained that two essential qualities are required on Seder night: koach hadimyon, the power of imagination, and mitleid, empathy.
We often rely too heavily on reason and intellect. But to truly fulfill the Seder’s command, we must allow ourselves to imagine — to feel — beyond reason. Only then can we see ourselves as having endured slavery and experienced freedom.
This applies beyond Passover. To give charity properly, we must feel another person’s poverty. To comfort the sick, we must share in their suffering. That is empathy, and it depends on imagination.
These are not easy traits to develop. The young rabbi, in his own way, was right.
When I later shared the rebbe’s insight with him, he listened thoughtfully, then smiled.
“But the Klausenberger Rebbe didn’t say that learning to imagine and to empathize were easy.”
He was correct.
Creative imagination and true empathy are difficult to achieve. They may be among the hardest tasks of Passover.
Yet they are also its essence. Through them, we connect not only to our past, but to one another — and to the meaning of freedom itself.
Chag Sameach!
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
