Parade

Everyone loves a parade. We don't need much of an excuse to celebrate. The Fourth of July? Have a parade. Your team just won a championship? Have a parade. A dignitary is coming to town? Have a parade.
There's nothing quite like a parade to stir the hearts, to instill a sense of pride - be it for country, team, organization, whatever. The rousing music, the colourful floats, the marchers so well choreo-graphed, the specialty acts - parades gather a community together, makes it feel unified and triumphant.

We have Jewish parades, too. On Purim, Lag B'Omer, even Chanuka. And these stir our Jewish pride, raise our Jewish awareness, increase our Jewish identity and association with things Jewish.

So parades are good things, and Jewish parades are really good things. But what is it about parades? What makes them special? We have other gatherings, other rallies, other ways of expression our enthusiasm, celebrating our victories, etc. But everyone will agree, there's something special about a parade.

If we think about it, we'll realize that two things separate a parade from a rally or party or other form of celebration. One is that a parade is always moving, and the other is that the leader is always in front.

At a rally, or a party, or a circus, or any other gathering, the leader is either in the center or opposite everyone else, like on a stage. So even when everyone else is a participant - not just an audience watching, but engaged in the rally - there's a difference between what the leader's doing and what everyone else is doing.

And so you might think you're part of the action when you're not, or vice versa.

But in a parade, you can't make that mistake. You're either in the parade, or you're watching the parade go by. (And most of us, if it's a really good parade, don't want to just stand and watch. We want to get in line and march along, even if we have to join in at the end.)

And you can't make that mistake because if you're in the parade, you've got to play "follow-the-leader." The leader is always out in front, and the parade goes where he wants it to. You can't be opposite the leader of a parade; you have to be behind him.

The other unique thing about a parade is that it's always moving forward. Oh, it may pause for a rest, but it's a temporary pause - like the encampments of the Jewish people in Sinai on their way to Israel. Unlike some other gatherings, whose beginning, middle and end may not be well-defined, a parade always starts in a specific place and proceeds, even if the route's a bit crooked sometimes, to a definite end and well known destination.

And, in a spiritual sense, that's why everyone loves a parade. Because we are part of the great march of Jewish history. The Leader of the parade is, of course, G-d - it is His pathway and route that we follow.

But isn't it exciting knowing that, even if we are the last "float" in the parade, we're part of it and we're nearing the finish, the end of the parade route, the time when "the whole world will be filled with knowledge of G-d as the waters cover the ocean bed"?