Matzah
It’s bread of affliction! No, it’s freedom bread! No, it’s bread of affliction! – Stop, you’re both right! What an irony: the same ingredients that combine to produce a symbol for slavery are the very same ingredients that combine to produce a symbol for freedom. Let’s skip the Harvey Dent analogies and get to the point: there are certain people who have identical talents, identical potentials. For some, it works out well while for others, not so much. On Pesach, it’s a level playing field—we all were freed, regardless of talents, position, capabilities or past. Now sling that matzah over your shoulder and know that this flavorless flatbread has the potential to turn you toward one of two paths. There are no guarantees in this world. You have the ingredients within you, what you make of them is your business, so bake with caution!
The wicked one, what does he say? “What is this service to you?!”
The Rasha has a pretty good point: you’re free tonight, so how do you celebrate it? With more rules and regulations! Rules are for slaves, not free people. Leave it to the rabbis to put a damper on what should be a night of unfettered celebration by hanging us up with endless, petty rules: this size matzah, in that amount of time, before this hour, in this particular position, dip, shake... When does it end with these guys? Curiously, we don’t even attempt to reason with the Rasha; rather, and quite shockingly, we punch him in the kisser! But that is exactly the crux of the matter, says R. Isaac Bernstein. If being free is, as the Rasha suggests, being able to do what we want to do, then what’s to stop me from punching him in the face, if that is how I so choose to “celebrate” my freedom? Nothing. Freedom without discipline isn’t freedom—it’s anarchy. Freedom is not the ability to do what you want to do, but the opportunity to do what you have to do.
It happened that Rabbi Eliezer…
It’s nice that R. Akiva is hosting these Talmudic all-stars at his home, but these sagacious sidekicks were actually his teachers (not to mention that R. Akiva himself once said the yom tov meal is best had in one’s own home). Why, then, would they have trekked to B’nai Brak when any one of them ought to have hosted R. Akiva in the warm confines of his respective home. Check out this roster of illustrious Torah luminaries—this isn’t the first time they hooked up Foursquare-style at a prime Israeli locale. This very same group cried on the Temple Mount when seeing foxes scamper on the ruins of the Mikdash (don’t trust me, check out Makkot 24b). But who was there to lift their spirits—none other than the laughing R. Akiva: If God fulfilled his prophesy of destruction, assured the sanguine sage, then he’ll certainly fulfill his prophesy of redemption. Resilient R. Akiva had the optimism to restore hope in the forlorn five-some. As history would have it, suggests R. Arye Pomeranchuk, just before this particular Pesach, these rabbis tried to take their talents to the Roman authorities to seek out reprieve for the Jewish people, who were suffering under Roman rule. They were met with resistance—the status quo would remain. In the face of such utter defeat, only the assured Akiva’s optimism could lift their spirits and instill the festive fortitude necessary to celebrate a freedom festival amongst such gloom. Count me in!
Go forth and learn what Lavan...
Go and learn? We might have a fighting chance to understand what you were saying if we actually came to learn. Pesach, and freedom more broadly, is experiential—we all need to see ourselves as having been redeemed, not just our ancestors. Freedom isn’t an intellectual experience we can sit down and lean by reading a bunch of texts. We need to experience it on our own for it to have any meaning for us. Don’t take my word for it. Go forth and and apply the lessons learned of the Pesach seder to your life, see whether it leads to a more fulfilling way of living or not.
Chad Gadya
And so we come to the end. And what a curious end indeed! A silly little song about a father who buys his son a goat. But it is more than that, of course. It is a tale of a series of hard-luck events that precipitate from this; a song, observes Elie Wiesel, of God’s own creatures destroying one another, some unwittingly while others less innocently. Quite the damper on an otherwise joyous night, wouldn’t you say? But the song reminds us that in Jewish history, all creatures, all animals, all events are connected. Continues Wiesel, the goat and the cat, the fire and the water, the slaughterer and the redeemer, they are all part of the story. And just when we think there is something that might pull us down, we must always remember that there is always another force that could just as easily bring us up.
