Happy Wednesday! I usually write this newsletter on Sunday, but this special Passover edition is being written on Thursday, in the midst of our preparations for the traditional celebration. This year Passover starts on Friday night, so I will be offline Saturday (as always) and also Sunday (because we celebrate double holidays in the diaspora – it’s a long story).

Looking out of my window, I see the thick flakes of an unusually powerful April snowstorm landing on my deck. The birds don’t seem too perturbed, but I’m glad I refilled the bird feeder. We’ve had about 25 cm of the white stuff so far, and we expect another 10 cm or so. The last time we had this kind of huge April dump, it was also Passover, and it was followed by the Flood of the Century. Hopefully that will not be the case this year. At that time my eldest child was a baby, and now he’s an adult of 26. We were fortunate to be able to bring him and his SO in before the storm began, so I have a full house. I am especially grateful because this will be our third seder with no guests –  between the ongoing pandemic and the heavy, late snow, we are still constrained, as we celebrate this holiday of freedom.

Freedom has become a word of division and contention in the past couple of years. Like our flag, it has been claimed by those who are mostly concerned with their own freedom, and not so much with the wellbeing of others. But like that flag, we can reclaim freedom, because it’s not just the ability to do whatever you want without any consideration of harm to others.

Freedom, to me, is the ability to look beyond constraints, to choose to accept them for whatever reason (the good of the vulnerable members of my community, the knowledge that this snow will melt), or to fight them (unjust laws that seek to control the bodies of vulnerable people rather than protect them). 

To quote Viktor Frankl, the last freedom is the ability “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way”. G-d knows I’m not comparing our situation here to the Holocaust. But this statement is always true – regardless of constraints, we get to choose our own freedom.

I hope you had a wonderful, peaceful Passover, Easter and Ramadan! I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.