This Shabbat marks a turning point on the Jewish calendar, but I imagine some of you may have already been in this mode for weeks. Shabbat haChodesh marks the beginning of Nissan, the month when we celebrate Pesach. The calendar acknowledges this Shabbat in a particular way, with a particular Torah reading, because it knows the centrality that we as Jews place on not just Pesach as a holiday, but the way that we build up towards and prepare for Pesach.
But for so many of us, preparing for Pesach creates a litany of complaints and burdens. It’s hard not to feel the challenges of the endless to-do lists, the shopping, the kashering, the planning for seder - the list goes on! And once the holiday begins, for some, there’s the difficulty in abstaining from certain foods and limiting what we bring into our homes. Despite our comfort in sitting with a pillow at seder, a ritualistically heavy experience of Pesach isn’t one that just allows us to sit back and relax.
But we are pushed, because of the Israelites’ experience, to try and feel it a bit differently. The special maftir reading for Shabbat haChodesh goes back to Exodus 12, when God tells the Israelites, in the midst of the story happening in real time, that this will be a month that they will mark for all time. The commentator Seforno teaches that this month, Nissan, was the Israelites’ first month of freedom. Ever. Previously, during their time in Mitzrayim, their time wasn’t their own. It was devoted to the service and will of others, so this month, for the first time, they began their existence as individuals and a people who can choose, who can be free.
Seforno gives a new and fresh perspective on what Shabbat haChodesh can be for us. Instead of just the fear- inducing reality that Pesach is encroaching on our lives, this weekend serves as an opportunity for us to try and re-experience that freedom that our ancestors felt for the first time. In some ways, it wants to stop us in our tracks, pause from the burdens we experience in preparing for Pesach, and think about how we can connect our own lives to the experience of the Israelites at this time, so many years ago. Shabbat haChodesh asks us to try and reframe the way we orient ourselves to the holiday of freedom, to relinquish the feeling of burden and focus on what our choices are, what freedoms we have, and what opportunities are available to us.
As we each, in our own ways, prepare for and celebrate Pesach, I hope you’ll stop to ask yourselves what your freedom means to you. I hope in the midst of busy preparations, you’ll pause to infuse your own choices into the traditions. And I hope that each of us is able to celebrate what it truly means to be free.
