<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Passover<br class=""><br class=""><span style="font-size: 14px;" class=""><i class="">Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . .<br class="">and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.<br class=""><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" class=""> </span>- Exodus 12: 7 & 13</i></span><br class=""><br class="">They thought they were safe<br class="">that spring night; when they daubed<br class="">the doorways with sacrificial blood.<br class="">To be sure, the angel of death<br class="">passed them over, but for what?<br class="">Forty years in the desert<br class="">without a home, without a bed,<br class="">following new laws to an unknown land.<br class="">Easier to have died in Egypt<br class="">or stayed there a slave, pretending<br class="">there was safety in the old familiar.<br class=""><br class="">But the promise, from those first<br class="">naked days outside the garden,<br class="">is that there is no safety,<br class="">only the terrible blessing<br class="">of the journey. You were born<br class="">through a doorway marked in blood.<br class="">We are, all of us, passed over,<br class="">brushed in the night by terrible wings.<br class=""><br class="">Ask that fierce presence,<br class="">whose imagination you hold.<br class="">God did not promise that we shall live,<br class="">but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,<br class="">brilliant in the desert sky.<br class=""><br class=""><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" class=""> </span>- Lynn Ungar</body></html>