“It’s not how you start, but how you finish that shows you who you really are.”
– Michael Phelps
What may be true for March is ironically true for Passover: that it comes in like a lion, but goes out like a lamb. No other holiday demands the intense preparation leading up to a festival entrance like Passover. Whether it’s cleaning, kashering, cooking, or the myriad of ways to prepare for the seder, this holiday requires a substantial level of focus in the days leading up to it, all for the sake of the holiday rituals, which are numerous.
But what are the rituals to signify the end of the eight-day festival? How do we bracket the end of Passover with meaning and a sense of purpose? For religious Jews, the last days in synagogue with their special Torah readings and memorial services are part of the equation, but I’m not sure they really bring it all together satisfactorily. Besides, there are still anywhere from six to eight hours left in Passover after the final morning of shul. For many Sephardic Jews, Mimouna caps off their holiday, but it is a celebration of the return to chametz after the end of the eighth day, not a closing on the holiday itself. Most Ashkenazi Jews have no clear ritual that brings the entire holiday to a close.
A closure ritual can serve an important need. Moving out of Passover into the next part of the Jewish calendar, it is worth asking, What did we learn? What are some of the ancestral and spiritual tools from our major spring holiday worth holding onto more explicitly this year? I offer two: deprivation and delayed gratification.
At its most basic level, deprivation is a deliberate limitation of choice. In Passover terms, we sacrifice some of our freedom when we impose rules on ourselves. For Passover, this is our extra food restrictions. Taking on Passover kashrut deprives most of us of a huge segment of our staple diet, and we are forced to adjust to different foods and systems of preparation. Where we go and how our days are structured are completely impacted by these extra rules. So much of our lives are altered during these eight days because of our self-imposed food restrictions.
The opposite side of the same idea is delayed gratification, the muscle we build when we withhold some of our basic pleasures and routines and re-embrace them later. Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski, a psychiatrist and Torah scholar, understood the capacity to delay gratification as essential for personal growth, mental health, and spiritual development. Twersky spoke of the “hedonic treadmill,” with which he explained the human capacity to focus on instant gratification and pleasure-seeking as a primary cause of addiction and emotional turmoil. But when we can delay the need for convenience and pleasure on demand, we actually tap into ancestral muscle memory for living rich and meaningful lives with a greater capacity for wisdom.
So how can we best manifest the fruit of these spiritual gifts from our ancestors? To the secular person, religion is often seen as synonymous with obedience and unreasonable limits. But a religious person might understand deprivation and delayed gratification as a pathway to greater freedom. As a key to spiritual growth, if it is pursued. Most Passover observances miss out on this pursuit because we forget to take the time for integration. A Passover closure ritual prioritizing reflecting on what we learned from our experience of deprivation and delayed gratification would be the potent closure we need. It’s not too late. Maybe for next year.
The closest thing to a true Passover closure might be the custom in some Chabad communities called the Moshiach Seudah—the Messianic feast. Instituted by the Baal Shem Tov in the 18th century, it goes like this: In the final afternoon hours of the eighth and final day of Passover, the tradition is to gather around a table, sing wordless songs, and share words of Torah as twilight comes. The “feast” is eating a meal consisting of only matzah. One final deprivation exercise before ending Passover and resuming our regular lives again. Just matzah. Nothing on it. Maybe some salt. That’s it. The simplest of meals with one purpose: yearning for a world redeemed. This is not an ancient ritual, but it is a template. More importantly it is both precedent and permission to innovate. Like the beginning of the seder, innovation starts with questions. So here’s one question for the very end of the eight days: What might it look like to close the Passover festival with the specific purpose of emerging wiser from all the efforts to reenact our freedom?