On the Road During the Season of Our Redemption

Even though Passover begins Saturday night, I find I must travel, at the behest of my day job, to Florida for most of next week.

I won't leave until Tuesday: Monday is the birthday of the One True Wife. Incredibly, I have no gift yet (and instead of shopping feverishly -- or working -- I am blogging. Oy...). The girls and I are frantically conspiring to concoct some fantastic fete, which will probably devolve into no more than dinner out a kosher-for-Passover restaurant. The rest of the week finds me in Orlando, looking at apartment complexes, and in Naples and Ft. Myers, checking up on my day job's one notable success, and on my aged and revered parents.

Despite the lengthy absence from my family -- I'm especially dejected at the thought of having to be away from my son during most of his week-long break from school -- I find the prospect of being on the road during Passover ... I don't know, bracing.

I'll have to cultivate a new level of mindfulness. The humiliating in-flight pretzels will be foregone. I won't eat at Denny's unless I'm ready to do without the toast.  Gotta watch what kind of creamer I put in the coffee. I'll drink wine at sunset with my old man, but skip the bourbon. All around me, the world will be being the world, and behaving as if time were simply time.

Even though I'll be hard at work (mostly), I'll also be contemplating the personal implications of the Exodus. I'll (try to) be mindful of the ideas and habits to which I'm enslaved. I'll meditate on freeing myself, aware that redemption is sometimes nothing more than a slight shift in perspective, a turn of a few degrees. I'll be motoring along in my rental car beside the Gulf of Mexico, imagining the parting of great oceans of obstacle, and the miraculous opening of passages to peace and freedom.

Time, like light, is omnipresent and yet invisible, breathtakingly fast and yet beyond the limitations of mere motion, of unfathomable origin and without discernible end. When we recognize unique passages -- historical, metaphorical, physical, psychological, all of the above -- time blossoms in all these dimensions, and yet it comes to rest in our hands. It is more than a second, or a season: it is a sacrament.

Moving toward that small patch of sand which our family has most keenly associated with liberation, I will be working, but I'll also be meditating, because, in this season more than any other, I will be traversing the edge, and perhaps plumbing the depths, of redemption -- my nation's, my family's, my own.

--T.A.

Comments

[Tamar]

David, this is a very beautiful post. As I dine alone tonight I shall think about all you have said. At this time, every year for 17 years I long for and miss Israel intensely.

Thank you.

Happy Pesach one and all.