Reaching the end of a job interview, the Human Resources Person asked a young Engineer fresh out of Texas A&M, "And what starting salary were you looking for?"
The Engineer said, "In the neighborhood of $325,000 a year, depending on the benefits package."
The interviewer said, "Well, what would you say to a package of 5 weeks’ vacation, 14 paid holidays, full medical and dental, a company matching retirement fund for 50% of your salary, and a company car leased every 2 years -- say a red Corvette?"
The Engineer sat up straight and said, "Wow! Are you kidding?"
And the interviewer replied, "Yeah, of course, I am kidding, but you started the kidding around."
In less than a week is Passover and we need to prepare. We are faced with a host of new challenges and questions.
How to prepare with minimal ingredients and limited access to communal resources? How to celebrate the Seder alone? How will we celebrate the Festival of Freedom with our movement restricted?
It is so painful not to be able to host you at our Seder like we can every year.
Please know although you have to make your own seder, you are not alone.
I was always moved by an incredible true story of one boy whose life was filled with tragic difficulties. As an infant, he was abandoned by his mother. At the age of seven, his father sent him away to a boarding school where his teachers called him the worst student in his class by far. The reports his parents regularly received from the Dean of the school said, “Your son seems incapable of learning anything.”
As punishment for his “stupidity”, he was frequently beaten by his teachers, brutal even for Victorian standards of the 19th century. When it came time for him to attend a high school, a task made all the more difficult by virtue of his extremely poor grades, his father wouldn’t give him permission to go to the school he himself chose because he was certain that his son would only embarrass him there. Thankfully he was accepted to a military school, but his father wrote to him of his great discontent and called him “an impudent little idiot”.
When the boy wrote to his father to share with him his progress, the answer came back with words that might be expected to destroy his self-confidence for the rest of his life: “You are a constant disappointment to me. Not only are you a complete failure in everything that you do, but I see nothing ahead for you but failure. Please do not write to me anymore. I do not wish to hear from you ever again.”
And who was this young man, the son whose own parents thought him wicked and simple and not knowledgeable enough even to ask a question?
He was Winston Churchill, one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century – the man who rallied the people of England to fight a war against Nazi Germany and whose speeches electrified and inspired a nation to preserve Western civilization.
In addition to being a courageous leader and an extraordinary orator, Winston Churchill was also a talented painter and a great historian. Of his many achievements, he is the only man who was ever nominated for two Nobel Prizes at the same time, one for literature and one for peace.
Who could have predicted that this son with an abusive father, a disinterested mother, insulting teachers, and ego-destroying deans and principals would turn out to be the “wise son” of the Haggadah?
It is something we can learn from. He never allowed the pain of his past to debilitate him; rather, he allowed it to reinvent him—into a new person.
Every year at the Seder we proclaim "Next Year in Jerusalem!" We pray for the rebuilding of the Temple and the return of our people to our homeland with the coming of Moshiach. As long as the Temple hasn't been rebuilt, we are like a family that is split. G-d is alone and we are alone. Only in the Temple will we be reunited again as one happy family.
When you celebrate your Seder all alone, missing your family and wishing to be together, that will arouse the divine yearning to be back with His children. When you say "Next Year in Jerusalem", that prayer will reach higher than any other prayer could. Specifically, you, sitting on your own, have the power to pierce the heavens with your words from a broken heart. G-d will have no choice but to answer you.
The most sanctified room in the Temple was the Holy of Holies, an inner chamber that was only entered once a year by one person, the High Priest. He stood there all alone. That's where you will be on Seder night, alone in the Holy of Holies.
Anyone who will be alone this year for Seder, you have a sacred duty. If you are single and wishing you could be with your soulmate, or a grandparent wishing you could be with your family, G-d is with you, because He too wants to be with His beloved.
Every Seder is holy. But yours is Holy of Holies. Please pray for us all. Then we can all be together, parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, G-d and His people, next year in Jerusalem.
That is the secret of Pesach. Life need not be monotonous, filled with gloom, and challenge. With all of its problems, life can be a walk with G-d, driven each moment by profound purpose, meaning, and infinite joy.
Friends, that’s the calling of the holiday. Surrender, freedom, and making the ultimate leap.
Shabbat Shalom and a sweet Pessach,
Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky
Tom Peacock wrote...