Rabbi Joshua's Column March, 2009

What we love about the seder, the central rite of the festival of Pesah, is that it is an interactive experience of shared thought, talk, and delicious food.  Reading from the two thousand year old Hagadah of Pesah, we gather around our table and invite all who are hungry to come and eat, retelling the story of the enslavement of Israel and its liberation.

It is through the retelling of the story that we keep alive a sense of the sanctity of freedom which is at the core of who we are as a people.  There is no doctrine to be internalized, only the experience of freedom to be realized.  Freedom is reflected in the encouragement of everyone at the table to ask and respond to questions.  The ultimate experience (the goal of this ritual) is actually to experience becoming free.  Conscience reigns.

There is no way to quantify the vitality of freedom, no freedom quotient as we have intelligence quotients and numerical values from the stock market.  The other side of this coin is that the loss of our freedom often happens invisibly while our eyes are open and we are reasonably conscious.  In recent years, we have seen standards of economic fairness quietly lowered simply by calling estate taxes “death” taxes.  Now with the economy apparently in free fall, we must be especially vigilant about the loss of our freedom.

The political stakes today are greater than those of any particular election.  Our democracy already is suffering from a dramatic imbalance in wealth.  When one of our leaders, even the President of the United States, dares be bold enough to speak the truth about the social and economic vulnerability of millions of Americans and the need to share our resources, he is accused of waging “class warfare.” 

I guess that my father, may his memory be for a blessing, always waged “class warfare” at our sedarim because he always brought the questions of the Haggadah back to the contemporary state of freedom around the world.  Even more significantly, he would raise personal questions about freedom.  My brother and I knew what to expect.  Not a few guests were surprised; one or two had the fortitude to turn the questions back on him!

My father’s favorite question was, “Do you really think we’d still be slaves in Egypt if God had not rescued us?”  When I was young, I understood the force of the question with great clarity.  Of course we would still be slaves.  The lesson to be learned, I thought, was that we ourselves have to rise up against the loss of freedom wherever it is happening.  I remain committed to such an understanding.

Yet the fact that Moses is not mentioned once in the Haggadah shel Pesah calls me back to think of my father’s question in other ways.  What is freedom, after all, if not ultimately a spiritual idea, an attitude of the soul, a state of the mind that allows one the courage to be liberated?  How central are the lessons of Pesah for our troubled times!  As we are inundated with reports about the economy, the fate of Social Security—as we try to find a quiet place from which to consider carefully what is going on all about us—how great are the opportunities afforded by the approach and then the celebration of Pesah.

According to the Mishnah, our first legal code after the Torah and indeed the source of the essence of the Haggadah, each of us is required to drink of the four cups at the seder.  The responsibility here is on the individual.  Of course, we members of the community have our own responsibility, as ever, to welcome the stranger and the friend to our table.  But each of us has a responsibility to find a place from which to reflect on the course of the history of our people, from the depths of our humiliation in slavery to the heights of our liberation.

As ever, the political is personal and the personal is political.  From each of us of the Chasan mishpakhah, each from our own personal perspective, to each of you in all of the variety of your experience as Jews and loved ones of Jews, we send you greetings at this very special time of our year.

Rabbi Joshua Chasan