Time traveling

This Friday night, Jews around the world will celebrate Passover by sitting at a Seder, the festive meal that recalls the redemption of our ancestors from slavery in Egypt more than two thousand years ago.
A Passover Seder is, among other things, a creative act of historical imagination. The Torah enjoins us to tell our children that we perform the Passover rituals because of “…what God did for me when I went free from Egypt.” (Ex 13:8) The first century sage Rabban Gamliel took these words to mean: “In every generation, each person is obligated to see himself (or herself) as having personally gone out of Egypt.”
To participate in a Seder is to do more than retell an ancient story. It is to travel back through a portal in time; going on an imaginative journey to re-experience the bitter feelings of enslavement and recapture the sweet joy our journey to freedom. A Seder is a voyage back through thousands of years to the beginnings of the Jewish people. It reminds us who we are and where we come from. But it is far more than that. By demanding of us that we place ourselves in the shoes of our oppressed ancestors, it invites us to empathize with their plight and, by extension, the plights of all oppressed peoples.
In this way, Passover not only recalls our liberation from bondage, it challenges us to work for the redemption of others. In fact, the entire second half of the seder, the part that follows the meal, focuses on the future rather than the past. It invites us to travel forward in time to imagine the Messianic era, a promised period that is yet to come when all people will be free, and God’s redemption of the world will be complete.
May that day come soon, for us and for all humanity.