Saturday, April 23, 2005

Celebrating Passover - A Different Kind of Freedom

By Rabbi Mark S. Glickman

Special to The Seattle Times  

Tonight, Passover begins, and Jews around the world will gather to celebrate freedom. But the freedom we will celebrate is not what we in America usually understand freedom to be, for Jewish freedom and American freedom are two very different things.

American freedom was the brainchild, in part, of our beloved Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson celebrated humanity’s great ability to run our own affairs peaceably, competently, and far better than any intruding government ever could. Thus, when, late in his life, he founded the University of Virginia, Jefferson gave the students enormous amounts of liberty – few rules, no required courses, and hardly any guidelines at all. The students would govern themselves freely.

Alas, the experiment failed. Shortly after the university opened, 14 students went on a drunken rampage, resulting in some minor injuries, property damage, and one very disappointed Founding Father. Jefferson called the students to appear before the university faculty and "Board of Visitors," which included James Madison and James Monroe, as well as Jefferson himself. Surely, getting caught on their bender was miserable enough for the students, but having to answer for it to three American presidents must have really upset their domestic tranquility.

Jefferson, then 82, was so overcome with emotion that he couldn't speak. At the university he had worked so hard to build, these students had abused the freedom he and other founders had worked so hard to attain, using it not to realize their great potential, but simply as an opportunity to get blitzed.  Clearly, Jefferson's idea of freedom wasn't working out the way he had anticipated.

Tonight, Passover begins, and Jews around the world will gather to celebrate freedom – freedom of a different, and decidedly un-Jeffersonian, variety.  
 
Yes, at our festive Seder meals, we Jews will remember and relive our ancestors’ exodus from Egyptian slavery, proudly singing praises of God for intervening on our behalf. And, yes, we will stand awestruck with our ancestors tonight as we behold amazing the miracle at the Red Sea that allowed us to be free.

But what is important is that there’s more.  For, soon after the crossing the Red Sea, we arrived at Mt. Sinai, and there God gave us the Five Books of Moses – the Torah.   In addition to its great, epic tale, the Torah contains commandments, limitations on our behavior.  

And we’re not just talking Ten Commandments, either.  Those Ten – listed in Exodus and repeated in Deuteronomy – are only one small group of commandments, a Torah-version of Letterman’s “Top Ten List.”  No, we Jews count fully 613 commandments in the Torah. They deal with everything – with business, with food, with sex, with ritual behavior, with the way we schmooze with our friends, and much more. Each one is a sacred little infringement on the liberty we gained when our enslavement ended.
 
Ironically, it was these commandments – these [ITAL]limitations[ital] on our behavior – that finally made us free.  Yes, we were free as soon as we left Egypt, of course, but that freedom was Jeffersonian freedom – the kind that allowed us to choose to do as we pleased, even if what we chose to do was horrible and self destructive. It was the kind of freedom that we might have used to go out on a drunken rampage through the Sinai.
 
The commandments, however, changed all that. Now, freed from slavery, we had a 613-item instruction book telling us what to do with our newly-gained liberty.
 
Indeed, the Jewish insight here is that true freedom isn’t the ability to do whatever we please – that’s anarchy.  Instead, [ITAL]true[ital] freedom is the ability to choose to do what is right.  True freedom isn’t what we got at the Red Sea; it’s what we received at Sinai.

And then, the story continues still, describing the great, arduous journey to the Promised Land.  There, at least at first, life was good.  There was, milk and honey, prosperity and peace; it was life as life should be.
 
Tonight, Passover begins, and Jews around the world will gather to celebrate freedom.  This freedom is a time-honored, sacred kind of freedom – the kind that arises only when we decide to live disciplined, noble lives, thus working to fulfill our great, God-given potential as human beings.
 
That this kind of freedom is profoundly good and transformative – the kind that can allow each of us to reach our own “Promised Land” – is more than obvious to us Jews. To us, for centuries, it is a truth that has been self-evident.