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D'var Torah for Pesach
2006
The Memory of Freedom
As the end of winter blends slowly into spring and the trees and flowers begin to bloom anew, Jews around the globe begin to prepare for the holiday of Pesach, Passover. One of, if not the, most celebrated Jewish festivals on the calendar, Passover is a time when families come together to recount the story of the exodus from Egypt. The name Passover encourages Jews to remember the biblical story where God literally "passed over" the homes of the children of Israel during the 10th plague, the killing of the first-born male children of Egypt. But to think of the holiday of Passover simply as a time to remember a historical event or a biblical story would be to limit the power and depth of the eight days during the Hebrew month of Nisan when the holiday is celebrated.
For the Sefat Emet, an early 20th-century Chassidic rabbi, the holiday of Passover is very much a living, breathing holiday. The Sefat Emet compares Passover to Shabbat, suggesting that just as God commands the Jewish people to both remember and guard the Shabbat, He also commands the Jewish people to do the same with regard to Passover: "Memory is the inner point (the divine presence) that one should not forget and because Shabbat revealed this point in the souls of the children of Israel therefore one needs to be guarded so that the inner point does not spread to a place of forgetfulness…this is also the idea in the redemption of the Jews in Egypt." For the Sefat Emet, Passover is one of the generators of memory, along with Shabbat, through which Jews understand or realize the existence of "Godliness" in themselves. The question then becomes, what specific memory from Passover generates this realization? Which memory must we guard and remember?
As a child I remember the intense nerves I would experience as I got ready to participate in my family Seder. For a few years I was the only child in my family who was old enough and knew enough Hebrew to sing the four questions. After the nerves subsided and I got through the questions, my grandfather, Irwin Posner of blessed memory, would bellow the same answer the same way my great-grandfather answered the question a generation earlier. I can still hear the booming Brooklyn-esque voice declare, "And the answer to that is…" before reading the following answer aloud from the Maggid (which, in Hebrew, means "to tell") section of the Haggadah:
"We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, but Hashem our God took us out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Had not the Holy One, Blessed is He, taken our fathers out from Egypt, then we, our children, and our children's children would have remained enslaved to Pharaoh in Egypt. Even if we were all men of wisdom, understanding, experience, and knowledge of the Torah, it would still be an obligation upon us to tell about the Exodus from Egypt. The more one tells about the Exodus, the more he is praiseworthy."
The Haggadah and the voices of generations before us answer the question of what memory helps generate the knowledge of "Godliness" of which the Sefat Emet speaks. That memory is the memory that we, the Jewish people, were enslaved. The story of Exodus, the first response to the four questions of the Haggadah, and the memory that sparks our recognition of our "inner point" is first and foremost about being enslaved and then the ensuing march toward freedom.
Memory, of course is an interesting thing. The memory itself exists in a time and space that does not exist in the present, but rather in the past. You can not affect it, but it can affect you. Later in the Maggid section of the Haggadah we read that we are supposed to see ourselves as if we were actually slaves in Egypt. The question now becomes, what effect should the memory of the Exodus of Egypt have on us as we prepare to celebrate Passover? How can we actually see ourselves as slaves in Egypt?
The sad truth is that it might not be as hard as we think. Clarence Darrow, one of America's most famous civil libertarians, said, "You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free." Unfortunately, in our world today, many people are still stuck in bondage with the prospects of freedom nowhere in sight.
Rabbi Irving Greenberg, in his book "The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays," notes that the truth is that the "overwhelming majority of earth's human beings have always lived in poverty and under oppression." However, Rabbi Greenberg insists that Judaism and, in particular, the holiday of Passover enforce the notion that eventually justice will prevail. He writes, "Judaism insists that history and the social economic political reality in which people live will eventually be perfected; much of what passes for the norm of human existence is really a deviation from the ultimate reality." While this certainly is one of the potential messages of the holiday of Passover, it still leaves us in a bind. Now not only are we still enslaved on some level (according to Darrow and Greenberg), but we have failed to understand how to guard and remember Passover in an active way as the Sefat Emet suggests we need to.
I was fortunate enough that when my grandfather recited the paragraph of "We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt…" he was not simply saying words; he was passing along a legacy of action. Whether it was attending forums during the civil-rights movement with my grandmother in support of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his fight for equal rights, taking his entire family to Washington to protest the Vietnam War, the hours he spent working on the Soviet Jewry movement, or simply the time and energy he put into making his community a better place for all, my grandfather modeled for me what it meant to truly "see myself as if I were a slave in Egypt." For my grandfather, he knew he could not truly be free if others were still enslaved.
There are many things worth fighting for in the world. Perhaps your cause is ending the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. Or maybe you cannot believe how many people around the world live in poverty or do not have access to adequate health care. Perhaps the "enslavement" of people in sweatshops or the indentured servitude of many who pick and grow coffee in Latin America is what you are passionate about. What the Sefat Emet, Clarence Darrow and my grandfather have taught me is that only way to truly celebrate the holiday of Passover is if we understand that we must be bringers of our own redemption and that of others, and we must stand up for what we believe and take action so that next year everyone will truly be free.
Prepared by Reuben Posner, Jewish education fellow, Hillel's Joseph Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Learning
Learn More
Additional commentaries and text studies on Pesach at MyJewishLearning.com.
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