It’s a great Haggadah, I realize. Just not the best one for me

It is hot. So, so hot.

I will myself to focus, not to tear my eyes away from the face before me. The man, haunting agony in his eyes. Wounds on his face, staining his beard, his robes. The broken desperation in his posture, his expression… his voice.

“They took my child,” he says, then he lifts his voice to a primal shriek, a Heaven-splitting cry. “My son! My baby! They took him because I could not fill the quota of bricks that those barbaric taskmasters have set on us. They have taken our straw, made us gather it for ourselves in the heat, in the burning sun, and yet they expect us to produce the same number of bricks that we have done up until now.”

There is no mercy, no reprieve; not from the sun baking down on us in the desert sands; not from the voice of the man or the wailing of — now I see them — tens of other slaves in ripped clothing, bruised and beaten; not from the deeper, rougher shouts of the taskmasters, brandishing leather whips….

I can’t bear it. My head is spinning; I feel thirsty, faint. Dying.

“Yisrael? Yisrael!” My name. Voices. I know them, it’s my brothers and sisters, my mother… but I’m still staring at that horrific face, the unknown man… but it’s receding, the desert around us disappearing, and suddenly, the man is staring out of the pages of the Haggadah in front of me, and I’m sitting at the Seder table, in 2023, with my family — all four siblings, two siblings-in-law, and my niece and nephew — staring at me with laughter on their faces.

“Hey, you’re like six pages behind us,” Chezky says, flipping the pages of my Haggadah forward, forward, past more nightmarish images and onto a page that depicts the splitting of the sea.

“You were sleeping. I guess you were really tired!” My sister Bracha tells me, as I blink across at her, disoriented.

“I… what?” I shake my head. I wasn’t sleeping, I was there, in Mitzrayim, feeling the pain, the terror, the burning heat….

It’s hot in the room, but somehow I’m shivering. Abba starts singing Dayeinu, my brothers join in, Chayala and Yitzi clap along, but I’m not there with him, I’m still lagging behind, lost in the torment of the Egyptian quicksand under a glaring, merciless sun.

The pictures follow me through the Seder.