The grass survived.

The snow has melted, finally, and you can once again run, walk or hike through the grass. After months under a foot or more of snow, the grass is still green, and alive, mostly.

How does grass survive the freezing cold, the darkness, buried under the snow?Humans can not survive being buried in an avalanche for more than a few minutes. Yet grass survives the cold, the weight, the desiccation. How do its cells resist rupturing, imploding and becoming a protoplasmic organic slime? How do its fragile roots maintain their grasp on a soil which has itself frozen and is no longer nurturing.

This week marks the beginning of the holiday of Passover, commemorating the exodus of the Children of Israel from slavery in Egypt. The holiday has many themes, revisited each year by parents and children and grandparents and grandchildren in a performance art like meal called the ‘seder’ where the story of the exodus is retold, using food as symbolic props.

But one idea often gets lost in all the preparation and the re-telling. The name of the holiday, Passover in English and ‘Pesach’ (pronounced peh-sakh) in hebrew, conveys a most basic but critical thematic idea. The name of the holiday references God’s sending an angel to visit death upon the first born males in pharonic Egypt as a punishment. God instructed the angel of death to spare the Jewish children. The name, then, focuses on a celebration of survival and an acknowledgement of God as both the taker and sustainer of life in a world filled with Divine intervention in the matters of mankind.

It is by design that Passover always occurs near beginning of springtime, a period of rebirth. And the blades of grass are the first signs of that renewal. They persist through a winter that really should have killed them. But at winter’s end the grasses stand up with no flowery announcement of their arrival. Unannounced and unadorned, they unfurl themselves and reach for the warmth of the nourishing sun.

The springtime holiday of Passover marks not only re-birth but also the birth of a nation that survived its own long winter of oppression, deprivation and servitude. Not every blade of grass survives the winter and neither did every member of the nation survive to leave Egypt 3,000 or so years ago. Which is why seeing the grass again in the springtime is the perfect time to truly celebrate life.