I had to look up the spelling of my title. I never read the phrase before, just heard family members say what sounded to me like "azeeezem Pesach" (with the "ch" sounding like you're clearing your throat). So whenever I felt tribal, I'd say "azeeezem pesach" and, as Yiddish has a way of doing, it made me feel good. Try it, say it outloud, you'll see what I mean.

So Passover. We remember when we were slaves in Egypt and Moses led us out of Egypt to the Promised Land.

I never really got into the whole slave story of Passover except for the ten plagues, which were gory enough to capture my attention when I was a very young (and somewhat bloodthirsty) child - locusts, ew.

I mean I dug what slavery meant at a very early age, because every year the story was told and then of course there were the stories of the Holocaust, so the oppression and injustice on a tragic scale was something I was familiar with just from osmosis.

What I liked the most about the story of Passover was a mention in the Haggadah (the liturgy booklet everyone reads outloud around the table) that "every generation" has to encounter and struggle with oppression. Like the Buddhism I practice, Judaism also has a strong understanding of the impermanence of both victory and defeat in battles against oppression and for justice and although the wise Sages probably wouldn't put it this way, I think they saw the yin/yang of human struggle, the darkness just as the light prevails, the light just as the darkness prevails.

Thus, the "every generation," everyone has to find out for themselves what it means to want freedom from oppression of any kind, why that is important spiritually, why it answers the question with "Not Me Us."

The kind of unity that is organically growing now is not in the control of any one person. It is something to experience, not to own or direct. I don't think our culture is used to taking bold leaps and we're seeing the result of that, in my opinion, with an actually brutal resistance to change, backed by some serious political machinery of the Empire. Dude.

But the unity is real just the same. Bernie is in a tie with Hillary in California, and how can that be with all the machinery bearing down upon him and us saying the race is over? Are all those Californians fools? All of them?

These are the times, brothers and sisters, not what are we going to do but looking at what we are actually doing right now, the phenomenon that is growing right under our noses.

What a scene, jelly bean.

Passover is about liberation from tyranny.

Solidarity.