Celebrating Freedom

The exodus of a group of slaves from Egypt, from servitude under the ancient world’s most powerful nation to freedom, has long served as the universal symbol of liberation. Not by accident did the spirituals sung by black slaves in the antebellum South rely on imagery straight out of the Hebrew Bible — of Moshe confronting Pharaoh to tell him, “Let my people go”; of the Jewish People crossing the “chilly and deep” waters of the Jordan to enter the Promised Land.

For thousands of years, Jews have been gathering on Leil Haseder to relate the story of how Hashem took them out of Egypt, from slavery to freedom, from servitude to redemption. They did so at a point in history when the very concept of freedom as a defining element of human life — certainly for every man, woman, and child of a particular society — did not even exist.

And we have continued to tell that story even in circumstances that looked every bit hopeless as that of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt — e.g., during the Spanish Inquisition, in Auschwitz. One of my sons commented at the Shabbos meal this week how he had just heard Rabbi Yosef Mendelevich describe the months of preparation that went into his preparation for a Seder in the Soviet Gulag. Some might have questioned what there was to celebrate under those conditions. But he did not. For he knew that even in prison, he was a free man.

The Soviets might kill him, but they could not break him. They could not take from him the knowledge that Hashem had taken the Jewish People to Him — lakachti — and lifted Rabbi Yosef Mendelevich to a realm above the Soviet prison, in which only his body was held prisoner.