I love to anticipate enjoyable activities. Sometimes the anticipation is actually better than the event that is being anticipated. Regarding Passover, this year, 5760, there will be a great deal of anticipation for many of us, and that anticipation will continue right up to the night of the first Seder. Many of you will prepare for this night with more effort than any other night of the year.

Perhaps you will do what many other serious Jews will do in the weeks prior to the Seder: You will meticulously clean your home, looking in every closet, under every area rug, and inside every kitchen cabinet in your quest to get rid of all leavened products, so that you can fulfill that important Mitzvah of not possessing, in fact, not even viewing, any item which contains chometz. You will scrub your kitchen counters, scour your pots and pans, and replace your regular dishes with Passover dishes. You will try in the weeks prior to eat all the leftover chometz in the house, and that which you cannot possibly finish you will either donate to a food pantry, or sell to a non-Jew, according to Jewish law.

By the time the actual Seder rolls around we are all anticipating something, although what it is that each of us anticipates will vary. Perhaps you are nervously anticipating the drive home from work, worried that you wonąt make your Seder in time. Or maybe you are anticipating the crowded table, with the chaos and tension that sometimes accompanies family gatherings. Perhaps you are uncomfortable about the Seder because it is the first one that you have ever attended, and you are concerned about saying the wrong thing, asking the wrong question, or pronouncing the unfamiliar Hebrew words improperly. Or maybe you are the Seder leader, and you are worried that your guests are going to leave the table having learned nothing new.

This anticipation is both physically and spiritually draining. Is it no wonder that we are often falling asleep halfway through the Seder? We are wiped out often even before the meal begins. Yet the Haggadah itself teaches us that, "The more one tells about the Exodus, the more he/she is praiseworthy." We must release ourselves from the shackles of exhaustion, and raise ourselves up, physically and spiritually, to perform the central Mitzvah of Passover, that of recounting the story of the Exodus, of remembering what it is that God did for us. For it is in the telling that we are able to taste, albeit limitedly, what our ancestors experienced: the redemption from slavery to freedom, and the formation of our great Jewish nation. By understanding the past we will have a much greater capacity to understand where we are going, and what it is God desires from us now and in the future.