Page 29 - Harlem Pesach Companion 2021

The Night I Came Out of Egypt

By Carla McIntosh

“In every generation each man must see himself as if
he had personally come out of Egypt”
-from the Passover Haggadah

For me, the preceding words represent the highlight of
the seder, the raison d’être of our beloved ritual. Rav
Zev Leff, in a lecture about the seder, discusses three
methods of achieving “b’chol dor va dor…” - the goal
of having every man see himself as if he has
personally experienced Yetziat Mitzraim (the
Exodus). The Rav says that one may do so on an intellectual level by understanding what
happened. One can also attain a strong sense of spiritual identification with the Exodus,
by means of performing the seder ritual. He suggests, most convincingly, that one must
have an emotional connection to the Exodus story in order to attain maximum
appreciation of/benefit from the seder and our history as a people. My own personal seder
experience shows me that the emotional connection, the emotional understanding of our
past, ties me most closely to the history and future of B’nai Yisrael.

As a mature woman of 60+ years, I find myself reflecting back on past years to see if
they portend “what the end will be.” When I was a grade school student, I found that
pressure and impending deadlines were my most effective motivators. One year, in junior
high or high school, I almost took this tendency to delay too far. I had a major project, a
term research paper due on the day before Pesach, hours before I would sit down for the
first seder. As I recount the story, the circumstances seem so inconsequential. A student
left too much work for the last minute. So what? Get it done or face the consequences,
right? Right. I understood then as I do now that there were many people for whom danger
and peril were all too real. Many people suffered through that night and every night
fearing for their lives. Even so, the intellectual understanding of the situation was not
nearly so impactful or penetratingly painful as my emotional response to my
predicament. I attended a highly competitive, girls’ college preparatory school. I was the
only Black student in my class during grades K-12. Pressure was a constant in my life.
The notion of failing to perform exceedingly well was a terrifying one…I had left myself
far too much work to do on that last night before the work was due. I had to finish up the
research, write an outline for the paper, provide the bibliography, and write an intro and
conclusion to the paper. I was so young at that time that I wasn’t required to write the
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