#BlogExodus: Freedom
I originally wrote a version of this post for the April 2012 Hebrew Union Congregation Temple Topics
, our monthly bulletin.
I have never led a
Passover Seder in a prison, but each
spring, as we begin our extensive preparations for the holiday, I find myself
wondering: what would that be like? I consider the question with an uncomfortable
curiosity, a combination of longing and aversion.
Passover is our festival of freedom, our celebration of
Israel’s storied redemption from slavery in Egypt. In every generation, we read
in the
Haggadah, our guide to the Seder, each of us must feel as if we,
personally, had come out of Egypt. As if we ourselves tasted the sweetness of
liberation after long oppression. In the traditional text we recite:
Therefore, let us rejoice
At the wonder of our deliverance
From bondage to freedom,
From agony to joy,
From mourning to festivity,
From darkness to light,
From servitude to redemption.
And yet, the Seder also reads: “Now we are all still in
bonds. Next year may all be free.”
I wonder how the first passage might sound to a convict in
prison, a homeless person, a political captive, anyone whose existence is
dominated by oppression, loss, or suffering.
And I wonder how the second text is heard by those of us
whose existence is dominated by blessing: physical comforts, political freedom,
the love of family and friends.
My first thoughts always go to how painfully our traditional
words of celebration and gratitude must prick those who find themselves in
bitter circumstances, and to how unthinkingly the formulaic words of persistent
bondage, of incomplete redemption, must roll off the tongues of those whose
lives are sweet.
Yet I know it is not necessarily so. I know there are people
in the most terrible of circumstances who, like
Viktor Frankl in the Nazi
concentration camps, still maintain the inviolability of ''the last of the
human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to
choose one's own way.''
And I know there are those who, in the midst of personal well-being, maintain a
consciousness of our broken world, an appreciation of the idea that none of us
is redeemed, none of us truly, wholly free, until all are free.
Might we aspire simultaneously to both of these truths? That
in the midst of oppression, we maintain a certain freedom, to transform the
future and change our lives; and that in the midst of blessing, we maintain a
sense of our responsibility for those less blessed? This year, when we conclude
our Seder with the traditional cry, “Next year in Jerusalem!”—next year in the
messianic age of peace and justice, next year may we be free, redeemed from every
Egypt—might our words should truly reflect our intentions (if not our
expectations), and guide our future actions? May it be so, at all of our
Seders, wherever they may be.
In the mean time, I intend to find out whether any Mississippi prisoners are in need of an in-house Seder this year.
