Passover. Slavery. Freedom. Mitzrayim. Ancient Egypt. The Narrow Place.

That narrow place, the place of limitations, the place of bondage, is as much about the place each of us is in our minds, and probably even more so than about geography. Our desert wandering, having been delievered from enslavement was not so much about being physically lost, as it was about our lostness in the comfort of way of being. Having been so accustomed, it was seemingly beyond our capacities to think in any other way. The Torah supports these accounts; we were a stiff necked grumbling bunch, we still are, and that is okay. We are a people still wrestling. Dayenu.

Not everyone left Egypt. Some decided to remain. Some were paralyzed with fear of the unknown. Some might not have felt they belonged though they might have acknowledged our mistreatment. Do we really escape when we leave others behind? How do move forward when some of our brothers and sisters insist on the comfort of being mired in a system that while is without freedom is too comfortable to leave? Do we forget them? Do we mourn them? Do we honor them with the acknowledgement that for whatever reason, they are whoever they are, and they are not ready to risk it?

Freedom, like love, requires nothing less than absolute risk. We have to be willing to lose everything in the attempt to discover something greater. Even in our seemingly lowest points in the desert we were at least physically free, if not yet in our minds. Like the ancestor preceding this story, we had to have the place, and be willing to wrestle, not to win or lose, but for value. Wrestling can be tiresome, exhausting, and sometimes seemingly without value, but knowledge and understanding of ourselves, even as scary as that might be found out to be, provides us the opportunity to know who we are, and what we might become.

I am still wrestling with how to be the imagined, fully authentic me, as if there is some Canaan of personality. I am still wandering the desert to escape those narrowest of places, self-imposed and imposed upon my mind by family and society. Sometimes I find myself full of fear, afraid to risk it. Sometimes I find myself full of bravery, ready to make my stand. Sometimes I am sensitive, and hurt, and angry, and sometimes my words lash out defensively and injure others. Those others cannot all be the taskmasters, and even if they are, they are human too. They are the ones I am commanded to treat better. I do not know how to get them to let me be free, and maybe I do not have to convince them. Maybe I just have to Be, without their approval or permission. I long for them to give up their shackles, the ones they want to place on me, and their own. Maybe even this way of thinking is one of my narrow places.

We left last night. Dayenu. We will be traveling all week. Dayenu. We will be traveling and wrestling, leaving those narrow places for the rest of our lives...