There is a line in the traditional Passover teaching that sounds impossible at first. In every generation, it says, a person is obligated to see himself as though he personally came out of Egypt. How can you remember an event that happened to other people, thousands of years before you were born? The science of memory shows how, and shows why God designed the feast to make you try.

The kind of remembering that lets you relive a moment has a name. Psychologists call it episodic memory, and one of its pioneers described it as a form of mental time travel. Dr. Charan Ranganath, a scientist of memory, explains in his 2024 book Why We Remember that when you recall an experience, your mind reinstates the context of it, the place, the sights, the smells, the feelings, and that reinstated context transports you back inside the moment. A single cue can do it. A song, a scent, a taste can drop you into a scene from years ago as though you were standing in it again. Recreate enough of the original setting, and the mind treats the memory almost like a present experience.

Context is the doorway. Rebuild the context, and you can step back through it.