“The festival of freedom?” Not so fast!
Jewish holidays are always an emotional experience, and many of them are based on family observance. Pesach is undoubtedly unique. It is the only holiday centred around children. Consider, for example, the Seder. It is all an educational enterprise. The starting point of the Seder are questions asked by children — the Mah Mishthanah.
Children are the central characters of the Haggadah. The text lists four children: the wise, the bad guy, the simple and the one who cannot ask. The commandment to teach children the story of Exodus is repeated over and over. Even the concluding songs, Had Gadya, Adir Hu, Who knows one… can be sung, and often indeed are sung, as nursery rhymes.
On the other hand, Pesach is a solemn holiday. Many scholars have compared the Seder to the symposium, a banquet in Ancient Greece and Rome that took place after the meal when drinking was accompanied by a conversation between learned men on important philosophical matters. Philosophers such as Plato and Xeno wrote literary works titled Symposium. Those are conversations between philosophers, politicians, generals, writers… all adult males. Children are remarkably absent.
The Haggadah deals with important matters, such as Divine justice (think of the plagues), the political leadership (entire books have been written about the absence of Moses) and especially freedom. Freedom is, indeed, the main thing Pesach is about. “It is the festival of freedom”, we often explain when non-Jewish acquittances ask about the holiday.
The problem is that our society does not associate children with freedom. On the contrary, children quite often keep us very busy. Tell it to that Orthodox man on a Tel Aviv bus with four children, who were all over the place, running after each other, shouting loudly. I mean: louder, even beyond the Israeli standard: jumping all around… you know what restless children do. The exasperated bus driver told the Orthodox man, “Do your children have to be always with you? That’s a nightmare! Can’t you ask some family to help? I mean, next time, travel with half of your children, not with them all!” And the Orthodox Jew replies: “I already do it. I have eight children”.
When we mention freedom or “having a free life”, we do not think of people like that Tel Aviv passenger. Nonetheless, Pesach, the holiday built around our children, is a festival of freedom. That seems a contradiction. What’s going on?
To tackle this issue, we should consider first the Biblical name of the holiday — which is about food (it’s a Jewish holiday, isn’t it?). Hag ha matzot, “Feast of the matzot”. That’s a bit complicated. Do you usually associate matza with freedom? As Rabbi Meir Soloveitchick famously observes. Is freedom what comes to mind when you see a piece of matza? I bet not. You more probably associate freedom with challah!
The text of the Haggadah is quite clear. Matza is “the bread of affliction” halachma anya, as per the Aramaic formula we recite at the beginning of the Seder. Bread of affliction, not bread of freedom.
But what is matza?
Matzot are baked very quickly not to allow the dough to leaven. The rest of the year, the dough leavens and is baked afterwards to produce the bread we usually eat. Matza is bread at its very beginning. Matza is not whole-fledged bread. It is bread at the beginning of its production (to quote Rabbi Yoel Bin Nun). It is potentially bread.
So here we begin to understand what Pesach is about and why children are involved. The freedom we celebrate on Pesach is not freedom to do whatever we want. Instead, on Pesach, we celebrate freedom as potentiality, the possibility that free human beings have to decide their own destiny and future. The freedom we celebrate on Pesach is not freedom in itself, freedom as a goal, but rather freedom as a means.
A means for what? To answer such a question, we ought to remember that the Exodus from Egypt is the beginning of a journey, the journey towards the Promised Land. This is why children are so important. Because by answering their questions and encouraging them to ask questions, we continue our journey toward the Promised Land.
We Italian Jews have a fascinating tradition. At the beginning of the Seder, after breaking the matza, one participant places the afikomen on his left shoulder. The other asks: “Who are you? And where are you going?” He (or she) says his name and explains, “I am going to Jerusalem”, And then passes the afikomen to the person of his right, who is asked the same question and answers in the same way “I am going to Jerusalem”. When the afikomen has completed the table tour, it is hidden, so the children will search for it at the end of the meal.
So think about this. The Seder is the beginning of our collective journey toward Jerusalem. And we include our children in our same journey, more: we give them a chance to travel ahead of us, to continue the journey. This is the freedom we celebrate on Pesach, this is the Jewish understanding of freedom. It is not the freedom just to be what you are; it is the freedom to envision, to pass our heritage to the next generations, and the hope and faith that they will continue our journey.
It is actually very counter-cultural. In this time and age, the common understanding of freedom is the freedom to be what you want — usually to identify yourself as a member of this or that persecuted minority.
I am not a fan of the current custom to fill the Seder plate with items to symbolize this or that identity -olives for the Palestinians, artichokes for intermarried Jews and, of course, how can we miss it- a bread crust to represent Jews who are excluded (bread on a Seder plate, imagine that).
These are all important causes, very urgent matters. But they are expressed with the language of identity. They are all statements about what persons are: a Palestinian, an intermarried jew, a whatever-the-bread-crust-is-supposed-to-represent.
Pesach is not about the freedom of being. Pesach is about the freedom to become, to project the future and imagine our journey towards the Promised Land.
The proof is here, in days like today, the days that follow the Pesach Seder, when we indeed count the Omer. We count the days until Shavuot, the celebration of the Revelation on Sinai when we Jews accept the Torah and the Divine Mission to make our lives an example of hesed and rahamim, kindness, and mercy.
Is Pesach festival of freedom? Yes, the freedom to live according to kindness and mercy. And to teach our children the same values and principles as part of a collective journey towards justice and freedom.
I wish you Chag Sameach and Shabbat Shalom.