By Betzy Lynch in La Jolla, California
As we begin to prepare for Passover, I am reminded that the preparation requires more than cleaning my home, buying Matzah and selling chametz. I too, must prepare to embrace my capacity and gratitude for freedom not just for the seven days of Passover but for every day. I hope this poem might inspire you to prepare too.
My Heart Melts
First, heartburn
A small uprising.
What I swallowed
refusing to stay buried.
An inconvenience, I said
Like Pharaoh
watching the Nile turn
calling blood
by another name.
I tell myself:
I am not him.
I am the one who sees,
who names what is broken,
who does not look away.
And yet
How often have I watched
harm against my people
and let my chest close
just enough
to endure?
The plagues do not begin with frogs.
They begin
with denial
a truth half-swallowed,
a sentence left wandering,
a quiet decree:
Feel this, and you will unravel.
So my heart does not harden
it melts,
then cools into something careful.
Not this.
Not again.
It learns new rhythms:
distance as wisdom,
walls as protection.
And still
the plagues arrive.
Not hail or locusts,
but vile Jew hating headlines,
and voices I know
speaking as if I am not there.
My pulse falters.
My vision narrows.
I begin to see others
only as I feel them
not as they are.
Pharaoh hardened his heart
but Torah whispers otherwise:
sometimes it was hardened for him.
Ignore truth long enough
and it will finish the work
like fire tempering metal
past the point of return.
This is what frightens me.
Not hatred
I know its name.
But my own becoming closed.
My own forgetting
how to open at all.
Because a hardened heart
does not only refuse enemies
it forgets its people.
forgets how to extend the table,
how to set a place for repair.
And what then?
When I stop returning,
stop believing I can,
stop making room
for the work of staying open
the plagues will return and
will not end.
They transform:
distance where there could be dialogue,
certainty where there could be more than one truth,
isolation where there could be us.
So I stand
not in Egypt,
but not fully free
and I ask:
what would it take
to let my heart melt again?
Not from fear and anger
but from laughter,
from an outstretched hand,
from a stranger who does not turn away.
Pharaoh’s story ends
in the closing waters.
Ours must not.
So I choose, again
to feel the melting burn
before it becomes steel,
I take the antacid so I can speak
So silence won’t become distance,
to name what harms
and still remain open.
And to remember:
That at my seder
I pray that all who are hungry will come and eat
And accept my open invitation, to sit at my table, not in spite of me being a Jew,
but because I am one.
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Betzy Lynch is the CEO of the Lawrence Family JCC in La Jolla.