Shalom, Chag Kasher V'Sameach,
I am finally finishing all preparations before departing to celebrate Pesach with my community. I am thinking about what the true meaning of Passover is, and how it applies to us today and in the future. There are so many lessons, and yet we read the same basic Haggadah every year, and yet we feel different every year because things in our lives are changing.
The primary theme of Passover, according to most, is the theme of redemption from slavery. Our Jewish people were sold into slavery in order to teach us a lesson about humility. We must want freedom in order to achieve it, and true freedom does not mean just doing what you want to when you want to. Being free means being unbound from anything physical, any obstacle of flesh and blood, or stone and wood, we are able to overcome. But without the knowledge of what being oppressed is, we can not truly be free. So Hashem fulfilled the promise to Abraham, that his children would be strangers in a strange land, and would be oppressed harshly by the task-masters. The exile in Egypt was the crucible from which the Jewish nation was forged.
So we celebrate every year the liberation of the Jews from bondage in Mitzrayim, and we say 'Next Year In Jerusalem'... But do we really believe it? Are we truly free from the chains of our physical limitations? Our freedom was not free, and over the thousands of years somehow we lost a lot of that freedom. Do we act free today? We are able to do almost anything we want to do, when we want to do it. With the marvelous invention of the internet we can virtually do anything we want without even having to leave the house.
I have learned that a Jew must be Jewish no matter what the other nations think of it. We should be proud of our heritage, and no matter what the Jew haters say or do shall not move us. We should be able to grow our beards, wear our kippahs and tzit-tzits and be able to daven when we have to without concern for what the non-Jew thinks. We have commandments to fulfill, and we should not shirk from them because they think we are different. The Jews in Egypt began to stop circumcising their boys because they had begun to pull back the skin so the children would not be different from the little Egyptian boys. The only tribe which continued to circumcise was the tribe of Levi... Because those tribes were afraid of what the Egyptians thought, the slavery became even more bitter.
When will the nations respect the Jewish people? It seems we receive 'No Respect' from the nations as they bully Israel into suicidal concessions. NO sane nation will release murderers in order to secure 'peace' with a partner who has no track record of ever providing peace. It is a stupid idea from the get-go, and to pretend that the Emperor has clothes when he has none is just plain delusional.
We must act free, we must not bow to the 'powers that beez', we must learn from the Passover experience that Hashem will take us out and cause great distress to those who have distressed us. When we show our Jewish souls we shine brighter than the sun, when we shirk our G-d commanded duty we are darker than coal in the eyes of the nations.
I still feel that redemption is close at hand. There is a lot happening in the world today, and it sometimes is so complex that it is hard to remain faithful. The haters, the Amalekian forces, try to make us believe we are not Jewish, we are not the 'real' Jews, we have no relation to the nation of Israel, that Israel was abandoned by G-d, etc., etc. They come from every angle trying to diminish our faith and trust in the promise our G-d made to our fathers. But we will not succumb to that, we have been around far to long to allow that kind of garbage to deter us from our mission.
Let my words strengthen you, so that you have a meaningful Passover experience.
Topic: If we are truly free, we must act free (Read 509 times)