Pray for a Glorious Land

Posted By admin on June 30, 2010

It is inches away from Pessach, the Jewish holiday of Passover which commemorates the exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt and the ending of over 200 years of a horrible, demeaning slavery. I’m sitting at my computer with a big, ugly leg brace hugging my injured right knee, crutches sitting at my side, and pain killers energetically coursing through my veins, wondering:

Why now? Why would my knee give out on me during one of the busiest times of the year? Why would I fall to the ground screaming in pain with just a few days left to prepare for this most glorious of holidays?

And then it hit me.

Each year I have a thought, and I’m sure many a Jew shares a similar thought: Why do we still care? We left Egypt thousands of years ago? We are ridiculously successful almost everywhere we go. It would seem that not only are we physically well past our days in Egypt, but we’ve rid ourselves of every last vestige of our slave mentality as well! So why will we be up really late discussing our Egyptian departure? Why do we continue our yearly antiquated practices so far after the fact?

And here I am. Lying on the floor, clenching my knee in terrible pain. Fourteen years ago I tore a ligament in that knee. Several years back the doctor cleared me, told me that all my knee problems were behind me for good. Then why did I fall? Why am I suffering? How could this still happen to me?

And all I kept on thinking was: The past never dies. Anything I’ve ever done is still with me. Any mistake I’ve ever made can come back and haunt me, and my entire past just sits as a part of me, capable of re-entering my life whenever it chooses. My knee never healed. It never will.

And how much more so for the illustrious past of the Jewish people. As twisted as it might seem at times, not much has really changed since we left Egypt. We still make the same national blunders, never being satisfied with our lot, priorities all mixed up. And despite the fact that we left Egypt with the goals of receiving the Torah, entering the Holy Land of Israel, and building the Temple, the Temple has been gone so long it’s almost as if it never stood, the Jewish people have certainly not flocked en masse to Israel despite full capability of doing so, and the majority of the Jewish world has abandoned God’s Torah.

The past is alive and well. All the lessons are still there for us to learn as if the events of the exodus happened yesterday.

Categories: Pray for a Glorious Land
Tags: God, Holy, Pessach