Passover Recap

With Passover having ended last night, I wanted to comment on how easy I found the Passover diet this year. Part of that can be explained by the fact that the only part about Passover eating I tend to find difficult is packing lunches, and this year I only had to pack a lunch 2 times (thanks to the Yom Tov’s, weekends, and the secular holiday).

But the other part is more spiritual, much in the same vein as why I found the fast on Yom Kippur to be so easy this past year. In past years I was focused on the limitations of Passover. What I can’t eat. This year, I looked at it differently. I was focused on “why” rather than the ‘how”. I asked myself the question, “why do I have to be careful what I eat?” The answer that I gave myself was that if it wasn’t for G-d acting to bring me out of Egypt, I would not be here writing this blog, I’d be building store cities for whatever Pharaoh was in power today (I’ll assume that with millions of Jewish slaves, Egypt would never have been concurred). So I owe everything to what G-d did at this time of year, 3500 years ago. As an act of gratitude and remembrance, G-d asks us to alter our diet for a week. In that light is seems quite selfish to spend the week complaining.

The key part to the answer, is the word “me’. We have to understand the phrase in the Haggadah that in each generation we have to look at ourselves as if we came out of Egypt. Once you are able to really relate to that sentence (which I was able to do with much learning), giving up bread for a week is a piece of cake (sorry, I had to get that pun in somewhere)