Pesach: Festival Of Freedom?

 Pesach Story    Chametz   Seder   Haggadah   Festival & Chol Hamoed Laws 
 Omer   Pesach Temple Days

.....................................   The Story Of Pesach  The Month of Nissan Everyone has heard Pesach called the Freedom Festival. But what kind of freedom are we talking about? As soon as the Jews got free, they traveled to Mount Sinai, where they received 613 binding commandments legislating every part of their lives. What kind of liberation makes half of the food in the kitchen off-limits? And how about the heavy-duty cleaning that Pesach preparation entails -- what is so freeing about that? How did this one escape come to represent the eternal image of redemption and freedom? When Moses first approached Pharoah, he only asked for a short religious vacation. Pharoah's answer is revealing: "Who is God? I don't know this so-called God of yours." (Exodus 5:2) Pharoah, who ruled as a deity in Egypt, spoke for all tyrants forever -- "If I am Supreme Ruler, then there is no room for any God above me." Pharoah saw no "image of God" in his Hebrew slaves, and no higher authority than his own. Human life had no intrinsic value to him. When human life is valueless, freedom -- the concept and the experience -- is meaningless. Pharoah says, "You're concerned about religion? Well, we'll have to work you a little harder." Tyrants despise the idea of freedom because it speaks of something beyond them. Pharoah's response is to oppress that much harder. In the spiritual wasteland of Egypt, the slaves themselves had sunken so low that they too had almost forgotten their Divine spark. Thus the Haggadah says, "If we had not been taken out of Egypt, we would still be slaves to Pharoah." Breaking the Israelites out of their spiritual enslavement was the true miracle of the Exodus. First a series of disasters broke the might of the Egyptians. The Israelites saw their former masters rendered powerless to stop the destruction. Right before the final plague, they were commanded to sacrifice a lamb -- an animal venerated by the Egyptians as holy. What courage it must have taken to risk their masters' wrath by publicly killing a symbol of Egyptian religion! There they showed themselves capable of relying on G-d and not on men. They showed they were ready to choose freedom. For freedom, as a Jewish concept, is not merely an absence of physical oppression. Freedom is an internal quality that stems from a human being's most prized possession -- his free will. This freedom cannot be taken away by pharoahs, although we, ourselves, can relinquish it. Mitzraim - Egypt - is related to the word metzarim - narrow straits. The journey out of Egypt was much more than a physical one. It was a voyage from the slave mentality ("I can't help it! It's not my fault!) to one of spiritual liberation. I am free to choose. This was a prerequisite for the next phase of the Exodus -- the receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, which is compared to a wedding ceremony between God and the Jewish people. What kind of a marriage would exist if one spouse was coerced? The people had to be able to "choose" God. Now we see that the freedom of the Exodus is in no way connected to the freedom of anarchy. True, the Hebrew slaves escaped from a tyrant. But they went on to embrace the boundaries of the commandments as a free people -- that is, a nation of individuals endowed with free will. They chose to connect to something higher than themselves. When Jews scour their houses to remove chametz, it is an exercise of free will. They choose to be free of the dead weight the chametz represents. Pesach is the quintessential "freedom festival" because it represents a liberation of the body AND the spirit, and the defeat of those forces which seek to dehumanize man by denying his Divine spark. In Spring, as the earth reawakens, the Jewish people once again sit down to the Seder table, to recall the Exodus and reawaken their internal sense of freedom. If we appreciate the gift of free will, we can cast off any shackles of habit that bind us, and renew our commitment to living according to our higher values, and only then can we experience a personal redemption by acknowledging the tremendous significance of the national one.   The Story Of Pesach  The Month of Nissan .....................................