Mussar Institute - Through a Mussar Lens

Preparing For Passover
By Alan Morinis

In only a few days, the cycle of the year will bring us once again to Passover. As we prepare to gather around our Seder tables, I want to share a Mussar teaching about Pesach specifically aimed at that table experience.

This teaching comes from Rabbi Yosef Leib Bloch, who was an influential Mussar leader of a couple generations ago. Rabbi Bloch’s father-in-law was Rabbi Eliezer Gordon (1841-1910), who was a student of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, founder of the Mussar Movement in Lithuania in the 19th century. When Rabbi Gordon died in 1910, Rabbi Bloch (1849-1930) succeeded him as Rosh Yeshiva of the famed Telz Yeshiva (now located in Cleveland). Among Rabbi Bloch’s many contributions and innovations was his support for the education of girls.

On the subject of Passover, Rabbi Bloch calls our attention to the many tokens of remembrance that are embedded in the Passover rituals. He points to:

Eating in a reclining position, which commemorates being freed from slavery
Bitter herbs [maror], which symbolize the bitterness of slavery that we endured
Matzah, the flat bread that marks the hasty departure from Egypt
Charoset, the mortar-like condiment that represents building materials the slaves used in doing Pharaoh’s work
The four cups of wine, which stand for the four expressions of divine strength that were employed to gain us freedom

Although these are all very familiar elements of the Seder and explanations of their meaning, Rabbi Bloch asks a surprising question. Why are we called to remember the exodus from slavery, he asks, by means of such humble and modest markers? In his words, “Would not an elaborate audio-visual pageant have a far greater effect?”

He answers that the elements that are built into the Seder, which are meant to stimulate remembrance, are of exactly the right type for the task. Those grand spectacles that he holds up in contrast “appear to make a tremendous impression,” he says, but in reality, they “have only a surface and passing influence.” The reason, he suggests, is that these immense and impressive shows “do not penetrate to the depths to affect the constant, fine emotions.”

(As a bit of off-hand corroboration, I will often ask an audience to name the film that won the Oscar for Best Picture two years back, or the team that won the World Series that same year. Despite the hugeness of the spectacle at the moment, it obviously leaves very little lasting impact since so few people can come up with the names.)

Rabbi Bloch asserts that small actions in which we ourselves participate actively—like the four cups of wine, the maror and the charoset taken with family and friends around the ritual table—do have the capacity to penetrate into our inner beings in a way those major productions do not. Rabbi Bloch says that the “relatively minute actions, although they do not seem to have a visible effect, descend into the depths of the personality and awaken the hidden chords of feeling.”

This view of the Pesach rituals is very consistent with Mussar theory about what brings about personal change. More than the dramatic action, what penetrates and induces new ways of being are small actions experienced in a state of heightened emotion—especially if that stimulation is repeated. The Mussar teachers realized that direct, sensory experience has a lasting effect, more than do purely mental inputs. And so, despite the apparent insignificance of the bitterness of the bitter herbs, the sweetness of the charoset, the bodily experience of reclining, the intense flavor of the wine, the snap and crunch of the matzah, and so on, these are direct, sensory experiences that are given power and direction when they are experienced in a gathering of souls, contextualized by the meaning of the Passover story and rites.

I know that in a few days, I will find myself sitting around a large table laden with food and centered on the traditional Seder plate. I’ll do that twice—once with my own birth family and again with my wife’s family along with various spouses, friends and others. I hope you will soon be seated in some similar situation. With the perspective on the Seder and its rituals that Rabbi Bloch provides, I am now looking forward to bringing myself as fully into experiential engagement as I can muster with the small and seemingly trivial activities that will take place those Seder evenings. When I eat the parsley with salt water and make the sandwich of matzah and bitter herbs, and each time I bring the cup of wine to my lips, I intend to bring myself into as intense and single-minded encounter with those sensory experiences as I possibly can.

After 59 years of Seders (totaling 118 in all to date), I already know the meaning of all the symbols. Now my challenge is to bring myself into full-fledged sensory contact with the signifiers that our ancestors provided for this ritual. Rabbi Bloch and the Mussar masters assure me that I can trust that the more intensely I hear, taste, touch, smell and feel those symbols, the more directly they will leave their trace on my soul. Then Passover will be enacted as the pathway to personal liberation it is meant to me. May it be so for you as well, and may that pathway lead to greater freedom for us all.

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