Just because you do not feel pain anymore does not mean you are not hurt anymore. That is, out of sight might mean out mind but out of mind does not mean out of heart. The pain you experience never leaves your heart. No experience does. Time does not heal pain, it numbs it. With enough time passing by you might not feel pain but it forever resides in you. The pain becomes a part of your personality, seared into your genetic makeup, woven into your soul. It provides the context in how you experience life, the backdrop in how you understand your experiences, the framework in how you feel the way you feel. Foremost, it changes how you perceive and relate to yourself. You move on with life, but your pain remains. You let go but your pain holds on. You forget but because the pain is you, you cannot forget who you are.
We go through life and collect pain through every painful experience. Even though our experiences are a part of our past but our pain forever lives on in the present. Some people collect paintings; some people collect cars; but everybody collects pain.
How the pain becomes bearable is that it gets lost in the love we collect. What happens is that in the hearts capacity to regenerate, it expands, and the pain gets lost in the thicket of the expanded love. For the pain to be tamed we must learn to become love collectors.
That is Passover. We left Egypt but the pain of the Egyptian experience never departed from us. It made us more sensitive and more understanding; more compassionate and more loving. How does the Jew feel when it hears about the orphan or the widow? When it hears about broken hearts and broken souls? It melts, shatters over and over again. It is the pain of the Egyptian experience and the love of G-d that we collected that makes us the Jewish people. To be a Jew means to travel by pain and love. On Passover, we not only celebrate redemption but the slavery; not only the freedom but the bondage; and most importantly not only the healing but the pain.
2015