Passover 2019

The Latin word for “thing,” res (pronounced like the English word “race”), lives on in English in certain stock phrases like res ipsa loquitur (“the matter speaks for itself,” a legal principle having to do with the assignation of responsibility in cases involving apparent negligence) or in media res (“in the middle of the thing,” a phrase first used about two thousand years ago by the poet and satirist Horace to reference the literary technique of beginning a story in the middle of the action). But it also lives on in the ten-dollar English word “reification,” used in many different disciplines to denote the practice of treating something that exists without physical existence (like an idea or an emotion) as though it were a “thing,” i.e., something that exists fully really in the physical universe.

The word is unknown to most, but the practice will be completely familiar to all. Silence is technically not a thing at all, after all, just the absence of a thing (sound or noise), but when Simon and Garfunkel sang about the “sound” (originally, the “sounds”) of silence, no one found that confusing or misleading: the lyric was so effective precisely because silence reified, i.e., treated as a “thing” and not merely as the absence of some other thing, feels so real and so unnervingly ominous. And the same is true in a million other contexts as well. Peace, after all, is also not a thing, just the absence of other things (war, strife, fractiousness, tension), but what parent using the words of the Priestly Blessing to pray that God grant a child “peace” doesn’t think of it as something that someone can either have or not have, as an actual thing that God bestows on the fortunate—but not as the mere absence of some other thing?

As we approach Pesach, I’d like to bring the concept of reification to bear in my pre-paschal thoughts about freedom. Passover is, after all, acknowledged in our liturgy as z’man cheiruteinu, “the season of our freedom.”  But freedom could also reasonably be described as an example of reification, as something that we like to talk about as though it were something that fully exists in the physical sense of the word but which at its most basic is merely the name we give to the state characterized by an absence of some particularly baleful other thing (oppression, domination, coercion, repression, subjugation, persecution). And it is precisely because these are all such awful things that no one would want any part of—it’s precisely because the absent things listed above are so pernicious and undesirable that we find it simpler to think of their absence as a state unto itself, as a thing, as a res.

But is it really so? That’s the question I’d like to explore today in full pre-Pesach mode.

It was Kris Kristofferson who wrote the famous lyric according to which freedom is just another name for nothing left to lose. Behind those words, which I imagine no one my age can read without hearing Janis Joplin’s voice singing them out in that unforgettable voice, lies a restatement of the theory described above according to which freedom is by definition the state in which you have no restraints or constraints forcing you forward in some specific direction, the state in which you suffer no consequences at all—that’s what it means to have nothing to lose—by choosing the path forward in life that strikes you as the one you’d like to travel into the future. In other words, freedom is defined as life without the police telling you to obey posted speed limits and parking regulations, without the IRS telling you to pay your taxes, without your accountant telling you to buy health insurance if you don’t want to pay a fine for not self-insuring, without the dentist telling you to floss your teeth, without the universe yelling at you not to smoke, not to gain weight, not to take drugs, not to ride a bicycle without a helmet on your head, not to drive without fastening your seat belt, not to steal candy from the 7-11, and not to let your dog mess up the sidewalk. (And, yes, without your rabbi telling you how to live your life.) Freedom, so Kris and Janis, is not having anyone telling you that you have to do anything or behave in any specific way. Freedom is doing what you want, thus specifically not a thing at all.

But the Torah offers an alternate approach, one that proposes freedom as something to be merited, to be earned, to worked towards and striven for. The Israelites hated being slaves, obviously. Who wouldn’t? But what they yearned for wasn’t mere emancipation from slavery and its countless rules to follow and commands to obey. They weren’t interested, so goes the story in Exodus, in becoming free citizens of Egypt, in casting off the bonds of servitude so they could take their rightful place in Egyptian society, in being who they already were except not slaves. Indeed, in their minds manumission from slavery was just the prerequisite for what they really did want, which was the freedom to travel to the land God had promised their forebears and there to create a culture reflective of the finest moral virtues and fully rooted in the sacred concepts the Torah spells out as the foundation stones upon which the ideal society rests. By calling Pesach z’man cheiruteinu, tradition teaches us that being free is specifically not having nothing left to lose. Referencing Passover as “the festival of our freedom,” in fact, implies just precisely the opposite: that being free means having everything to lose…and then finding the internal stamina—and the profound moral courage—to live according to the internal principles you wish to guide you forward, to leave the familiar behind and enter the wilderness through which all must pass who wish to come both to their personal promised land and also, on a national level, to the Promised Land, the one in which national and personal destiny coalesce in a seductive amalgam of personal fulfillment and national destiny. To be free does not mean doing what you want to do. It means doing what you want to be.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. And our seder rituals reflect the complicatedness of the task at hand.

Matzah itself is a good example. What is it exactly? Our Jewish tradition features two stories that don’t fit at all well together, or at least that don’t at first blush appear to. The story we all tell and retell features the Israelites leaving Egypt with such alacrity that they have no choice but to bring along their unrisen dough, which somehow (and just a bit fancifully) turns into the matzah crackers that thenceforth will forever symbolize the yearning for freedom. But the Haggadah also features an entirely different idea: when we lift up the plate of matzah and declare that “this (i.e., the matzah) is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt,” we are identifying matzah as the kind of cheap, tasteless bread that slaveowners feed to their slaves, thus the foodstuff par excellence that symbolizes the misery of chattel slavery. The stories appear to constitute two different approaches, one featuring matzah as symbolic of slavery and the other taking it to symbolize freedom. But the truth is that the stories fit quite well together if you interpret the two explanations in each other’s light: the story seems to be that the Israelites, for all they surely yearned for freedom, soon found that shucking off the actual chains that held them in place was one thing and becoming truly free individuals something else entirely. They wanted to eat fresh, yeasty bread, the bread of free people, but they ended up with the tasteless bread that slaves eat instead. And that suggests, to me at least, the arduousness of the journey to true personal freedom…and the degree to which it isn’t ever really enough just to self-define as free. You have to find the courage to loose the bonds that hold you in place, that dictate your behavior even though there aren’t any actual taskmasters preventing you from shucking them off. To want to live free is not that challenging. But truly to step away from the leg irons that keep you moored to your own worst habits and least appealing character traits—that requires a lot more than just self-defining as free.

The whole dipping thing—obscure to most, yet also granted such a prominent place in the Haggadah as one of the famous four questions posed by children to their elders at the seder—has a similar lesson to teach. The use of dipping sauces was a mark of luxury in ancient times, thus reasonably symbolic of the freedom enjoyed by people of means to glide forward through life unimpeded by financial constraints. And so, to mark our status (albeit just obscurely for most), we too eat while symbolically reclining (another habit of the wealthy) and begin our meal not by tearing into the main course but by enjoying some genteel dipping while the servants are busy in the kitchen roasting the paschal lamb. But even there the actual ritual tells a slightly different story. We take fresh vegetables and dip them not in tasty sauce but in our own tears, here represented by the salt water on our seder tables. We dip a second time too, a point made explicitly by the inquisitive children asking the questions, but the second time is even worse: we take the bitter herbs that symbolize our ancestors’ wretchedness and dip it in charoset deemed symbolic of the mortar the Israelites used to build Pharaoh’s cities and monuments. So we’re doing the free person’s thing, but we can’t quite get rid the baggage we bring to the ball: we’re trying to mimic the wealthy and the free…but we can’t quite do it. We surely want it. But, just as our ancestors found being free to be something different than merely not being slaves, so do we too have to accept that freedom is not only a thing, but a heavy thing at that and one that it takes training to be able easily (or at all) to lift and carry forward.

The moral of the story: this whole freedom thing is harder than it looks. To be free means not to be a slave to anyone, including not to yourself.  And no one has a more demanding taskmaster than the self-enslaved! This year, as we gather for our s’darim and for communal worship, I invite you all to join me to seeing this not as yet another opportunity to spend too much time in shul and to consume way too many calories, but as an opportunity for true personal growth…the kind that has the ability to make of slaves truly free people.