Of all of the evildoers in the world, many of us know firsthand that bullies are among the worst. Like many of us, I, too, was bullied when I was younger – even as late as high school.  And it was in high school that I met the cruelest bully of them all – a guy who never passed up an opportunity to torment, who seemed to inflict pain for the sheer joy of doing so, and who brought enormous suffering to me and many of my schoolmates.

And at the Passover Seder last Monday night, I got back at him!

Oddly, this bully – I’ll call him Billy Coleman– was smaller than me.  Klutzier, too.  One of the few people chosen after me for sports teams, Billy the Bully was, in fact, something of a weakling.  This weakness, however, never interfered with Billy’s bullying, because Billy was a conniving bully.  Never did he kick or punch or steal our lunch money.  His torment of choice came not from his brawn, but rather from his sheer determination to hurt.  Nonetheless, it wreaked havoc, and I shudder as I remember his evil deeds.

Billy, you see, would simply tear the final pages out of the books we were reading.

Oh, the horror!  Often, we didn’t even know we had been “Billied” until some time afterward – until we reached the end of whatever book we were reading.  Or at least until we almost reached the end.  Billy never let us get all the way there.

What’s more, Billy was indiscriminating in his choice of books.  As a result, it didn’t matter whether we were reading Stephen Crane or Stephen King, Charles Dickens or Charlie Brown, a biology textbook or Shakespeare –  all of our books were potential objects of Billy’s desecratory bullying.

Many of my classmates and I still grimace as we remember it.  We’d devote many hours of reading time to a certain book, we’d approach its conclusion with eager anticipation and, turning to the final page, we’d find not the last several inches of text, but a jagged, torn page-stub instead.    Billy!

Billy’s cruelty lay in the fact that he never allowed us to reach the end of our stories.  Many of those books had pretty-well wrapped things up by the final page, but some had not.  In fact, in some books, the events of the final page or of the final sentence completely transform the plot.  Was that the case in our Billified books?  We would never know.

Being stuck in the middle of a story – or, more specifically having to finish a story before it’s really over – can be agonizing.  Imagine how we would feel if, say, Little Red Riding Hood ended with Grandma still inside the wolf;  if horror movies ended well before dawn, as people are still getting eaten by the Who-Knows-What; if the final curtain fell with Juliet still on the balcony, wondering “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?”

In fact, it occurs to me that most of the despair that we human beings suffer results from the “Billying” that we do to ourselves.  Pain often overcomes us because we are unable to see a good end to the story we are living – we’ve torn out the final page, if not more.  People often become depressed, for example, when they lose the ability to envision a better life.  Financial difficulties begin to feel oppressive when we cannot find a path to prosperity.  Lost love hurts when we cannot imagine ourselves ever being happy again without it.

I wonder how much of our pain could be eased by reminding ourselves that we haven’t yet gotten to the end of the story.

Well, at the Passover Seder last Monday night, Jews around the world gathered at their tables to enjoy a festive meal and to tell a story of redemption – the entire story, up to very end. 

The story, of course, is the tale of God freeing the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt.  But that’s not all, because the story continues with the Israelites at Mt. Sinai, receiving instructions from God as to what they were to do with that freedom.  But that’s not all, either, because it continues with the rest of their journey through the desert to their ancestral homeland.

But even that’s not all.  Because Jews tell this story not only as a tale of the past, but as a model for the future, as well.  Our age-old hope is that, just as God once saved our people from the evils of slavery, so too will God one day redeem all humanity from the many evils that confront us today.

The world may not be perfect yet, but it’s getting there, and the hope of those who embrace the Jewish view of the future is that one day it will arrive.

So that’s the story we told the other night.  We reminded ourselves that, difficult though things may be now, they got better in the past, and they can improve once again.  If you think that they won’t, that’s only because you’ve forgotten that we haven’t gotten to the end yet.  You’ve “Billied” yourself.

Our world is indeed on a great adventure – an adventure that continues each day. I’ve told that story each year at the Passover Seder in the past, and until we reach the end, I’ll keep on telling it – the whole darn thing.

Take that, Billy Coleman!