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The Plan: Dark Imaginings


I concluded “A Banquet of Consequences,” with the following questions:

Why the dark parts?

1. ‘And it is this that has stood for our ancestors and for us; since it is not [only] one [person or nation] that has stood [against] us to destroy us, but rather in each generation, they stand [against] us to destroy us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, rescues us from their hand.’

2. We pour the cup of Eliyahu and open the door.

‘Pour your wrath upon the nations that did not know You and upon the kingdoms that did not call upon Your Name! Since they have consumed Ya’akov and laid waste his habitation (Psalms 79:6-7). Pour out Your fury upon them and the fierceness of Your anger shall reach them (Psalms 69:25)! You shall pursue them with anger and eradicate them from under the skies of the Lord (Lamentations 3:66).’

I think we’ll have to use our imaginations to fully appreciate these two paragraphs…

 

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I would like to explore the Plague of Darkness to find how those two ‘dark parts’ fit into what we are now calling the Seder,  “Feast of Surprising Consequences.”

 

‘And why did He bring darkness upon them? Because there were wicked people amongst the Israelites of that generation who had no desire to leave Egypt, and these died during the three days of darkness so that the Egyptians might not see their destruction and say, “These, (the Israelites) too have been stricken as we have” (Rashi, Exodus 10:22).’

 

What exactly was the wickedness of those who Israelites who died during Darkness?

 

I suspect they lived in darkness; unable to live with hope, even when all indications were that Redemption had begun!

 

I believe we sing the following to a happy tune because we are declaring our connection to joy and hope having the ability to live in anticipation of rescue:

 

‘And it is this that has stood for our ancestors and for us; since it is not [only] one [person or nation] that has stood [against] us to destroy us, but rather in each generation, they stand [against] us to destroy us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, rescues us from their hand.’

 

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There is special magic to be able to compose our future in the dark, even when all hope seems lost:

 

“Would you suppose that much of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetry was written in the dark; in total darkness. You will hardly credit it, but it is true, perfectly true! The lake Bard was accustomed to place a pencil and paper by his bedside, and when a bright thought came to him, between the sheets, he wrote down instantly without striking a light, which was a slow process in an age of tinder-boxes, now obsolete, allowing time for fancies less volatile than emanations from the lakes to evaporate; and thus secured it for the benefit of posterity. Through long habit he was able to write correctly and legibly in the dark (Thomas Jefferson Hogg in Life of Percy Bysshe Shelly quoting a ‘fussy foolish banker in a country town’).”

 

We joyfully include this seemingly dark paragraph in our “Feast of Surprising Consequences,” to celebrate how we who continued to compose a bright future even in the darkest parts of Egypt continue to live with vibrant, pulsating, hope for our future.

 

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We pour the cup of Eliyahu and open the door – to the dark of night – to the darkness of Egypt and we imagine that first Pesach when we were forbidden to open our doors during the Slaying of the First Born and we recite what our ancestors so wanted to sing that night as their cruel taskmasters, their torturers and abusers, were punished.

 

We are not standing at our door. 

 

We stand at the door of our home in Egypt that first Pesach, and we recite what we could not then:

‘Pour your wrath upon the nations that did not know You and upon the kingdoms that did not call upon Your Name! Since they have consumed Ya’akov and laid waste his habitation (Psalms 79:6-7). 

Pour out Your fury upon them and the fierceness of Your anger shall reach them (Psalms 69:25)! 

You shall pursue them with anger and eradicate them from under the skies of the Lord (Lamentations 3:66).’

 

It is purely an act of Imagination, for anger and revenge can live only as imagery, no more, or it will poison our souls.

The consequences of such hateful rage cannot be consumed; they will consume us.

 

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“The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of the world he would like to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing he likes to think about (G. K. Chesterton).”

 

This “Feast of Surprising Consequences,” is a celebration of our ability to build beautiful worlds; it is the Feast of “In each and every generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he left Egypt.”

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