Every year at the seder we retell our central story: once we were slaves to a Pharaoh in Egypt, and now we are free. Once we were trapped in the constriction of terrible circumstance, and now we can breathe and stretch and shape our own choices. Once we were forced to live in servitude to an earthly power; now we are free to choose to live in service to the love and the hope and the power which are beyond all earthly imagining.

In the traditional haggadah we read:

In every generation a person must see himself as though he himself had been brought forth from Egypt, as it is said: 'And you shall speak to your child on that day, saying, it is because of what God did for me when God brought me out of Egypt. Not for our ancestors alone did the Holy Blessed One wreak this redemption, but we too were redeemed along with them.'

We tell the story as though it had happened to us, because it does happen to us. It is always happening to us.

In every life there are times of constriction and tightness. The name Mitzrayim, "the narrow place," contains the root tzar, narrow. This is the root of the word tzuris, suffering. In every life there is suffering. We all know this, though sometimes we don't want to acknowledge it. (I certainly don't want to acknowledge it most of the time. As though by ignoring it I could make it less true.) But here's the radical part of what our tradition teaches: in every life there is also redemption.

That's the central story we tell, the story which makes us the Jewish people. We tell it each year during the Pesach seder. We tell it each Friday when we remember the Exodus  in the kiddush blessing over wine. We tell it every day when we remember the Exodus in the ge'ulah blessing of daily prayer. We were slaves to a Pharaoh in Egypt, we have been in the narrow place of constriction and suffering, and the Holy One of Blessing brings us out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. We are the people who tell the story which leads from slavery to redemption, from constriction to openness, from sorrow to joy.

 We each have personal stories which we habitually tell. Stories about our childhoods, stories about our families, stories about our choices and our circumstances. What are the stories you tell about your life? What would it take for you to tell a story of wholeness and redemption, like the story our people tells every day, every week, every year -- the story we tell which makes us who we are?

This post is part of #blogExodus, a carnival of posts on themes relating to the Exodus and to Passover, instigated by the ever-wonderful ImaBima. Follow it by searching for the #blogExodus hashtag on Twitter or wherever you habitually look for things.