Thoughts on the Season of Our Freedom

Jewish holidays often have multiple names applied to them.  Chanukah, for example, is known as Chag HaUrim, the Festival of Lights.  Rosh Hashanah is also Yom Teruah, the Day of Sounding the Shofar. Sukkot is Chag HaAsif, the Feast of Ingathering. As for Passover, which is rapidly approaching, it is known in our liturgy as Chag HaMatzot, the Feast of Unleavened Bread and also as Z’man Cheruteinu, the Season of our Freedom. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            As the Seder begins on the night of Passover, after the Kiddush and some other introductory rituals, we begin the telling of the story of the Exodus by raising a plate of matzah and proclaiming, “This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in Egypt.  Let all who are hungry come and eat; all in need, come celebrate Passover.  Now we are here, next year in the land of Israel.  Now we are enslaved, next year, we will be free.”  Some suggest that this is a conflation of two traditions.  In Babylonia, the people recited the line, “now we are here, next year in the land of Israel” while in the land of Israel, people said instead, noting that Eretz Yisrael was subject to a long line of conquerors, “Now we are enslaved, next year, we will be free.”  

Others suggest that both lines are apt regardless of where or when one lives.  While we celebrate the Exodus from Egypt, nonetheless, for centuries Jews have been oppressed and, if not actually enslaved, they were still subjugated to the rule of various tyrants.  Even in the land of Israel, people may have felt a sense of exile. As long as the land was ruled by others; it wasn’t really “Israel” yet.  Even today, one could argue that the idealized picture of Israel, the vision of the prophets, has not yet been realized but “next year” – next year things will be different. The holiday is a reminder of our hopes for future redemption and actual freedom, physical, political, and spiritual.  Many of us recall before the fall of the “Iron Curtain,” adding a fourth matzah to the three on the plate for the Jews of the Soviet Union, praying that one day soon they may be enjoying freedom.

Of course, freedom is not just a Jewish hope.  A Ukrainian interviewed on Public Radio last week, emphasized that Ukraine is not Russia, that they have a different culture, different values.  The interviewer asked about the different values and the gentleman replied, “Freedom, freedom, freedom.” I often wonder how the Russians, after centuries of the rule of the Czars and the Communists, finally tasted a bit of freedom for a decade or so in the ‘90s, could let it slip away.  But then, I wonder, to what extent are we on the path to doing the same thing here?  What has become of freedom in other places in the globe, in Turkey, Hungary, Hong Kong, and elsewhere?  I posted on Facebook an opinion piece from the Washington Post last week, written by a resident of Gaza, who recognized that he and his neighbors were enslaved, as it were, to Hamas, and called for demonstrations for freedom, to throw off the rule of this terrorist regime.

Every day, as part of the introductory morning blessings, there is a series of prayers in which we offer thanks for the way in which we were created. Among them is a blessing which is stated in the negative in Orthodox siddurim, praising God, shelo asani aved, who did not make me a slave. The Conservative prayerbook puts it in the positive, she-asani ben/bat chorin, who made me free. Reading the traditional version, the blessing fits in well with the spirit of Passover where we went forth from slavery to freedom, we negate the slavery that our ancestors suffered.  Yet our sages remind us that an eved, a slave or servant, may serve a human master, but avodah is not only a term for slavery, but it is the word used for service, worship.  In leaving Egypt, we entered into service of a higher authority, the service of the Lord.  In the positive version of the blessing, we are called b’nai chorin, free people.  The root is cherut, freedom.  However, the rabbis play on that word “cherut.”  It has the same letters as “charut,” which means “engraved.” They take the biblical description of the tablets of the Ten Commandments which were engraved (charut) in stone and tell us that these engraved tablets were tablets of cherut, of freedom. (Read not charut, but cherut.)  In service to the Almighty, we found a new kind of freedom, a freedom which brought with it responsibility to higher values.  It represented not merely freedom from oppression, but freedom to realize our full human potential.

The late former chief rabbi of Great Britain, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, writes in the notes in his Haggadah, “there are two words for freedom in Hebrew, chofesh and cherut.  Chofesh is ‘freedom from.’ Cherut is ‘freedom to.’ Chofesh is what a slave acquires when he is released from slavery.  He or she is free from being subject to someone else’s will.  But this kind of liberty is not enough to create a free society.  A world in which everyone is free to do what they like begins in anarchy and ends in tyranny.  That’s why chofesh is only the beginning of freedom, not its ultimate destination.  Cherut is collective freedom, a society in which my freedom respects yours.  A free society is always a moral achievement.  It rests on self-restraint and regard for others.  The ultimate aim of the Torah is to fashion a society on the foundations of justice and compassion, both of which depend on recognizing the sovereignty of God and the integrity of creation. Thus we say, ‘Next year may we be ‘b’nei chorin,’ invoking cherut not chofesh.  It means, ‘May we be free in a way that honors the freedom of us all.’”

The early 20th century essayist Ahad HaAm wrote that “free persons measure themselves and their standing by their own measure, not the measure of others.  Their ideal is not to attain the level of their peers, but to rise as high as their powers enable them….Ask one who has suffered the indignity of discrimination, and you shall learn that only one whose vision is deliberately limited does not feel the enormous tragedy of the soul, and the heartbreaking consciousness of the natural abilities that seek an outlet and find none.” 

Rabbi Wendy Zierler, professor of Modern Jewish Literature and Feminist Studies at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, comments in My People’s Passover Haggadah on the Ha Lachma passage, “One of the great paradoxes of the Haggadah is that while it ostensibly commemorates our liberation from bondage in Egypt, it includes passages such as this, in which we openly declare our continued enslavement.  This admission creates a context in which we can openly discuss those areas where we feel our communities have not yet succeeded in living up to our hopes and ideals and consider what fetters us and others in the present day.”  

Included in the weekday Amidah, to be recited three times daily, is a call to freedom, “T’ka b’shofar gadol l’cheruteinu,” “Sound the great shofar for our freedom.”  As we celebrate the redemption from Egyptian slavery, we look to a greater redemption of all the world in our daily prayers.  This blessing goes on to speak of the ingathering of the exiles of our people from the four corners of the earth, once again linking freedom with the return to the Promised Land.  But as we have seen “cherut,” freedom is much more than political sovereignty.  It entails a spiritual fulfillment and the possibility of reaching our full potential.

This year as we gather at our Seder table, with family and friends, we are filled with gratitude for the many blessings we enjoy, not least of which is freedom. At the same time, however, we are burdened with worries and concerns, personal and national, political and societal. As always, our eyes are toward Zion (ayin l’tziyon tzofiyah, we sing in the Hatikvah), a land still not at peace, still awaiting the return of the rest of the hostages, still grappling with corruption. “Next year,” “Bashanah Habaah,” Naomi Shemer sang, next year, we pray will be different.  

Our eyes are toward Washington too and surveying the chaotic mess upon which I need not elaborate.  We see it and we know it too well and we need not accept it.  Ultimately our eyes are on Heaven, however we conceive of the Divine and whatever we believe that It represents as a force for good in the world, bringing “seder,” order, out of chaos, “tohu vavohu.”  This year we may feel more than ever that we are still slaves, but we pray that next year it will be different.  Next year we will be free.  Next year we will meet in Jerusalem, that idealized place of cherut, of freedom.. “L’shanah habaah biyerushalayim.”

Shabbat shalom.

Rabbi Edward Friedman