Passover reminds us that freedom is hard -- and that's okay
All holidays are collections of cliches, and none more so than Passover, which Jews begin celebrating Friday night. Passover, which commemorates the Jews’ liberation from bondage in ancient Egypt, comes down to us as a dinner, or Seder, with some trusty set pieces: We sing “Dayenu,” we eat matzoh, we drink wine. And that’s all great — it’s hard to quarrel with a holiday that requires you to imbibe four full cups of booze. But what happens when the central message of the holiday, freedom, also becomes a tired metaphor — and a misunderstood one at that?
No matter what kind of Jew you are — Orthodox or secular, right-wing or left-wing, Ashkenazi, mizrahi, or Sephardi — you trot out the “freedom” metaphor at your Seder. Of course you do, because the Haggada, the book we read for the holiday, instructs us to. We’re supposed to imagine that we were enslaved in Egypt and think about what it means to become free. So we talk about freedom and give it whatever spin is most comfy for us and our preconceptions: At a feminist Seder, we talk about freedom for women; at a Middle East peace Seder, we talk about land rights for Palestinians; at a Zionist family’s Seder table, we talk of the glories of contemporary Israel.
Meanwhile, we sell our Gentile friends on the grandeur of Passover by saying, “It’s about freedom!” Because who doesn’t love freedom? But this rhetoric misses the point entirely. What does freedom entail? If you read the Haggada closely, you see that freedom is not simply, or even, joyous liberation. It’s the freedom to suffer, struggle, endure and maybe — if God is on your side — arrive someplace better.
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The Passover story is here to remind us that journeys of liberation — personal, communal or national — aren’t pretty. They’re not heady sequences of trumpets and triumphs, cascades of battles and victories and certainty. Like any other endeavor involving human beings, they are marked by crippling doubt, by bouts of despair, by moments of wondering if it wouldn’t be easier to give up.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/04/14/passover-freedom-suffering-endurance/