• It’ s the feel of crumbling matzah in our mouths, at once the taste of slavery’ s deprivation and of earthy freedom.
• It’ s the sweet dark charoset, the dense taste of mortar and bricks.
• It’ s the inescapable bitterness of maror, the taste of avodah kasha, of harsh labor.
• It’ s the crunch of spring vegetables, rebirth in our mouths in the form of karpas.
• It’ s our ancestors’ s tears, salt water in which we dip our karpas – a taste of grief paired with the luxurious gesture of dipping.
We are obligated to know in our guts what it was like to be a slave laboring in infinite sadness – and we were given the gift of the seder by which to do this. In fully participating, we literally become the dwelling that Stolorow describes, a mishkan, our psyches and bodies transmuted into a home for the traumatic experience of our ancestors, for our own trauma, and for the stranger amongst us right now, by our telling and our eating of the story.
In my life, I go through cycles – there are times when tears come easily... and then there are other times when the world – or for that matter, my own life – becomes too much, the volume of emotion exceeding the container of my heart. I go numb; I shut down; feeling freezes and my heart becomes a block of ice, flow inaccessible.
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