The season of our freedom

By Rabbi Bernard Barsky, Special To The Dayton Jewish Observer

Rabbi Barnard Barsky

The Passover of my youth is well-documented in a home movie my father made in 1949 when I was 4 years old. The entire extended family is gathered at Aunt Eva’s house around a table of extravagant indulgence.

In those years of prosperity after the war, no one doubted that freedom meant living in America.

It was easy then to ignore the words in the Haggadah which declare, “This year slaves, next year free men.”

Ten years later, in 1959, the Silverman Haggadah made the first changes that reflected the events of the 20th century and the concerns of post-war American Jews. And there was written what everyone really felt: “Now many are still enslaved, next year may we all be free.”

Many, but not us in America. It was a prayer for those other Jews, the ones behind the Iron Curtain. Presumably, once they were free as we were, we could finally cut that sentence from the Haggadah.

We are certainly still glad to be living in America, but as time passes it becomes harder to equate what we celebrate at Passover with the shifting political promises of any constitution.

The Supreme Court has recently suggested that freedom isn’t so much about persons as about the circulation of money, and the recent wobbles on Wall Street and in the banks have shown us how insecure we can feel when our money is insecure. Surely this cannot be the freedom that Passover is about.

The freedom of Passover goes deep into the core of human existence. In fact, it is the very miracle of human existence, like nothing else in all the created cosmos.

This universe is infinitely vast in time and space, intricately structured in mathematical and physical articulation, majestically beautiful in the mind’s comprehension and the sensuous perception of it.

But only here on this one floating mote of cosmic dust, this earth, is the purpose of everything laid bare in the mind-boggling conundrum of human freedom.

This strange possibility placed only in the human heart, this spiritual force which divides existence into yes and no, good and evil, right and wrong, love and hatred — this is ours alone, the gift and the power which the Creator of all has deposited in us, and formed us lovingly to bear.

The immeasurable universe exists only for this divine wager of moral freedom; and the fact that we are so trivially small, that our time span is less than a mere bleep in the infinite heartbeat of God, is inconsequential to the significance of the experiment with freedom.

The entire transcendent spiritual power of God which sustains the universe is poured into the infinitesimal point of darkness that is our human heart. God has withheld nothing, but handed over the whole value of creation to the human being.

The covenant of God and Israel — and let us never forget that our name Israel is not the name of a race but of a relationship, the wrestling for meaning that God and humankind engage in together — is not about obedience, but about discovery, continuous discovery within creation of where and how to find justice, love, compassion and goodness.

Only for the spiritually lazy and the demagogue is the moral universe predetermined, already imprinted on the world in black and white. For those with searching hearts, the moral universe is full of color and confusion — a thing the poet Hopkins called “Pied Beauty.”

Our groping way with freedom is the moral life of God. In the words of the Midrash, “If you are not my testimony, then I am not God.”

Our freedom did not begin at the Exodus from Egypt, but is the very essence of our Tzelem Elokim, the image of God in which we are made.

God wrestles continuously with man only to bring us to our true nature and call us back to ourselves — for God’s own sake! We speak of ourselves on Passover as slaves now because we so easily submit to fear and compulsion. We must constantly return and rediscover who we are.

In the words of the great 20th century visionary Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook:

“Penitence is the aspiration of the true original freedom, which is the divine freedom, wherein there is no enslavement of any kind…Here is light, here is the voice of the living God calling to me from the depths of my own being, here is the light of eternal freedom for all existence, that has come and shines from the light of God on Mount Zion, the place of the valley of vision, where the word of the living God has begun to be heard.”