ב"ה
THEMES of Featured Ascent Lights
Beginner
The water of the sea conceals that which is within its depths
The water of the sea conceal that which is within its depths. When G d split the Red Sea, He removed that concealment, revealing the dry land underneath, representing G d's removal of divine concealment in the world. This splitting of the Sea gave the Jewish people for all generations the strength to withstand any obstacles blocking their path.
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The "head, haunches and entrails" of the Passover lamb hint to the three pillars of Jewish spiritual life.
The spiritual lesson of Pesach is to
remove the ego of chametz; the entire person, from head to toe, must be
involved, as symbolized in the verse describing the paschal lamb, ‘its head
on its haunches [legs] on its entrails’. These three things
mentioned: head, entrails and legs, hint to the three pillars with which a
person connects to Jewish spiritual life: Torah, prayer and acts of kindness.
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The Israelites were redeemed from Egypt in the merit of the righteous women of the generation.
During their sojourns in the wilderness, the Jewish people were granted a mobile well in Miriam's merit. Water - the most crucial of their needs - was in her merit since
it was entirely to Miriam's credit that the Jews continued to procreate in Egypt in spite of Pharaoh's decrees.
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Intermediate
When Passover arrives, we go from darkness to light.
The Shelah writes that all of the actions we do at the Seder are indications of the freedom of souls, not just the freedom of our bodies. We have been redeemed from within the kelipot, the "husks", the place where we were slaves to the temporal reality by virtue of our lack of consciousness.
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Just a tiny bit of arrogance can make a big difference.
According to the
Zohar, Chametz represents
‘idolatry’, one of the most extreme manifestations of the yetzer
hara. Fascinatingly, the laws of Chametz mirror
the laws of idolatry in their absoluteness. Although normally a
very small amount of a prohibited substance might be considered neutralized and
nullified, the prohibition of Chametz is
unusually stringent.
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