The newest book by world renowned teacher, Mashpia and Shliach, Rabbi DovBer Pinson, is on the Haggadah and the Yom Tov of Pesach.
Volume 1 is an in-depth exploration of the major themes of Pesach and the Haggadah and how they are illuminated in Chassidus and rendered in a very down-to-earth and accessible way.
“The Haggadah: Pathways to Pesach and the Haggadah” Vol 1 is presently the number 1 Release in Jewish books on Amazon.
Available in all good Jewish Bookstores and on Amazon.com
Excerpt from the book:
Chassidus explains that Mitzrayim / Egypt comes from the root word מצר / Metzar / constraint, constriction, or narrowness, implying stuckness. The natural limits of time, space, and personal consciousness set the stage on which a general state of ‘constriction’ can manifest. For example, constricted consciousness in the realm of time can appear as being obsessively tied to the current moment, to such an extent that one cannot see the big picture, including their past or future.
In ‘constricted space’, a person can become stuck in their physical or geographical location without the freedom to move.
In constricted personal consciousness, one can become so engrossed in their own life story that they cannot see or think about anyone else beyond themselves.
…Mitzrayim-Metzar is not a mere linguistic association, rather, the Torah itself infers that Egypt, in contrast to Eretz Yisrael, the Promised Land, was a place of constriction and narrowness. The Pasuk / verse says, “I have come down to rescue them from the Egyptians and to bring them out of that land to a ארץ טובה ורחבה / good and spacious land” . The Torah thus implies that Egypt was not spacious, but rather oppressive and claustrophobic. It was a society based on trauma and intractable stuckness. As a result, Mitzrayim represents any reality or condition of existential narrowness, any constriction of self-expression, or any sense of physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual enslavement.
In Egypt, Klal Yisrael/the People of Israel was not only laboring under an external state of slavery, rather they were experiencing עבדות בעצם / Avdus b’Etzem / an ‘essential’ enslavement, an enslavement of their very essence. They thought and believed (especially those who were teetering on the fiftieth level of Tumah / impurity and stuckness, as will be explored) — as the Egyptian slave owners wished them to believe — that there was an absolute fixed class system, and that those who were currently slaves were meant to be, and would always be, slaves. This belief in the status quo permeated their experience of time/space/soul, to the extent that their condition of constriction and slavery was not merely extrinsic, rather it was intrinsic and indispensable; they could not even conceive of themselves beyond its fanatical borders.
Then, suddenly from Above, with dramatic force, came Klal Yisrael’s unprecedented liberation.
This freedom was not merely a release from jail or bondage, rather Klal Yisrael was revealed to be חירות בעצם / free in essence. Our release from Mitzrayim brought us into an intrinsic freedom; we were no longer slaves by definition. No other people can ever truly enslave us again. Sadly, they are able to put us down, oppress, persecute, or abuse us, but we are eternally and existentially free. Ours is not just a freedom from being a slave and acting like a slave, it is an absolute freedom beyond the very context of enslavement and subjugation altogether.
that was a very clarifying lesson.