Tonight my family and I, along with some friends, are celebrating Passover. We celebrate this day of the Jewish calendar every year. What is Passover really? Can we associate it with an American concept? In a sense, Passover could be understood as a mixture of Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. It is the story of a people who dreamed of a free and independent future in a place where they could serve God in the way that He asked them to.
Freedom and independence are the hope of every human being but as we learn in the Passover story, freedom is not free. Many people died in in the Egyptian plagues in order for the Jewish freedom to become reality. And many people died in the American Revolution. The Passover ritual has a place to remember this. In a sense when we are free, we are not just free; we are also ‘freed’. Freed by somebody who paid the price for our freedom. And if someone pays for our freedom, ethics and integrity demand that we owe allegiance to the person who freed us. So not only is the old adage ‘Freedom is not free!’ true, but we now enter a philosophical ‘catch-22’ as if we owe something to those who free us, we are not totally free. Maybe the problem stems from an erroneous definition of freedom. In the story of Passover, Jewish freedom is built on the ashes of the life of a man, Moses, who chooses to give up his own freedom, life, and dreams of quiet tranquility to answer the ‘call’ and free the Nation of Israel. There is something I really like in that story: It all started because one man answered a call to check on a brush fire on a mountain slope.
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