Our Daily Kavanot during Passover will feature pieces from our Wise Passover Haggadah Supplement. Each day, our clergy will focus on a different element of the Passover holiday.
Rebirth, Renewal, and Hope
By Rabbi Sari Laufer
As big fans of both the beach and ice cream, one of our COVID finds was the Coastal Cone in Ventura. Always looking for ways to fill time normally spent with school, friends, and activities, we would often make the drive up from Sherman Oaks to catch some afternoon sun and sand, and of course, enjoy a favorite treat. While the frequency of those trips is now far less as life has—mostly—resumed its normal rhythms, my children still ask for the “ice cream beach,” and when the schedule permits, we head north.
With my little learners in the row behind me, we have often discussed the microclimates of the San Fernando and Conejo Valleys, the shift from the desert-like valleys to the coastal plains, and whatever other wonderful tidbits they have learned from Mrs. Snyder and Mr. Meth in science and Project Studio. And, we are always aware of the colors of the commute, of the shifts in the hills to our left (heading north), moving from brown to green to greener as summer gives way to winter, and winter gives way to spring.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, told a story of a friend whose mother was visiting from Jamaica, the verdant Caribbean island. He said:
They were driving along in the middle of January. And her mom said to her, “Why don’t you cut down all of these dead trees? It’s ridiculous. Everywhere I look, there are just dead trees.” And she said, “Mom, those trees aren’t dead. But in winter they appear to be. Wait ‘til the spring.”
And of course, my friend’s mom, later in that spring, was overcome that all of these, quote, “dead trees” came back to life and the buds and the green. And in some ways, you know, in so many parts of our world, we long for what are those things in the natural world which signal that there is regeneration and there is a renewal. And those little buds of spring scream out eloquently that there is a hope.
Among its many names, Passover is known in our tradition as Chag HaAviv, the Holiday of Spring—a holiday rooted in the themes of rebirth, renewal, and hope. Over the next week, as we celebrate Passover, our clergy will share their reflections on these themes. We hope they will add meaning, hope, and perhaps joy to your holiday celebrations, and we wish you—from all of us— a chag kasher and sameach, a zissen Pesach, a moedetun mobarak bashe: a happy, healthy, and sweet Passover.
Chag Sameach,
Rabbi Sari Laufer