Freedom

Sermon Shabbat Passover 5784, Rabbi Sam Cohon

I have been hunting about for a new Passover joke this year, but sadly, all I can find is old ones.  Some of them, however, are classics. 

A Jewish man is waiting in line to be knighted by the King of England. He is supposed to kneel and recite a sentence in Latin.

His turn arrives, he kneels, the King taps him on the shoulders with the sword ... and in the panic of all of the excitement he forgets the Latin phrase. Thinking quickly, he recites the only other line he knows in a foreign language, which he remembers from the Passover Seder: "Mah nishtana ha-lailah ha-zeh mi-kol ha-leilot."

The puzzled King turns to his adviser and asks, "Why is this knight different from all other knights?

Or, of course, my all-time favorite Pesach joke.  A blilnd man is sitting on a park bench during Pesach, and a rabbi comes and sits down next to him and pulls out his lunch.  He feels bad eating with this poor blind man next to him with nothing, so he takes a piece of matzah and gives it to the blind man.  A few minutes later the blind man taps the rabbi on the shoulder and says, “Who wrote this garbage?”

As we know, as a festival, Pesach is special in some unique ways.  Even the name of the holiday has special importance. 

Pesach actually has no fewer than four official names in Jewish tradition: Pesach or Passover for the paschal offering, the lamb that was sacrificed and roasted in the days of the Bible and the Temple; Chag HaMatzot, the holiday of matzah, the unleavened bread we eat for the week of Passover; Chag HaAviv, the springtime festival, probably the oldest of the names of Passover; and most thematically, zman cheiruteinu, the season of our freedom.  Each of these names has something important to teach us, and each is interesting in and of itself.

The word pesach itself comes from the word for “leaping” or jumping in Hebrew, an apt description of the ways that young lambs leap and cavort in the fields. The use of this animal for the sacrifice of the Passover reminds us of that the Angel of Death “leaped over” the homes of the Israelites when striking the first-born of the Egyptians dead, and it also refreshes for us the memory of the leaping joy of freedom, the ability to move and act as we wish that is prevented during slavery.  Free people can cavort, skip, dance or jump as they please.  Slaves jump to someone else’s command.  Hence, Chag haPesach, the holiday of “leaping over.”

The second name for Passover is Chag HaMatzot, the festival of poor man’s bread, Matzah.  Unleavened bread, made with flour and water in 18 minutes or less, baked quickly and simply, the food our ancestors made as preparation for a hasty journey in flight.  Of course, on Pesach we eat matzah all week, and therefore do not eat chametz, which is best described as being the opposite of matzah, anything made with leavening or fermentation.  In a way, Matzah is completely unadulterated bread, pure, if, well, tasteless.  But simple, plain, honest.

The third name for the festival is Chag HaAviv, the holiday of springtime.  Undoubtedly there was a spring festival observed long before the events of the Exodus led to the creation of the holiday of Passover.  Spring is celebrated in every culture and nearly every religion in the world.  In our Seder celebrations, which of course teach the meaning and story of freedom in a rich and wonderful variety of ways, spring was featured in the green vegetables we dipped in salt water and in the hardboiled egg that symbolized the rebirth of spring.  The magnificent love poem, Shir HaShirim, the Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible, is chanted on the Shabbat of Passover—tomorrow morning—and it’s a text filled with images of gardens and growth and love in the flowering springtime.  A wonderful way to celebrate this most beautiful and verdant of seasons, this springtime festival.

And finally, the ultimate theme of Passover is freedom: zman cheiruteinu, the time of our liberation.  It is this essential ideal that is woven all through the week of Passover, the central focus on God’s gift of liberty that has made Pesach the model freedom festival for the world.  B’chol dor vador chayav adam lirot et atzmo ke’ilu hu yatzah miMitzrayim.  “In every generation each of us is obligated to see ourselves as though we, personally, had been brought out of Egypt,” we are taught in the Haggadah.  In addition to our own celebration of our ancestors’ freedom, we also are compelled to learn compassion and have empathy for the downtrodden.  For when we can view ourselves as survivors of slavery we are compelled to sympathize with the dispossessed, a central principle of Jewish belief. 

It is a fascinating aspect of Judaism that we focus so much on the fact that our ancestors were slaves, the lowest of the low in any society.  So many peoples celebrate their noble ancestry, their descent from high-born people or even actual gods.  For example, the Emperor of Japan was quite literally believed to have been a descendant of the sun itself; the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, our enslavers, were considered to be divine themselves, gods on earth descended from the gods.  Greeks kings and Roman emperors claimed similar highest-possible ancestry.

But not the Jews.  In fact, we make it a point to say Avadim hayinu l’Pharaoh b’Mitzrayim; we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.  We had nothing of our own, had no status at all.  We were, in that materially advanced but morally stratified society, akin to Untouchables.  And in our retelling of this tale we don’t hide that at all; instead we remember our origins and where we came from with insistence.  We weren’t born with silver spoons in our mouths, but among the hardworking, the lowly of the earth.  We were slaves, and God, through Moses, brought us out to freedom.  But it was not the last time we were enslaved.

In fact, that has often been our fate in the many centuries since that original burst into freedom we commemorate at Passover.

There are, in fact, a number of words for freedom in Hebrew, perhaps because there are many different kinds of freedom, and many different ways it can be either achieved or curtailed.  The first you’ve heard already, Cheirut, liberation or freedom, for this season of freedom, zman cheiruteinu.  But there are many others: chofesh, which means free of obligations, like a vacation from work or school; dror, which is usually translated as liberty, as in “Proclaim liberty throughout the land,” the ukratem dror ba’arets, from the commandment to celebrate the Jubilee and free all servants; and even padah, as in Pidyon shevuyim, the freeing or redeeming of captives that is a central mitzvah in Judaism and one we are struggling with now as we seek to liberate the hostages held by the Palestinian terrorists in Gaza.

I’ve been thinking about freedom this week, for very obvious reasons, not simply because it is the central focus of Passover, not only for the hard and painful fact that our brothers and sisters are trapped in chains under Gaza now, but for the troubling fact that we are experiencing, in our own way, a little less freedom right now in America than we have enjoyed for some years.  Most of our daily lives are not impacted by the hatred pouring out at Jews on our college campuses—but some of us are very much affected by a new and frightening reality that hasn’t existed here in most of our memories.  And the acts of vandalism and more direct violence both verbal—including shouts of “Israel must die” and “we want Jewish genocide” at the University of Arizona this week—and physical have eroded the freedom we feel.  We have, perhaps, taken our remarkable level of freedom here in America a little for granted.

I always ask people at the Seders I conduct to reflect on freedom, and what limits their own freedom.  The answers always range broadly.  Sometimes people talk about addictions; sometimes they talk about restrictions imposed by society; sometimes they mention physical ailments that limit them, or financial hardships that curtail their freedom to act, and live, as they would wish.  This year one of my friends answered in a unique way: he said that what restricted his personal freedom was his own conscience; that is, he needed to act responsibly, which was at odds with feeling truly free.

I suspect we are all limited in the freedom we feel by a variety of factors.  But perhaps the most important thing to remember on this festival of freedom, is that freedom, as generally defined in Judaism, is not simple the absence of constrictions, the liberation from slavery or imprisonment.  It is also having the ability to choose our own ideals and standards, to follow the valuable course in life that we wish to follow.

I love a poem of Adrienne Rich’s on this. She says, “Freedom. It isn't once to walk out under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers of light, the fields of dark—freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine remembering. Putting together inch by inch the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.”

May we all be able, at this season of liberation, to achieve such meaningful freedom.