It's the day before Passover and we're preparing to flee Egypt again to leave behind all the tasks we never got around to doing to bid goodbye to old habits and routines that won't take us anywhere but back to where we started to say farewell to the people who enslaved us and treated us as if we didn't exist. It's the day before Passover and we're searching for crumbs so we can toss them away and lighten the load of what we'll carry through the desert for the next forty years. It's the day before Passover and the taste of freedom is in the air and the smell of blood, too, of Pharaoh's soldiers drowning in the sea and soon we'll open the pages of the hagaddah and start off on our journey again, the same journey every year beginning with the same question — why is this night different? — and maybe this year we'll learn the answer and freedom won't be a question and slavery will be just another word in a story we retell each other year after year.
Bruce Black is the author of Writing Yoga (Rodmell Press/Shambhala) and editorial director of The Jewish Writing Project. He received his BA from Columbia University and his MFA from Vermont College. His work has appeared in Elephant Journal, Blue Lyra Review, Tiferet Journal, Hevria, Poetica, Reform Judaism, The Jewish Literary Journal, Mindbodygreen, Yogi Times, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and elsewhere. He lives in Sarasota, FL.
