Free Spirit

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shafran1By Rabbi Avi Shafran

The sight was not only amusing, it was timely. Leaving my house for shul early the third morning of Pesach, Shabbos this year, I wished my next-door neighbor a good morning. A muscular man, he was sitting in his doorway in his pajamas, curled up against the mist and chill, smoking a cigarette.

His wife (or maybe his landlord) doesn’t allow him to smoke in the house. And so he can often be found outside feeding his habit. This particular day, though, his just-woke-up-and-needed-one-so-bad look took on a larger import. It was a poignant reminder of what Klal Yisroel was celebrating that week: release from slavery.

I imagined my neighbor regarding his perch as an escape from the oppression of the smoke-intolerant house. The reality, of course, is quite the opposite: his enslaver is his addiction.

The freedom for which Jews recently spent a week thanking their Liberator is also often misunderstood. Yes, Yetzias Mitzrayim freed our ancestors from physical enslavement, but it was much more than a liberation movement, a shaking off of shackles and assertion of independence. The deepest enslavement the Jews suffered in Egypt, according to our mesorah, was spiritual in nature. The people had sunk to a deep level of defilement, having assimilated their masters’ unholy practices. And Hashem’s intercession before the people could sink even any deeper into the moral morass – another moment in Egypt, Chaza”l teach, would have rendered them beyond redemption – is the deepest reason for our Pesach rejoicing.

Which made a statement issued by the advocacy arm of the Reform movement on the eve of the holiday so tragically ironic. It came in the wake of the Vermont legislature’s vote to redefine marriage in that state, and expressed how, “as we prepare for the Passover holiday,” the movement was “cheered by the sweetness of [the] victory for marriage equity…”

To some of us, the Vermont vote, like an Iowa court ruling shortly before it that yielded a similar outcome in that state, would have been more appropriately associated with the Seder plate’s maror. For the headlong societal rush to exalt behavior the Torah forbids not only to Jews but to all of humanity evidences a deep and dangerous misunderstanding. It confuses libertinism with liberty, free-for-all with freedom.

For true freedom entails responsibility; it is the freedom not of the body but of the soul. When Hashem ordered Par’oh “Let My people go!” He continued: “… so that they may serve Me.”

The Torah’s concept of freedom does not entail being unfettered, but rather bound to what is meaningful; it does not mean independence but subservience – not to the mundane but to the Divine.

Which is why Pesach in a sense, doesn’t entirely end after its seven (or, outside of Eretz Yisroel, eight) days. On the second day of the Yomtov, following the Torah’s command, we begin counting, marking each of the following forty-nine days by pronouncing a bracha and assigning the day a number. The fiftieth day, the day after the counting is completed, is Shavuos; it is in a very real sense the culmination of Pesach.

For it is the anniversary of what Yetzias Mitzrayim was for: Kabbolas HaTorah. And therein lies the ultimate meaning of Jewish freedom: emergence from our enslavement to lower urges, to substances, possessions, the dictates of society. Freedom of the spirit.

And so we count the days – quite literally – from the chag of freedom to the chag of Torah, expressing (and, hopefully, impressing on ourselves) just how inextricably the theme of Pesach is linked to that of Shavuos, how the ultimate expression of true freedom is having the courage and mettle to throw off the yoke of temporal masters and commit ourselves to what is meaningful in an ultimate sense: the will and law of Hashem.

Chaza”l put it pithily, noting how similar the Hebrew word for “etched,” “charus” – used about the dibros carved on the luchos – is to the Hebrew word for freedom, cherus.

“The only free person,” they explain, “is the one immersed in Torah.”

{Matzav.com Newscenter}


4 COMMENTS

  1. Instead of harping again on toeivah marriage -which probably effects no one he knows – I honestly imagined from the way the article began that R’ Shafran was going to address the enslavement of so many frum Yidden to tobacco or their enslavement to food as visible by the staggering number of overweight frum men in the community. I imagined he was going to write about Pesach representing freedom from slavery to these vices. Too hard I guess. Easier to pick on toeivahs!

  2. I believe He is writing about liberal and societal freedom (like writing any comments you like) are realy an enslavment to the yetzer hara and we should try to be free of them and be only a slave to HAKODASH BARUCH HU.
    Yashur Koyach Rabbi Shafran

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