Freedom FOR

My family will celebrate Passover tonight. This continues a long tradition of attempting to do something to connect us with the Jewish Passover celebration. My mom grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in Cleveland. Matza and lox are my favorite connections to her childhood, along with fuzzy memories of Purim and chutzpah. For awhile, there was a messianic Jewish congregation in Indianapolis that put on a pitch-in Passover on Maudy Thursday, and our family loved that. When I went to Brazil, I got out a picnic blanket and explained the basics in broken Portuguese to my kiddos at the little yellow church, and put it into these words:

Since returning with my family from Brazil, I’ve studied more and tried to add in more details, and I’ve fallen in love with my mom’s seder plate (which you see in the photo above). This year, I am excited to try again (and grow some more), with my 11 step (simplified and shortened) version of the Seder, the Passover meal (the last supper). You can see all of that here.

The middle of the celebration (step 6 in my 11 steps), you tell the Exodus story. This is the central theme, or basis of the whole celebration. In Jewish tradition, it is when you go deeper than just telling the story (as it’s assumed everyone already knows that), you create a holiday that is about memory: not just the past, but the present and future as well. I read this beautiful article by Theodore Goldstein called “Passover and the Master we Choose.” He shares that as a kid, his family tradition was to go around and share something they felt enslaved to. It pulled the Exodus story out of the past and into their lives. They “reflected on the ancient story of our ancestral liberation and what liberation might look like and feel like in our modern lives.”

Honestly, I hadn’t really considered this before, in my celebrations of Passover. Theodore goes on to share that in some interpretations of the Exodus story, as many as 80% of Jewish slaves stayed behind. They were not liberated. They chose to stay. The author continued his deep dive into freedom, speaking with someone about America’s history of slavery:

I don’t want to skip this. I want to stop and savor it as the Jewish tradition does so well. In my own journal, I jot down my thoughts. Israel being freed FROM Egypt was a great and powerful thing, but it was that they were freed FOR serving God and coming the chosen people in a chosen land that was DESTINY. That gave them purpose, hope, and a reason to live. A reason to break out of the mindsets of slavery that come with the physical bondage. That is the secret of freedom: not moving from slave to victim, but from slave to liberated—and even to becoming a liberator.

I’d love to debate this graphic and these thoughts. That is part of savoring a topic (at least in the Jewish tradition). Is freedom only complete when the freed person frees someone else? My first thought was that’s what Jesus does, and there is some verse for it…but when I looked up the verse, it wasn’t that God freed us to free others, it is 2 Corinthians 1:4-6 “He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us. For the more we suffer for Christ, the more God will shower us with his comfort through Christ.” And that leads me down a whole other line of thinking…

Thank you for joining this small Passover discussion.