With our freedom from slavery, what are Jews free to do?

RABBI RACHEL BREGMAN

We eat charoset, a mixture of fruits, nuts, cinnamon and wine that represents the mortar used with the bricks we no longer have to place as slaves. Freedom from bondage, from Egypt, from Pharaoh.

The idea of being freed from slavery by G-d is a central tenet of Judaism. We say every Friday night in the blessing of the wine and throughout the Torah, even when speaking about seemingly unrelated things: Remember G-d freed you from slavery and took you out of Egypt. But what, I wonder, upon finding freedom from slavery are we now free to do?

Primarily, we are free to serve G-d and not Pharaoh. Spiritually speaking, the seder gives us the opportunity to check in with ourselves to see if we have become enslaved to Pharaohs of modernity like power, money and ego.

G-d didn’t work so hard to bring us out of one Egypt just to replace it with another. The seder asks us: Now that you have your freedom, what have you done with it?

If the Exodus is a story of a three-part journey – Egypt, the wilderness-desert and Israel – serving G-d is the wilderness-desert, a stop on the way, the means to an end, but not the final place on the journey.

Author and psychologist David Arnow writes in Creating Lively Passover Seders: “Paradoxically, as we celebrate our liberation during Passover, we sharpen our awareness of the enslavement that reigns within and around us. At the moment we taste freedom, we remember the hungry… From the heights of deliverance, we survey a shattered world crying out for healing.”

He adds later: “What is the source of the staggeringly audacious conviction that the present, the status quo, cannot be the end of the road?

That’s where G-d comes in. G-d speaks in a small voice within each of us saying: “Never forget that yours is not a ‘normal’ but a broken world, one that we can surely help fix. At the seder, that voice calls a little bit more audibly because with Passover we confront the reality of our freedom and we have used it, for good or ill.”

G-d did not bring us out of Egypt to serve G-d (Dayenu, it would have been enough). Rather, through our service to G-d we are meant to eternally bring freedom to others. Our service to G-d is our service to humanity. Our service to humanity is G-d’s work in action.

So, when you sit down to your seder, I hope you ponder not just your freedom from slavery, but relish also your freedom to free others. Happy Passover. (Rabbis Without Borders via JTA)

Rabbi Rachael Bregman is at Temple Beth Tefilloh in Brunswick, Georgia.