4/14/20 Tuesday: Eat Sleep Pray ; Hope Memory Freedom

          We are up early this morning helping to prepare for the last days of Pesach. No there is no seder, no Hagadah. No special foods. Yet the two mantras that constitute the observance of a Jewish holiday remain poignant: 1) Eat, Sleep, Pray, Eat, Sleep, Pray. and 2) They tried to kill us, We won. Let's Eat.  However, there is always another aspect to the final days of any Chag including Pesach: Remember -Zachor. The idea of Zachor has been something we have been invoking as we have said Yaaleh V'Yavoh every morning in in the Shacharit Mincha, Maariv Amidah as well as in the Birkat Hamazon. We have been asking God to remember us. as a people and a nation.  We have been asking God to remember his covenant with us.

          My wife showed me something on youtube called "Saturday Night Seder". It is a fundraiser for the CDC- The Center for Disease Control. Certainly, there were parts I did not particularly find tasteful, but overall I thought the message was incredibly powerful and watching it as we prepare for the end of Pesach and adding the theme of Yizkor made watching this Seder on behalf of the CDC even more poignant. Something has happened from the beginning of the Pesach where we recount our people's slavery, our leaving Egypt and asking God to remember us. Had that been all that God did, it would have been enough, Dayeinu. Now our narrative focuses upon the first moments after our departure from Egypt, our first moment where our freedom is challenged. We arrived at the Yam Suf - the Reed Sea, and we needed to choose, we needed to act decisively. Certainly, we acted on our own behalf. However, our ancestors also crossed the Yam Suf because they were concerned for their children, concerned for their children's future. Their focus was not only upon themselves but for the welfare of others. Certainly, we ask God to remember. However, as spiritually free, we invoke our national and individual memory. At the end of the Pesach Festival, we will say Yizkor and invoke memory. And we cannot help but remember all those who have suffered because of the current plague. The point is, Hope and Memory does not belong to the spiritually enslaved. Hope and Memory are acts that we do, We have hope and we remember, those are activities of a free people. 

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