A thought for your Sedar…

We generally ask on Passover, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Before we answer that question with the reading of the Haggadah, I’d like to ask a different question. “Why should this Passover be different from all other Passovers”?

The answer, is because no holiday should leave us the same as we were when it began. Jewish holidays are not parties or mere celebrations; they are opportunities for growth. And that takes preparation. But on Passover, we are so busy physically preparing for the holiday, with all the cleaning, shopping and cooking, that we tend to not take the time to prepare ourselves for growth.

So lets prepare.

On Passover, every Jew is obligated to see himself as if he personally had gone out of Egypt. This strains the imaginative powers of even the most imaginative of us. Back-breaking labor, massive bricks, the crack of the whip of the Egyptian taskmaster, the humiliations and torture of slavery are all so remote from our experience that, try as we may, the empirical sense of being enslaved eludes us. How, then, can each of us personally experience liberation from slavery?

I propose, that seeing yourself as if you had personally gone out of Egypt, is not about liberation, it’s about freedom. But what is freedom?

In the western world, freedom is generally defined as “the ability to do what ever you want.” But Israel did not obtain liberation in order to go party in the desert. The purpose of the exodus was to receive the Torah at Mount Sinai. Equating Torah with freedom is surprising. The 613 commandments of the Torah are often regarded as 613 restrictions. How can they be synonymous with freedom?

The answer can be seen by observing the elections held in countries ruled by dictators. All the accoutrements of free elections are there, such as voting booths and secret ballots. But if only one candidate is running, the election is clearly not "free." Freedom requires choice.

When God gave the Jewish people the Torah, He gave us 613 choices. Observe Shabbat or not. Love your neighbor or not. Gossip or not. Unlike Pharaoh, God, as you might have noticed, brooks a great deal of disobedience. That's why a person who violates a Divine commandment is not struck by lightening. Immediate punishment would limit our freedom of choice. The ability to make moral choices is a Divine gift. It's the only true freedom humans have.

Freedom is not about having no one to tell you what to do; it’s about being able to choose who to listen to. “Blessed is the servant of G-d, who is not the servant of Pharaoh.”

Only in the moral realm do you have free choice. When your inner tape says to give tit for tat, to respond to an insult with an even more lethal barb, you have the power to change the tape. You have the power to ask yourself, "Is this who I really want to be?" The very act of choosing between your knee-jerk response and the Divine imperative to be kind is freedom.

Each of us at every moment is heeding the voice of Pharaoh or the voice of God. The voice of Pharaoh commands us to do what is instinctive, automatic, reflexive. "Doing what comes naturally," is ultimate bondage because we exercise no power of choice.

The voice of God, on the other hand, offers an alternative to instinct. For example, by commanding us not to take revenge [Lev. 19:18], God in effect is saying: "Your instinct is to hurt those who hurt you. By commanding you to act otherwise, I'm offering you the ability to choose a different course."

The exercise of choice is the essence of freedom. Forget the taskmaster's whip and the massive bricks. Each of us is enslaved every time we act on automatic pilot, every time we react according to our instinctual programming.
To experience liberation this Passover, we need only to break the bonds of instinct, to learn to deliberate and decide what we shall do or what we shall say, based on who we want to become -- a slave of Pharaoh or a servant of God.