Earlier this week the Festival of Freedom, Passover, came to an end after 8 days. It’s my favourite holiday, but not the easiest to observe. There are a lot of rules and dietary changes, and I ALWAYS gain weight and mess up my sleep. For the second year in a row, we were not able to have our usual number of guests, and we were sad not to be able to bring my eldest son and his SO in from British Columbia – it was our first Passover without him at our table since 1995. Still, it was Passover, and it was good.
Today we face the job of putting everything away and restoring the order we had in the kitchen just over a week ago, and we can continue with our lives. But the question remains for me – what has changed? We celebrated our liberation from Egypt about 3000 years ago, but how free are we today? And are we ready to be free?
Many of us are still living under restrictions due to the virus, but that’s not what I’m talking about. External restrictions on our freedom come and go with the conditions in our communities, and no pandemic lasts forever. Those of us who are choosing to follow the physical restrictions and take care of our community are making that choice freely, and it’s important to acknowledge that. The taskmaster in our heads, however, is another story.
Freedom is a choice and a responsibility. It can be a burden – there are numerous stories in the book of Exodus about the freed slaves wanting to turn back to the life where they were told what to do and how to do it. In the end, they were found not worthy of a life of freedom, because of their inability to take responsibility for their own life and choices. They wandered in the desert for forty years until that entire generation (of men – we aren’t told about the women) had died, and their children, born in freedom, were ready to move on to the next stage of the story.
We live in a time with different pressures and fears, but the basic questions remain the same. Do we require an authority, either internal or external, to give us permission to do the things we say we want to do? Are we waiting for everything to be perfect before we pull the trigger on a project we’ve been dreaming about? Do we resent our loved ones because we think they are the reason we can’t do what we want to do? It can be very revealing to go through these questions and see how many of the answers are fear-induced excuses, rather than the truth.
It’s time to remember that every choice is ultimately our own. Our traditions and our beliefs give us guidelines we may choose to follow, and the stories we tell ourselves may make it seem like someone else is forcing us to do things (or more likely, we think they are preventing us). But in the end, no human can control another human. We can choose to act or not act, but we can’t, in all truth, put the blame on someone else.
The choice is ours. Let’s take it.