The Jewish holiday of Passover, which is celebrated for 8 days, commemorates the Jewish peoples’ exodus from slavery in Egypt.
For a week, we forego bread and other food made from wheat or other grains. Instead, we eat matzah. In other parts of our lives we’re invited to break free from the confines of our routines and rituals.
Your Ambivalence to Freedom
In theory,everyone wants freedom. In real life, however, it’s not so simple.
Perhaps, like many people, you resist freedom when it’s offered: you stay in the relationship that isn’t serving you, you continue with a routine or habits you know you want to stop.
This is part of the human condition.
One part of the Exodus story that gets little attention — because it was passed down orally, instead of in writing — is that some of the Jews didn’t want to leave Egypt.
Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say they were ambivalent about it.
Their lives as slaves may not have been “easy” but they were predictable and certain. They woke up each day knowing what was expected of them and what they had to do.
The people had acclimated to their situation; they found a way to be comfortable in discomfort.
On the other hand, Moses was asking them to believe in an unnamed and invisible God, who would lead Moses and the people out of Egypt and to an unknown “promised land.”
Where exactly they were going and how they would get there was a mystery.
The Trap of Being Comfortable in Discomfort
It’s easy to see why they might have been ambivalent. Certainty and comfort are two of the biggest drivers of human behavior.
Learning how to be comfortable in discomfort is a valuable skill that can help us expand our window of tolerance. But if we get too good at this skill, it can keep us trapped.
The Challenge of Breaking a Routine
As Passover invites us to break free from the confines of our routines, it also illuminates where we are resistant to this freedom.
Often, we maintain our routines because their structure serves us in some capacity: it gives us certainty about where to go and what to do.
When we’re inside the narrow place of our routines, we don’t have a good perspective on the big picture. We can’t see the plethora of options for what we might eat when we give up bread and other wheat products, or how we might structure our days if we changed our routines and rituals.
All we know is the current thing we are doing. Anything other than that feels like emptiness.
This is how we can get stuck in a routine.
The Lesson of Passover
The brilliance of Passover is that it forces us to take its lessons from theory into practice. We don’t just talk about the exodus; we re-enact it through the rituals of the seder.
For the rest of the week, we are forced into certain changes.
Just like the Jewish people who left Egypt, we must trust in something bigger than ourselves if we are to move forward.
To free ourselves from the certainty of our daily routines, we must trust in something we can’t see.
It’s only when we cultivate that trust and are willing to break free from our routines that we’ll be able to see all the other options that await us on the other side.
Love it? Hate it? What do you think? Don't hold back...