28 Mar LIFE-CHANGING SEDER GEMS THIS PESACH, DISCOVER YOUR TRUE LIGHT

Ten Ways to Know
He’s Not for Your
Daughter
Someone sent me
this email.
Here are the top ten
ways to Know the guy your daughter
brought home for the Pesach Seder isn’t
going to work out…
10. Hides the afikomen in his pants
9. Won’t stop asking when the Latkas are
going to be served
8. When welcoming Elijah he checks the
chimney
7. After the fourth time calling your wife
“Ma’ Nishtana” still hopes to get a laugh
6. In return for the afikoman, he asks to
see your Tax Returns
5. To comply with the Hagadah, he
punches the person who reads the
“Wicked Son” in the mouth
4. You are at the third cup of wine, he’s
on number 9
3. After the afikoman is stolen, he starts
pocketing silverware
2. When everyone points to the Marror,
he points directly at you.
1. As a gift, he brings fresh baked
Challah, or a bottle of Crown Royal
Three Necessary Items for Internal
Liberation: Wine, Matzah, Maror The
three most important ingredients at the
seder table are the wine, matzah and
maror (bitter herbs.) For these three
items capture the three foundational
ideas that can allow us to set ourselves
free.
A) The first step is wine. Wine possesses
deep potency. “When wine enters,
secrets come out,” says the Talmud. (The
word “yayin” and “sod,” wine and
secrets in Hebrew, share the same
numerical value of 70.) Wine represents
the “secrets” in us—for wine itself is a
“secret”: It is initially hidden and
concealed within the grape, and it takes
much labor to extract it from the source;
the grapes have to be crushed and the
wine to ferment. Wine, an intoxicating
beverage that is at first concealed within
the grape, represents the deeply
concealed powerful forces lingering
within the human psyche.
The first step in setting yourself free is

realizing how much more there is to you
than what meets the eye. You must
recognize your potential—what you
were really meant to be, what you are
capable of becoming—for you to break
out of the chains.
B) This comes together with step two—
the maror, representing the bitterness
caused by slavery. In order to set yourself
free, you have to be able to stare the pain
you endured in the face. Repressing pain
and making believe it does not exist,
only buries it deeper into our psyche. On
the night of our freedom we have to
return to the “maror,” we must gaze into
our pain, feel it, sense it, grieve for our
hurt, and then as we are staring into the
pain—we will find the inner, secret spark
of hope and light buried within it.
If we avoid the pain, we can’t discover
its inner light. Only when we gaze it at,
can we extract the ember hidden within
the ashes.
C) Then we have the critical step of
matzah: We eat the matzah, says the
Haggadah, because the Jews did not
have time to wait till the dough has risen;
they rushed out of Egypt. I want to ask
you: They waited for 210 years, they
could not wait another few hours? What
was the rush? And even if they were in a
rush, why is that such a central theme in
the narrative that for thousands of years
we are eating only matzah and avoiding
all leavened bread? What happened to
the virtue of patience?
Answer: The greatest enemy to setting
yourself free is—delaying things: tough
decisions and bold moves. The message
if matzah is, when it comes to setting
yourself free, you have no time to wait
even an extra 18 minutes. Do it now!
Make that call now. Send that email now.
Make that move now. Set up that meeting
now. Make that decision now.
Start the new behavior now. Confront
the situation now. Start doing it now.
If it is worth doing, then do it now.
Because, as my Rebbe would say, “We
want Moshiach NOW.” We want
redemption now.
No Angel Would Identify Us
“The Lord took us out of Egypt, not
through an angel, not through a seraph
and not through a messenger. The Holy
One, blessed be He, did it in His glory by
Himself.”
Why could G-d not send an angel?
At times when we look at our
external behavior, it may seem like
we aren’t good. We aren’t always
doing even what we know we
should be doing.
In Egypt, the sages teach us, there
was barely any behavioral
distinction between Jews and
Egyptians. The Jews have been so
crushed, they have fallen morally
as well. We were at an all-time low
spiritual state.
No angel could identify us. No angel
would want to invest in us and redeem
us. G-d alone, who can see beyond all
the external layers, who knows that at
our core we are good, comes and redeems
us, whispering in our ears: If only you
can see yourself the way I see you. Wake
up to who you truly are essentially—a
perfect expression of the Divine.
Because G-d Himself sees what is going
on in our heart of hearts.
(Nesivos Shalom)
“Pour Out Your Fury”
As we open the door to welcome Elijah,
we read a passage which at the surface
seems difficult to digest:
“Pour out Your fury on the nations that
do not know you, and upon the kingdoms
that do not invoke Your name, for they
have devoured Jacob [the Jews] and
destroyed his home. Pour out Your wrath
on them; may Your blazing anger
overtake them. Pursue them in wrath and
destroy them from under the heavens of
the Lord.”
In truth, it is one of the noblest
expressions of the spiritual majesty of
the Jewish people and our faith. The
passage itself is a combination of three
verses from the Bible (Psalms 79:6-7;
Psalms 69:25; and Lamentations 3:66).
It was compiled and added to the
Haggadah during the Middle Ages as a
response to the massacres of the Crusades
(beginning in 1096), and to the
persecution of the Jews during the time
of Easter, which usually coincides with
Passover.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews were
slaughtered in the name of religion and
“truth.” Yet how did of their freedom

that He avenge their innocent blood for
them, so that they can immerse
themselves in a life of love and
compassion, without the need to resort to
violence in order to protect innocent life.
While some nations and religions have
glorified (and continue to glorify)
violence, Judaism recognized the need,
at times, for moral violence to combat
immoral violence. “If someone comes to
kill you,” says the Talmud, “kill him
first.” If you see someone beating
another person to death it is your
responsibility to stop the killer by any
meanse. If you see a person about to
launch a rocket at a school of children,
the moral thing to do is strike the
monster. Yet, despite all of this, violence
has never become part of our identity
and mandate. We pray for the day, when
G-d will release His wrath and fury,
when He will eliminate people who are
dedicated to murder and violence, and
will allow us to be immersed only in
positive pursuits.
Pouring Out the Wine
This notion is also expressed in the
custom that when we recall the ten
plagues, we spill wine from our cups into
a broken bowl. Why?
Explains Don Yitzchak Abarbenel (in
Zevach Pesach), the Finance Minister of
Spain who in 1492 left his country
together with hundreds of thousands of
expelled Jews: Wine symbolizes joy, and
pouring some wine out of the cup
demonstrates that our rejoicing is
imperfect, because other people suffered
in the process of our liberation. True, the
Egyptians did barbaric things and they
deserved to be punished, yet we still are
pained by the fact that there is still so
much evil in the world that we have to
combat. We pray for the day when the
inner spark of G-d in every creature will

come to the fore and the world will be as
one.
Nirtzah—I’m Never Good Enough?!
We conclude the seder with the final and
very strange step of “Nirtzah:” We
acknowledge that G-d has accepted our
Passover service.
This is enigmatic. All the other 14 steps
of the seder connote an action of some
sort: Kiddush, washing hands, dipping a
vegetable, breaking the matzah, saying
the haggadah, etc. What is the significance
of this 15th step where we do nothing,
but simply believe that G-d was pleased
with our seder?
In truth, this is the climax of the seder.
One of our false ego’s favorite lines is:
“You are not good enough.” You commit
to learning Torah twenty minutes a day,
and your false ego comes and says: only
twenty minutes? What can you learn
already in twenty minutes?
You spend fifteen dollars and buy your
wife flowers; your ego says: that’s all you
spend on your wife?!

You gave someone collecting money for
charity ten dollars, afterwards your ego
says: you are not good enough, why
didn’t you give him twenty dollars?
Any project we do, there is that little
voice inside that comes and says: “Not
good enough.”
Remember this rule: This is the voice of
the yetzer hara, of the negative
inclination, of the false ego.
Of course we should always improve,
and there is always room for
improvement. But this isn’t the intention
of our ego. It has one intention–to make
us feel dejected and take the life out of
life. For how does it make you feel when
you think “not enough”? Does it inspire
you or paralyze you? Does it motivate
you or crush you? It makes you a smaller
person, it makes you think less of
yourself; it makes you think that your
actions are worthless. It drains you from
your vitality and zest. It ultimately causes
you to do less, not more.
It has nothing to do with the truth or with
G-d; it is a creation of a false ego.

The Jewish way must be different. Once
something was done, we say: I have done
the best I could have done in the moment.
I trust that my sincerity will be seen.
Better a Red Matzah than a Red Face
The story took place during a Pesach
meal of the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe,
Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson (1880-
1950), during which he was accompanied
by several of his Chasidim, on one of the
days of Pesach in the mid-1940s.
The Rebbe was sitting at the head of the
table, with about a minyan of Chasidim
around the table eating. Rabbi Nissan
Mindel, one of his secretaries, was
among the Chasidim at that meal; he
wrote the following story in his diary.
Present at the time of the meal, as was
usually the case, were also young men
and yeshiva students, who stood in the
room during the meal and observed and
listened.
One of the guests eating at the table was
a non-Chabadnik who, not accustomed to
the Chassidic custom not to dip the
matzah into any liquid, dipped his matzah

into the bowl of borsht. The young men
in the room were disturbed at this
infraction and started to rebuke this
fellow. There was somewhat of a
commotion – which eventually reached
the attention of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
The Rebbe asked Rabbi Shmuel Levitin
(he was my father’s great uncle), what
the commotion was about. When Reb
Shmuel found out and conveyed the
details of this incident to the Lubavitcher
Rebbe, the Rebbe turned to the young
men and the yeshiva boys and with a
serious expression said: “Es is besser tzu
machen di matzah reit, vit dem ponim
reit.” “It is preferable to make the Matzah
red, than to make one’s face red.”