This, the completion of our final set of fours, is phrased differently. We seem to have turned a corner. We've been "removed" from burdens, "delivered" from bondage, and "redeemed". It may seem that we have been "set free" on the other side to do as we wish.
But, no, the text continues.
And I will take you to be my people.
Enough of this back-patting already. Once we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt and we have experienced many other horrors. But we have also been on the other side, both individually and collectively. We've been slavers and oppressors. What shall we make of that?
We try, not always with success, to learn from our experience of slavery and homelessness. Assassinations, massacres, murders and expulsions frighten us. Our cousins, our neighbors begin to establish their own independent society. Many of us try to understand the plight of the Palestinians, yet we see that still, only a minority of the Palestinian people seem to understand our need and pain. Much of their internal rhetoric remains the same. They still have not changed the text of their covenant calling for the end of our State. And extremists on both sides feed each others' expectations.
Tonight we recline. Our reclining is not a sign of laziness, but of freedom.
No one forces us to eat on the run, at our desks, or out in the fields at
our work. We can enjoy a meal that includes conversation and song, a meal
that focuses our attention on the burgeoning year as it blossoms around
us and encourages renewed growth within us. Our meal also intensifies our
awareness of the efforts for freedom still pursued by ourselves and others.
After drinking three of our four cups of wine, we also know that we have come most of the way from the degradation of slavery to the dignity of freedom. But freedom, like wine, can lead to a powerful headiness. Liberation itself is not the goal.
We have the strength to act according to our own decisions. Yet we understand that not every decision we make is the correct one, merely because it is ours. Though we can act out of strength, we have also learned that not by might, nor by power, but by the awesome divine attributes of justice and mercy will we all achieve wholeness.
Therefore, before we drink this fourth and last cup of wine, we pause.
As we drink to honor the Jews and other peoples of our own time:
Those who struggle in so many ways to maintain the Jewish state, Israel,
sometimes needing to take up arms in defense
other times daring to
extend arms in comradely embrace
in either case taking chances with their lives.
And those everywhere who strive to develop a life guided by Prophetic ideas.
We ask ourselves how we use our power to place other people in the narrow, limiting straits of "Mitzra'yim."
We will continue our work.
We understand that our societies are but the basis on which the struggle to create that messianic era, the life envisioned in the Passover Seder, is to be built.
Blessed are You, Adonai our God, sovereign of all space and time, creator of the fruit of the vine.
All drink the fourth cup of wine
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