The plates are washed and put away. The left overs are gone. Even so, it’s still Passover.
Pesach is a seven-day long Festival. For Reform Jews, Pesach doesn’t end until
Friday night (Saturday night if you’re Conservative or Orthodox). While most of us enjoy a seder or two, and
many of us refrain from bread products during the whole week, few of us pause
to consider the meaning of a week-long observance. If Passover commemorates our freedom from
Egypt, and the Angel of Death passed over the Jewish homes in one night, why
extend the Festival?
The Israelites, you will recall, didn’t enter the Promised
Land for a generation after the Exodus.
Those sent to scout the land thought they looked like grasshoppers to
the natives, for that’s the way they saw themselves: inconsequential, worthless, puny. Although their feet were no longer shackled,
their minds still were.
Liberation is a process, not a moment. Slaves may escape; Supreme Courts may declare
it. But it takes time for freedom to percolate
down into our daily lives. We need to reshape
society to include the formerly disenfranchised – something the United States
is still doing, 150 years after Emancipation.
We need to learn to see the full humanity of those we haven’t previously
understood. We need to re-constitute our
own psyches, to understand ourselves as free people with the power to determine
how our lives should go, to know to our cores that we are grasshoppers no more.
What freedoms do you cherish in your life? Which are legal, which are social, and which
are personal? How can you integrate them
more fully into your sense of self?
Freedom doesn’t come over night. It’s a long, hard trudge.
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