October 1945, the leaders of the Yishuv, the Zionist
community of Palestine, authorized the Palmach in its first major
operation. The goal was to free 208
ma’apilim, idividuals who sought to evade the British blockade and enter the
Promised Land and ended up as prisoners in Atlit. Yitzhak Rabin was an officer in that
mission. The first Palmach brigade
completed its mission without firing a shot and without losing one
soldier.
When it was time for the next mission, to destroy the
supplies of the British unit ‘Palestine Mobile forces’ Rabin and others carried
out intelligence operations, and when he was ready to report and receive
permission for the ‘go ahead’, he decided to drive up to Chaifa for the report
on a motorcycle – and he did not have a license to drive one. On the way, he was driving too fast and
collided with a truck. His left leg was
completely broken.
Now out of the action, he felt like a prisoner, locked up in
his house. He wrote a letter to his
sister and signed it, “Your brother, the cripple.” ‘Achicha ha’pi’se’ach.” When I read the way he signed the letter, I
immediately heard the overtone in that word of Pesach. Pis’each and Pesach, spelled the same way,
pronounced differently, one referring in the letter to a person who is stuck,
the other to a holiday of freedom, liberation, release from oppression.
Rabin’s leg would heal, and one day he would become the army
chief of staff, and prime minister. He
would continue to fight for the Jewish people to be able to live safely and
securely in our ancient land. The people
of ancient Israel would be free, but their difficult transition to freedom
would lead to 40 years of wandering the wilderness, not a prison, but a
challenging environment – no walls but requiring patience and strength of
spirit that the first generation of freedom does not seem to possess. None of that generation enters the Promised
Land.
The irony in this story does not stop there. The Malbim in his extraordinary commentary to
the Haggadah points out that after the 4 questions, we say ‘Avadim hayinu’, we were slaves, meaning we are no longer
slaves, and we could ask, ‘Of what value is our freedom from Egypt? We’re still prisoners or slaves to
Achashverosh”, the King of Shushan, from the Purim story, standing in for every
other dictator or government in the days after Egypt that persecutes us, the
Greeks, Romans, Persians, Muslims, Christian Europe, the Nazis, the British
mandate…
The lesson I learned this year in preparing for Passover is
that there are two Hebrew words for freedom, and they both do not mean the same
thing – it is the difference between the two that clarifies how the Jewish
people not only can thrive but can flourish and grow in strength at this time,
in this country, when there is no persecution – and so we are relatively
relaxed, calm, and so the message of what we should do is more critical than
ever, despite the fact that, as we’ve discussed, in the last survey of American
Jews the reponse for components of Jewish identity showed that the the biggest
percentage of Jewish identity today appears to still be a post-Holocaust
survival and memory mentality.
One word for freedom is ‘chofesh’, chofshi, like liyot am
chofshi, traditionally that word is understood to be free in the sense of no
limits, nothing held back, kind of like the Dauntless in Veronica Roth’s
‘Divergent’. The other term ‘cherut’,
means freedom with a purpose, with a message, with limits, responsibilities and
expectations of ourselves and others – Cherut does not mean that we cannot
dream, actually, this type of freedom allows us to dream, giving us a firm
foundation, the lesson that all the matzah we eat, the words we say at Seder,
all these limits we impose on ourselves are not arbitrary – they point us in a
specific direction, toward reclaiming the excitement, the hope, the mystery,
the freshness of walking together and with God on our journey through time –
through the scorched deserts of doubt and pain, through the calm valleys of
friendship and community.
The light of Jewish faith burns brightest at Pesach,
brighter even than Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. When the matzah is gone, when Seder leftovers
are gone, and we go back to real pasta made from Semolina, we must not allow
the light to get clouded over, dirty, until we cannot see it anymore – tape a
piece of matzah to the inside of the front door, have horseradish more often,
shout the message of freedom from the pen and from the rooftops, so that we can
follow Yitzhak Rabin’s example, as he recovered from being pi’se’ach, unable to
walk, to Pesach, walking out from Egypt proud, tall, and strong.
Shabbat Shalom.
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