Thoughts On Passover, Slavery, and Freedom
(A couple months later, ’cause writing and thinking take time!)
Passover is a holiday about freedom. It celebrates the liberation of the Israelites, the forerunners of the Jewish people, from slavery in Egypt, as told in Exodus (or, for the less Biblically inclined, in Dreamworks’s Prince of Egypt or by Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments). According to the mishna, all Jews must consider themselves as though they personally had been freed at this time.
We recite this mandate during the seder, the order of prayers and readings that make up the special Passover meal. The idea that one should make the past live for oneself and recognize that it is ongoing resonates with me.
But the idea that the most relevant thing we can do to talk about slavery and freedom is to imagine what such an experience would have been like doesn’t sit well.
What right do I have as a middle-class, Canadian white woman to indulge in the luxury of imagining past hardship based on events of dubious historical accuracy when in my own home city, there are families for whom slavery is within living — or even personal — memory? How can I accept the hypocrisy of envisioning a life of slavery when the people who make my electronics or my clothing probably live it?
The Exodus is one of Judaism’s foundational narratives. It and the events that follow mark the shift between the Hebrews as family clan, descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the Jewish nation as a people Chosen by and Choosing G-d.
Being slaves and then being freed is an important part of this narrative: G-d is said to have redeemed the Children of Israel from bondage, a miracle that both proves G-d’s existence and greatness and also underlies our duty to G-d and to the world. To be redeemed is a blessing and a responsibility.
I can deal with this story as a metaphor for nation-building. And I acknowledge that as an atheist, I’m biased: the Passover story cannot have the same meaning for me as it does for someone who believes. As an agnostic, I respect that others may believe differently for equally robust reasons. But I can’t feel right about the insistence on juxtaposing this idea of spiritual redemption with literal slavery. Freedom is an important topic, but I can’t conceive of it in a way where it makes sense to discuss freedom for one group only — mine.
The narrative we recite on Passover assumes that freedom is something between each person and G-d. G-d is the arbiter of true freedom, physical and mental. This situates freedom as something individuals can possess — or choose to possess — independent of their fellows.
But for me, nobody is free unless we’re all free. To discuss our freedom in terms of our own mythologized past and symbolic suffering rather than taking on our full responsibility to freedom for ourselves and others in the world we live in today — well, that seems kind of like being well off and talking about how great charity is but never considering giving.
I do think narratives are important ways to confront real-world issues, but this one concentrates on focus on oneself as liberated from oppression rather than as free. What is the point of being redeemed if we don’t talk about the responsibility that comes with that redemption? Do we care only about the experience of our (fictionalized) ancestors but balk at discussing slavery when it pertains to the sweatshops that make our shoes and electronics, or those who struggle for proper nutrition and shelter, let alone an education, or those who must deny an essential part of their being to avoid violence and rejection at the hands of others?
Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand (as I may have pondered a while back). If, as Jews, we accept our freedom as a privilege, a gift of the grace of G-d, we must also accept the moral duty that comes with that gift.
This, in fact, is also part of the Passover story, albeit part that is often downplayed. The redemption of the people Israel from bondage is not an end in itself; rather, it is the first step toward the true joyous event, the acceptance of G-d and G-d’s laws at Mount Sinai, the willing choice to serve the Almighty, who is the Source of all goodness.
This choice of service in the name of what’s right, this new ability to make and act on meaningful ethical decisions, is the kind of freedom that makes sense to me: a first-world, white, healthy, middle-class, employed cis-gender woman with oodles of education, in a heterosexual relationship, with a strong support network of family and friends. There are ways in which I’m not free — being female, being gender-nonconforming, being queer, being Jewish, and not yet being my best self* — but there is no point in working to amend this if I don’t see these freedoms as part of the larger tapestry of everyone’s freedom.
Exploring this kind of freedom doesn’t come easily when so much of the Passover seder focusses on representing the forced physical labour of our ancestors and the violent retribution for those who inflicted it on them. Although we symbolically grieve the pain of Pharaoh’s people as we enumerate the Divine plagues visited on them as punishment, we never consider whether we are modern-day Pharaohs responsible, directly or indirectly, for others’ servitude.
Does our lifestyle contribute to poverty? Do our attitudes to groups of people keep them in a psychological prison? Does our unwillingness to confront history, current events, our own desire for comfort trap others in worlds of inferior possibilities?
To be free and to be a nation — to belong to a group that stands together — mean the same thing to me: to be free of the burden of worrying about one’s own liberty and shoulder the responsibility of caring about that of others.
For this and other reasons, Passover doesn’t have meaning for me as the exploration of the story of the Children of Israel’s liberation from Biblical Egypt. I can’t — won’t — indulge in imagining the physical reality of what it would be like to be a slave myself.
Instead, when I think of myself as being personally freed from bondage, I will think about what my freedom means. Freedom doesn’t have to be the opposite of slavery, just as right doesn’t have to be the opposite of wrong. I can decide what it means to be right, what it means to be free, on their own terms, looking toward my multicultural, international human community instead of a narrow, mythical past.