Korech

Last night I prepared the matzah with charoset and maror, placed it on my tongue and felt my chest well up. For 37 days I’d eaten no processed carbs and the bite with which I broke my fast was the marriage of bitter and sweet. A balance. Maror to symbolize the bitterness of enslavement and charoset to celebrate the sweetness in freedom. They came into me with one taste, my tongue confronted and soothed. I was embraced by the agony that sometimes bleeds into this world, the image of Jesus’ hands hallowed out and worked. There was grief for the slow slashing of dignity and safety and self. I was back in my own Mitzrayim, a narrow space that I had helped to construct with my own heavy glue of isolation, self hatred and resentment. But there was stillness also. A breath among the sting. The sting that pushed beyond, that brought me to the sweet and made it deep and rich and rooted. The sting that woke me up, complicated the sugars and made them real. It was resurrection, resilience, release. It was those extremes held between the rush towards freedom, sustenance born out of necessity and given holy meaning, it was those things that allowed me to love the sum of myself.