When we think of spring we think of the warming weather, the blossoming of trees, the blooming flowers, the lighter clothing and the longer days. And as the season turns from cold to light it brings a kind of euphoria where after months of being pent up inside our homes we can enjoy the time outdoors. We are free from the confines of our own four walls. No longer ensconced within our cocoons, we sense that there is a wider, happier world for us to explore.
Spring is the season of freedom. We know it. We feel it in every fiber of our being. Does it not then make sense that the festival of freedom, Pesach (Passover to the English speaking world) takes front and center at this time. (Yes there is also Easter, but I believe that holiday has different meaning than Passover, even though it’s seminal occurrence was during the Passover holiday over 2000 years ago)
Now of course, according to the Torah, this is the time when Moses with the might of Hashem brought the enslaved Hebrews out of bondage into freedom. But why at this time of year? Why not in December? At the time of the writing of the Torah there was no Hanukkah in December, and even if there were, you can have more than 1 holiday a month. In fact, Shabbat in and of itself is a weekly holy day.
I think the symbolism cannot be lost on us. Spring brings to mind a new beginning. Throughout the animal kingdom it is the time of birth and of life. The seder plate, the meal eaten at the Passover celebration, while also remembering the bricks (charoset), tears (marror) and the unleavened bread (matzah) eaten by the fleeing Jews, also takes note that this is spring time, and the time to plant new crops. Pesach means many things, including the remembrance of the Jewish connection to the land of Israel. The Jewish People never forgot the rhythms of their indigenous lands. Passover brings up springtime, and then with the counting of the Omer in the weeks that follow, it brings us to the planting of the crops that would keep everyone alive for the year to come.
We Jews are inextricably linked to the Land of Israel. The last line of the seder is “Next Year in Jerusalem. Next year may we be truly free.” L’shanah haba’ah, b’Yerushalayim.
There is nothing so much in Passover as the theme of a new beginning. And what could be more than a new beginning than to be free. And so the theme of freedom resonates over the millennia. What is it to go from being enslaved to being able to make your own decisions? What does it take to go from having your every movement ascribed by someone else to being your own person? What does it mean to have agency? What does it mean to have responsibility? What does it mean to have duties, obligations, and outcomes all dependent on the choices you and you alone make?
Freedom, is an essential part of being human. For eons, people have fought for and died for their right to be free. To be able to follow their own path and to not be coopted into another religion, ethnicity or culture. Empires have risen and died, trying to control the very essence of human nature itself. But without lasting success. in fact, humans still celebrate the right to make their own choices. We have an abundance of independence days throughout the world.
Unfortunately, there are still those whose main raison d’etre is to deny the human right to be live in a free world. Whether it is a political philosophy or a religious one. There are those today who would control every aspect of the how we think, what we feel, and how we chose to live our lives. They would take from us the right to be independent, to be be free, to decide for ourselves our future. They think that their way is the only true way to live and seek to destroy what they see as an aberration of their world view. There is something lacking in this megalomaniacal mind set. It is destructive. It only seeks death. It only seeks destruction for what it cannot control.
Of course, we do not have to let such views win. You do not have to let those whose sickness is to deny the spark that makes humankind so different than others in the animal kingdom win under any circumstances. You do not have to make excuses for such hatefulness, as some do. For those who wish to destroy the essential part of being free, our right to pursue our dreams as we see fit, are owed no favor. They deserve derision and need to be treated with disdain.
Moreover, what we learn over time is that choice is the essence of freedom. But with choice comes obligation and responsibility, as well. With choice comes duty. With choice comes the acknowledgment of reality and how to incorporate our wants, our desires, our needs into a productive positive environment.
Humans believe in freedom as synonymous with our rights. Especially here in the United States. That Bill of Rights, especially the first amendment, becomes the absolute of our society. It is the watchword of our faith in being Americans. It is who we are. It is part of our American character. It is part of our raucous, uncouth, no holds barred version of human interaction. But it too has limits, albeit small ones, and ones very hard for the government to bridge.
We Americans are an unusual lot in the annals of history. We are stiff necked and stubborn in our belief in ourselves and in our right to be whom we chose to be. We especially don’t like someone else defining us. We will define ourselves….someday. We are still arguing about that too. In fact, we are still arguing about the first amendment. Actually we are still arguing about the entire Bill of Rights, where our right to be free from government oversight begins juxtaposed with where the right of the government to be able to function and protect all its citizens begins.
“The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins,” Oliver Wendell Holmes.
What we do learn, however is that nothing is absolute. Not even your right to be free from the consequences, both good and bad, of your choices. The essence of freedom is being able to accept the outcome of those choices and living up to your obligations.
I find it really interesting how the story of Passover, and the eternal search for freedom, is so represented here in the American story. It is the pull and push of your right to live your choices, but the requirement to do so in a manner without destroying someone else’s rights on the way to meeting your goals. It is this limit of freedom that is very American as well. (Well we try to make it that way at least. If people do not put consequences on themselves, society will in many different ways.)
As the Hebrews suffered consequences for choosing wrongly in building the golden calf by being forced to wonder in the Sinai for 40 years before entering the Holy Land (seriously how stupid could you the Hebrews have been? They see all the miracles that Hashem had wrought on the Egyptians and yet they still created an idol? Common sense apparently is not a Jewish genetic trait) so too does society put limits on freedom and create outcomes for poor choices, not just criminal outcomes which is a different subject. Society has unwritten rules about behavior and respect of others. Well it used to anyway.
So as we enter spring with the holiday of Passover, we return to the land, to the concepts of independence, of freedom, of consequences, of responsibility and the reality of how to live within a world that has boundaries, rights, wrongs and unfortunately, still quite a number of people who are sociopaths .
And because of those sociopaths (both in Gaza and in the world at large), 59 hostages (only 24 still thought to be alive) will not be celebrating at the seder table this Saturday.
(Someone needs to explain to me how Egypt and Qatar have the chutzpah to not offer the return of every living hostage to Israel in exchange for a ceasefire [only 5 or 7 living hostages and some dead] as if Israel should thank them for their largess. A pox on these scum. See these countries under the definition of sociopaths trying to save Hamas.)
Chag Pesach Sameach
IT IS DAY 551 OF THE HOSTAGES BEING STARVED AND HELD IN THE TERROR DUNGEONS OF GAZA 🎗️
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