COMMENTARY: The Disciplined Path to Freedom During Passover

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) In his riveting autobiography, “Fear No Evil,” Natan Sharansky recalled one of the many Passovers he spent in a Soviet prison. When his captors took away the small piece of matzah a fellow prisoner tried to slip him in his punishment cell, Sharansky simply used salted herring as his […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In his riveting autobiography, “Fear No Evil,” Natan Sharansky recalled one of the many Passovers he spent in a Soviet prison.

When his captors took away the small piece of matzah a fellow prisoner tried to slip him in his punishment cell, Sharansky simply used salted herring as his bitter herb, a cup of hot water in place of the sweet wine-apple-nut mixture known as charoset. After his jailers confiscated the book of Psalms he had smuggled in, Sharansky recited those comforting Psalms that he could remember.


“I tried to recall everything I could from the Passover haggadah,” he wrote, “starting with my favorite lines: `In every generation a person should feel as though he, personally, went out of Egypt … Today we are slaves, tomorrow we shall be free men.’ ”

Few Jews today can appreciate the sweet taste of freedom at the Passover seder like Sharansky, who was physically enslaved and often brutalized during nine years in a Soviet prison. His crime? Being Jewish and wanting to emigrate to Israel.

Through sheer force of will, he remained psychologically and spiritually free during his long imprisonment. After eventually winning his freedom and moving to Israel, Sharansky rose to political prominence and has served as a cabinet minister for nearly a decade.

The seder commemorates the Jews’ exodus from Egyptian slavery more than 3,300 years ago. Revealingly, most assimilated Jews who don’t keep the Sabbath or who rarely attend synagogue are likely to attend a seder.

Jews seem to feel a primal connection to Passover, and while almost none have experienced the dramatic personal exodus of a Natan Sharansky, many earnestly try to infuse their seders with as much meaning as possible.

The more ambitious among them try to superimpose their own political and psychological stamps on the experience. A check on Amazon.com under “haggadah” will bring up more than 900 titles, including haggadahs for vegetarians, feminists, gays, environmentalists, messianic Jews. Catering to the “God-neutral” and “violence-free” crowd, there is “The Santa Cruz Hagaddah: A Hagaddah, Coloring Book and Journal for the Evolving Consciousness.”

Maimonides, the 11th-century codifier of Jewish law in the Talmud, probably could have predicted the slew of postmodern haggadahs. In his seminal work, “The Guide for the Perplexed,” he wrote, “We want things arranged according to our taste and reason … but when we look at life from an aspect of the eternal scheme of things, we find that what seems to us bad or shocking only does so because of our own lack of knowledge and wisdom.”


Admittedly, the hagaddah can be hard to relate to. It is filled with archaic “thys” and “thous” as it skips through Jewish history, reciting bits of rabbinic arguments over the proper time to utter the morning prayers, as well as arguments over how many plagues there really were on land and by sea. But a good, traditional haggadah will also offer commentaries by famous sages, such as Rashi and Maimonides, that elucidate the many layers of meaning within the haggadah itself.

Traditionalists like me have a hard time with revisionist haggadahs because Passover is about the Jews’ birth as a nation, not about our need to express a do-it-yourself liberationist philosophy. In fact, Moses himself, leader of the Jewish Exodus, is startlingly absent from the haggadah. That’s no accident: This story isn’t about us; it’s about the awesome nature of the Almighty.

Studying the haggadah with traditional sources can help Jews connect with the primal spiritual freedom they seek. A deeper understanding of Passover shows that we are meant to learn that true spiritual freedom lies along the disciplined path that God set out for his people.

With that in mind, the haggadah becomes far more than a prescribed menu of things to say, to eat and to drink. It reminds us that freedom requires discipline, and that even today, many of us are still enslaved to a variety of false gods: money, ego, power, and status. With its quiet lessons in humility and liberation, the haggadah needs no external or modern agenda imposed on it to be relevant.

Just ask Natan Sharansky.

DH/JL END RNS

(Judy Gruen’s latest book is “Till We Eat Again: Confessions of a Diet Dropout.” Read more of her columns at http://www.judygruen.com.)

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