Tonight begins the eight day holiday of Passover. The Talmud, Judaism’s ancient book of law and philosophy, states with regard to the Passover Seder: "In every generation a person is obligated to see themselves as if they are right now leaving the slavery of Egypt; as the Bible says, “Remember that you were a slave in the Land of Egypt.”” The Talmud’s description of the Passover Seder meal is not one of remembering the past but of reliving the transitional moment from slavery into freedom.
The moment we constantly refer back to as Jews, the seminal moment of the Jewish people is not the experience of receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai or of entering the Promised Land, but rather the moment of freedom from Egyptian bondage. The seder meal takes us through this by means of a set experience, a fixed process of transformation. The seder is a dance of slavery and freedom. We drink the wine of freedom, and then dip a vegetable into the salt water representing the tears of slavery; we eat unleavened bread recalling the haste of redemption but then eat bitter herbs to feel a slave’s pain.
Ironically, though the seder is the meal celebrating freedom, its name, the word “seder,” means “order,” which seems the opposite of freedom. Perhaps, though, the sturdy and precise architecture of the Seder which seems limiting, is necessary because only through it can we create memory that is a reliving, and thus experience freedom in the present. As Milan Kundera writes: "Imposing form on a period of time is what beauty demands, but so does memory, for, what is formless cannot be grasped or committed to memory (Slowness p.39).” As with all things, it is only through limitation, in this case through the specific orderly experience of the seder, that we can find true freedom as we did in the ancient exodus, experiencing the transition from slavery to freedom even in the present.
The Rabbis tell us that the Hebrew word for Egypt is Mitzrayim, which means “narrow.” The goal of Passover is not to remember leaving ancient Egypt for freedom, but to relive that experience in our own lives; to recognize our personal spiritual “Egypt” and find freedom from it. What is the purpose of freedom? Contrary to the movie version, in the Bible the Divine message Moses gives Pharaoh is not, “Let my people go!” but “Let my people go that they may serve me in the dessert.” True freedom leads us somewhere, somewhere deeper, somewhere more meaningful and more spiritual, it leads us back to back to God.
If taken seriously this year we can expand the memory and reenactment of the transformation from slavery to freedom into a transformative personal experience of spiritual freedom.
