Getting to Joy This Passover

As I was preparing for Passover in the midst of the Coronavirus, I discovered, to my surprise, that there is no Torah commandment to rejoice on Passover.  We are commanded to rejoice on Shavuot and the Torah bids us to be happy twice on Sukkot.  But there is no mention of joy at all for Passover. One early 14th century Spanish source, the Baal Haturim, suggested this is because Passover is the beginning of the harvest cycle that ends with Sukkot, so there is still too much unknown and anxiety about what the future will bring for there to be spontaneous joy. (Sound familiar?)

But the ancient sages knew we needed joy.  They constructed the haggadah to start with disgrace and end with praise.  In their formulation, the disgrace was confronting either the shame of having been despised slaves or recognizing that our oldest ancestors were idolaters and that none of us has a pure spiritual pedigree.  Their praise is the psalms of Hallel, those magnificent poems that exclaim over and over again that things can turn around, the most shunned can become the most beloved, the flinty can change to flowing, all thanks to God.

As we enter into Passover, we start with our own difficult feeling, exactly where we are: in fear, in grief, in spiritual constriction. And then we build towards praise. This is important: Praise isn't the same as gratitude. We might not be able to muster gratitude. But praise is recognizing that good things are actually possible (like being freed from slavery) even if they haven't happened to us personally (yet). Praise is acknowledging the source of potential goodness in the world. There is an opening there, a feeling of inner relief, of expansiveness.

And that embodied feeling of expansiveness is very similar to the embodied feeling of joy. Remember a time you felt joy. Can you sense that spaciousness inside your ribs that moves outwards?  How amazing: Praise can be the back door into joy.

So as we prepare for Passover, it might help to think about what we might be able to offer praise about: the possibility of love, the possibility of healing, the possibility of things turning out for the good, the possibility of redemption. And then maybe we can move into joy!