Monday 29 March 2010

Is Freedom Really Free? What's Passover to you?

The Pesach (Passover) preparation has been over a month in the making. My entire life I have not learned as much about Pesach as I have in the past month. I understood it on a simple level: freedom from slavery.

As impossible as it is to get Jews to agree on the same thing, one thing that all Jews would agree to is that Pesach is a holiday of freedom.

I should also point out the interesting phenomenon that, no matter how much of our Jewish identity we “lose”, reject, or forget, nearly every Jew in the world is always sure to partake in a Pesach sedar.

Most of us don’t even know what a sedar is—I didn’t either. Even the dictionary erroneously defines ‘seder’ as a Passover ritual that commemorates the Exodus from Egypt. Sedar is the Hebrew word for ‘order’ or ‘arrangement;’ which is often referred to as a learning schedule.

The combination of freedom and strict order seems like a bit of a paradox.

Having grown up a Reform Jew and spending the past 6 months learning in a baal teshuva Orthodox Yeshiva, I now realize how very different the definition of “freedom” is between the Orthodox and non-Orthodox world. In the non-Orthodox world, particularly among reform/liberal Jews, the freedom of Passover is our freedom from bondage and persecution and a newfound liberty to do whatever we like without anyone in control of us or telling us what to do. At face value, it seems like a nice idea, but that’s not what true freedom is, and it certainly does not do justice to the freedom we experience on Pesach.

When we are free to do whatever we want, we are not free. We might appear free, we might even think we’re free, but in truth we become slaves to our desires. A drug addict might think he’s free because he is free to do as many drugs as he likes, but his addiction binds him to the drug like shackles on a prisoner. While this example might seem extreme, the same can be said for us in our everyday lives. How many times have we heard, “I’ll eat this chocolate tonight but I’ll hate myself tomorrow.” So don’t eat it!

The other side of this supposed freedom is that we have no direction whatsoever. Someone who has all the money in the world is technically free to do whatever she wants, but with no direction in life she’ll never be happy. How frustrating was it in college when your professor told you to write a 40 page paper on “whatever you feel like.” Sure, you have the freedom to pick your subject, but then you have no idea what to expect for a grade; you have no idea what the professor is looking for and therefore no idea what the end product is supposed to be like. The same can be said for life. If we are free and have no constraints, how are we supposed to understand our purpose and “end product?”

The true freedom of Pesach, as defined in the original, “Orthodox” teachings, is not at all this idea of freedom from all constraints.

First, we have the freedom from Mitzrayim (Egypt). Mitzrayim represents the purely physical world and the complete absence of spirituality. By contrast, we learn in every narrative where Jews are in Israel, the Jews have to pray, work the land, and establish a relationship with G-d in order to bring rain and produce. In Mitzrayim we see there is no need for this; the Nile, the world’s longest river, is the source of water and “provider of life.” For what would Egyptians need G-d?

Egyptians had gods and idols for everything, and even deified the Pharaoh. The word פרעה (Pharaoh) itself means ‘without boundaries’. If you are without boundaries, you are ownerless and you can do “whatever you want.” But as we just learned, doing whatever you want doesn’t make you free, on the contrary, it makes you a slave to your desires. You become imprisoned, and what is really kept out is spirituality and the essence of who you really are.

The word מצריים - Mitzrayim itself comes from צר (tzar), which means ‘narrow’ in Hebrew. In Mitzrayim, you are confined to live in a completely physical life; life is narrowed to physicality, the essence of Mitzrayim. Therefore, during Pesach we celebrate the coming out of narrowness. After the 10 plagues, G-d took us out of this jail to escape the narrowness of physicality. G-d took us to the desert, which is the complete opposite of Mitzrayim; there’s an absence of water (there’s no Nile), and an absence of all physicality; and this is when we truly become a nation.

One of my Rabbis brought in this idea of narrowness to explain that, in a tangible world that functions with 5 senses, everything we see can be explained within the 5 senses. This is a façade; to assume that something can only exist if I see, hear, touch, smell, or taste it narrows us to a world of finitude and completely leaves out the 6th sense: the perception of something spiritual. Our challenge is to live outside of this narrowness and see something that is infinite. Everything physical expires, dissolves, or dies, but that which is spiritual is eternal and lasting.

Pesach is a reminder to us that we can’t find lasting meaning in the physical. While physicalities can enhance our lives, they ultimately bring only instant-gratification. If it’s something lasting we are searching, we have to look beyond the physical and be open to the spiritual.

Chametz

Besides being finite and short-lasting, much of physicality is fake. This is why we clean our houses out of chametz (leavened products) and why we eat matzos instead during Pesach. What is bread made of? –flour, water, yeast, and sugar or fruit juice. Our sages teach us that the flour represents our body, water our soul, sugar/fruit juice our physical desires, and yeast our arrogance. Why is yeast our arrogance? Yeast is a fake, superficial additive, which takes just a little bit of bread and blows it up to make it look bigger than it truly is.

How often are we slaves to our physicalites, investing in everything which will make us look and seem bigger, better, richer, more attractive, and more successful than we really are?

The idea of eating matzo is the realization that we don’t need any of these superficialities to sustain us. It is in fact these superficialities that hold us back from truly being free.

The Wise Child

Out of the 4 children who ask questions (the ma nishtana), one child is deemed the “wise one.” Why is he wise? As my Rabbi notes, he is wise because he asks questions about actions—why do we do this and that? It shows an effort to understand something, versus making assumptions or ignorant statements.

How often do we ask and explore about the many intricacies of Judaism or life in general? How often do we make assumptions that block us from pursuing the answer?

My Rabbi added the point that asking questions is a way of completing oneself. If we are able to ask what is lacking, we get an idea of how to complete it. Wherever we decide we are lacking can indicate where we are headed. If we realize we are lacking spirituality and deep-meaning in life, then we can figure out the steps to fill the lack and make our life more complete. If we really feel a lack for a BMW, then it’s the BMW and materialism that will be more definitive of our future path. The problem is that most of us feel we are lacking in the most superficial of areas and we don’t allow ourselves to pursue anything of value and lasting-meaning.

We should all ask ourselves what we’re truly lacking, that is the real us.

Finally, unlike the ‘non-Orthodox’ understanding of the freedom we experience during Pesach, freedom is a means to an end, it is not an end in and of itself. G-d didn’t bring us out of Egypt so we could go party in the desert. He brought us out of Egypt so we could stand at Mt Sinai and commit to a certain amount of responsibility, so we could become a strong, united nation and receive the Torah.

We can call ourselves as free as we want, but if we don’t have order and direction, if we don’t have the 613 commandments on how to lead a better life, then we’re not free at all, and it’s just as much of an illusion as the yeast in our bread.

This Pesach I hope we can all relive this freedom in its purest form. Let’s think about what is truly meaningful to us, what is lacking, how we can obtain it, and what is superficial; so we can get to the essence of who we truly are and begin to understand our purpose for being here.

While this happened over 3,000 years ago, we are all in Mitzrayim right now. The only way out is not to ignore the physical world, but to recognize the spirituality within it and overcome being a slave to our desires for the sake of using that physicality for a higher purpose.

Kasher Pesach Sameach!

Next year in Jerusalem!

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