Shabbat Chol Hamoed Pesach: Pi'se'ach to Pesach - Learning to Walk to Freedom...Again

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.

Shabbat Haggadol: What holiday are we celebrating this week? 5774/2014

When we sit at the Seder table, and when we take our matzah to work, maybe even to school, in the spring, what holiday are we celebrating?

Passover, Pesach, Zeman Cheruteinu, Chag Ha’Aviv, Chag Ha’matzot – While this holiday is not the only one with more than one name, it is a defining holiday for us as the Jewish people.  Without the events that this holiday remembers, we would not even be a people, and so the confusion of its identity is a challenge to us. 

Are we celebrating ‘Passover’, the Anglicized name of the holiday based on a loose translation of the way God seems to ‘skip over’, lifsoach, the homes of the Israelites in Egypt and carry out the 10^th plague against the homes of the Egyptians.  We should be clear here that the ‘skip over’ translation is not the primary way to translate this verb.  A better translation is ‘to protect’, after all, God knows who lives in the house whether there is blood on the lintel or not. 

Are we celebrating Pesach? – the name of the holiday connected to a springtime sacrifice of a lamb to be eaten by a group of people.  In the spring lambing season, a sacrifice made to God that expresses thankfulness for the new life and bounty?  We no longer make this sacrifice.  We memorialize it with the Zeroa, the bone, that we put on our Seder plate.  The days of Jewish throngs making their Pesach sacrifices on the Temple Mount are long gone.

Are we celebrating Zeman Cheruteinu, the time of our freedom, appreciation to God for letting us go from Egypt?  We celebrate this freedom in the Torah with song and dance and immediately in the Torah we begin to regress into complaints, murmuring, and wishing we were back in Egypt where everything was “better”.

Are we celebrating ‘Chag Ha’Aviv’, the Holiday of Spring, the renewal of nature in connection with renewal of the people.  The egg (and green vegetable) on the Seder plate are symbols new life and the circle of life and time.  And yet this meaning carries a pastoral or peaceful sense of nature and its rhythm, rather than the harried and hurried way we leave Egypt.

Chag Ha’matzot – The matzah holiday, a feast of unleavened bread that reminds us of leaving Egypt, that connects with the harvest of new grain and throwing away the old sourdough leavening agent as we welcome the new crop, as we hold off on baking the new crop into bread.  Today, most of us are not farmers anymore, and waiting to eat from the new grain crop, chadash, instead of the old, yashon, is more an issue of whether our kosher bakery or restaurant advertises yashon.

These reflections on each name of the holiday suggest that each name tells part of the story, not the whole story.  We can observe a holiday with all these parts, maybe not in equal measure given who we are, but in proportions that are meaningful to us even though the conditions of the first Passover, and of the ancient Israelites, have morphed into the Jewish life we live today.

To the traditional names of the holiday we can add others that are meaningful – I would add Chag Ha’Haggadah, the Holiday of the Storybook, a holiday that celebrates the gift of joining together to tell our stories, to exchanges ideas, ask questions.  Or Zman Ha’Achdut, in the 1990s, statistics suggested that some 90% of American Jews participated in a Seder, now the numbers may be closer to 70%, still, that is a very good showing.  There is a sense of achdut, unity, that well more than half of Jews of all backgrounds will be participating in the event.

Any other ideas of what we might call this holiday?

Whatever name or names we use, may it be a happy, healthy, and meaningful holiday for us all.  Shabbat Shalom and Chag Same’ach.