WOW! The holiday marathon is behind us. While there were certainly limitations on work, food etc., I hope that it was for you, as it was for us, wonderful and beautiful family time and celebration.
The post Passover greeting is “א געזונטע זומער” a healthy summer. There are so many meanings to that little greeting. On a most basic level, we’ve switched over to summer prayers in our amida, and for those of us fortunate enough to live in places where we experience 4 seasons (or at least, blazing hot and freezing cold) the transition starts to happen.
On a deeper level, there is more to it than that. We just finished a week of squelching our inner chometz, our EGO – Edging G-d Out – and now it is time to reintroduce our higher and cleansed and more aware sense of self back into the “real” world, the world of bread, ego, self-inflation and indulgence.
This is not a bad thing, the purpose of creation was not to live as hermits in a cave up in the mountains like Angels, but to bring Heaven down to earth and infuse this at times corrupted earth with this Divine energy. We take the humility of Pesach and bring into the dough of after Pesach.
In our day to day life, this is represented by the better weather of after Passover, where things warm up, clothing becomes more scant and hedonism and pleasure seeking tend to ‘warm up.”
For this we have the greeting, a healthy summer vs a happy summer or pleasurable summer. A spiritually healthy summer. A summer where we infuse the material and mundane with a healthy dose of Passover energy.
So, I bless you and myself, for a “א געזונטע זומער” a healthy summer!
A very good Shabbos to you!
Rabbi Mendel Schusterman
Thanks to my brother, Rabbi Nechemia Schusterman, Chabad Peabody, Mass., for sharing the above thought.
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