By Liel Leibovitz and Mark Oppenheimer / Special To The Washington Post
All holidays are collections of cliches, and none more so than Passover, which Jews began 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.
We’ve been exalting and oversimplifying Passover since ancient times, well before Charlton Heston, draped in a red silk robe, thundered, “Let my people go!” But if you read the biblical account of history’s most famous long commute, you realize it’s less Heston and more Larry David. No sooner do the Jews skedaddle from the house of bondage than they start complaining. They survey the sand and the sun and the scorpions and, like half a million Borscht Belt comics, they kvetch: “For this we left Egypt?” The Israelites, the Torah tells us, “grumbled against Moses and said, ‘Why did you bring us up from Egypt to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?’”
And God, the most merciful, has very little patience for this mob of moaners. At some point, when the Israelites mope that the manna — the magical superfood the Lord in his beneficence had sent raining down from the heavens — was not delicious (and such small portions!), the Creator gets in one of His famous smiting moods and makes it rain snakes instead. Moses saves the people. The bellyaching continues.
What are we to learn from this ancient, comical story? As far as national creation myths go, this one ain’t glorious. For every big miracle (see: Red Sea, Parting of), we get pages and pages of anxious humans saying that it’s all too hard and maybe we should just stop and go back to the Bad Place, where at least we had a little bit of meat to eat.
But that’s exactly the point.
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.
And here’s Passover’s dirty little secret: Most Israelites felt exactly the same way. Rashi, the great medieval commentator, wrote that a full four-fifths of all Hebrew slaves took one look at Moses, their liberator, said a curt “no, thanks” and decided to stay in Egypt, rejecting the travails of freedom for the known quantity, the security, of slavery; of living lives that were difficult, and less free, but safe and familiar. Then as now, it took superhuman dedication just to leave your house. And once you did, you felt more terrified than anything else.
The feeling that freedom — or democracy, or self-governance — is a whole lot of work is something many of us share today. We barely had a chance to recover from two devastating years of a global pandemic when along came the first full-scale war on European soil in decades. Our political system is hobbled, our health care system is in tatters, and even the Oscars are no longer pure, escapist fun. As we continue what to many of us seems like an unending trudge through the wilderness, we may be tempted to throw in the towel, settle on the couch, binge-watch cooking shows and forget all about trying to make things better, for ourselves and those around us. In short, we may decide that too much freedom is a bad thing.
Thankfully, as the Passover story reminds us, freedom is within reach; it is a fight, but it’s one we can win. Whatever your promised land is — equal pay for equal work, health care for all, a free Ukraine, the right to organize, liberation from social media and the tech overlords — we can get there. But it won’t be right now, and it won’t even come at the end of the five-hour meal that we call a Seder. It might take 40 years. That’s how long it took the Jews to get to their promised land.
To endure all the travails between here and there, it’s not helpful to keep talking about freedom as if it’s just a good old time. Freedom is not ayahuasca tourism or a Grateful Dead show at the Fillmore East. It’s hard, and the rewards may lie far in the future.
And while we’re waiting, the Haggada has a message for us: Complain if you must. If it makes you feel better, kvetch. It’s tough out there. It was tough at the Exodus, too. No one should be asked to live through all this stoically, and no one should pretend that they’re not falling apart. But if we trust in ourselves and each other and our faith, and if we stick around to the last page of the story, we’ll find that it has a very happy ending.
Liel Leibovitz is a host of the “Unorthodox” podcast and an editor-at-large for Tablet.
Mark Oppenheimer is a host of the “Unorthodox” podcast and is the author of “Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood.”
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