Musings on freedom

Last week, we celebrated the holiday of Pesach. Pesach (Passover) is Chag HaCherut - the Holiday of Freedom. We celebrate the end of our slavery in Egypt and exit to freedom, first in the desert and then in the Land of Israel. But what is this freedom that we're celebrating?

Merriam-Webster's first definition of "freedom" is:

1: the quality or state of being free: such as
a: the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action

And, so to celebrate freedom, we obsessively rid our surroundings of anything that could even remotely be considered to be "bread"; we follow exact, specific rituals, including drinking a specific number of cups of wine (/grape juice), reclining in one specific direction at particular times, and reciting specific formulated prayers; we eat bitter foods such as horseradish, whether we want to or not; we go through the intricate legal process of fully legally selling our bread and bread-related items to someone else, only to buy it back later; and spend several extra days, outside of the normal weekly Sabbath, where we are prohibited from performing any form of work - and even the days in the middle have significant restrictions.

All to celebrate our lack of "constraint in choice".

Seems quite ironic, no? We celebrate freedom in a very strictly defined manner, where we don't have much freedom to choose what we're doing at all. What kind of freedom are we actually celebrating, then?

Perhaps the difference is in who is calling the shots. In Egypt, it was Pharoah dictating day-to-day life; after the exodus, it was God, and serving God is freedom. That would be a classical religious answer.

But perhaps there's more to be learned here than just the surface-level lesson about being servants of God instead of humans - about what freedom actually means. 

As slaves in Egypt, we were participants - or the subjects - in an unjust society. We were slaves, with no rights or dignity; the Egyptian society had no justice or equity for those living in it. The taskmasters were able to kill the slaves with wanton abandon, and nobody except for Moses cared. Slavery is the epitome of being unfree - and an unjust society, that justifies and allows slavery or murder, is the epitome of an unfree society.

By contrast, almost as soon as we left Egypt, we were creating a society that sought justice. Yitro, Moses' father-in-law, helps create an escalating court system, so that disputes could be settled fairly and honestly. Laws and order are established and held as an ideal.

In a lawless, unjust society, I may be completely free by the dictionary definition. I can decide to steal, or I can decide to murder, and that's within my right; as a totally free person, with no restrictions at all on the choices I may make, there are no boundaries.
But this is not true freedom. It's hopefully obvious that if I exercise that absolute freedom to harm someone else, then that person's freedom is being impugned. You cannot have a truly free society for everyone if freedom allows you to restrict the freedom of someone else. The natural conclusion is that for a society to be truly free, then there needs to be justice and there need to be restrictions on individuals to ensure the freedom of the society.

And so, when we follow all of the strict rules of Pesach in order to celebrate freedom, it's a useful reminder on what freedom actually is; not absolute freedom to do whatever we may want, but instead, the freedom of dwelling in a just and free society, bound by rules and conventions that safeguard the freedoms of us all - and that we sometimes must safeguard the just society in order to protect it when necessary.