Freedom and Order

by Rabbi Alan Zelenetz, Dean of Jewish Studies

Pesach, the Jewish festival of cherut, freedom, coincides each year with spring the time of liberation for nature, and both suggest an awakening to a new life and a boundless new energy. In fact, an extra month, Adar Sheni, is inserted in the Hebrew calendar at pre-determined intervals in order to ensure that Pesach fall in the spring so that the symbolism of this conjunction not be lost. The tefilat tal, too, is introduced in the Pesach season in order to create a liturgical tie between springtime and the chag.

Spring represents as well the natural order of the world going about its way, as echoed in the famous reverdie, the spring song, of the English poet Chaucer at the outset of his Canterbury Tales (with its incidental echo of borchi nafshi, perek 104 in Tehillim, the Book of Psalms) - April's showers fall, flowers blossom, the wind gently plays about the tender crops, the sun travels its course, birds break into song, and folk rise up and out of doors.

This second aspect of spring, symbolic of natural order, seems to suggest a contrast, rather than similarity, with the Pesach holiday. For, if anything,  Pesach represents a rupture of natural order, earthshaking events in which God performs miracle after miracle on behalf of Bnai Yisrael present a biblical record of nature turned topsy-turvy, water thickening to blood, unnatural darkness, sudden plague and mysterious death. So much so is Pesach a celebration of God's wonder-working - the parted sea, the desert manna - that the shemoneh esreh excludes al hanissim, the prayer of gratitude for marvels that we recite on Hanukkah and Purim, because the very essence of Pesach and the very existence of the Jewish nation are testimony to this over and again.

And yet the order of nature is quite relevant to an integral understanding of Pesach. Having been granted their freedom in such spectacular and supernatural fashion, the Jews were likely to lose their sense of proportions. For had not Moshe and Aharon, leaders but nonetheless mortals, performed unnatural deeds and mighty wonders with their own rods and voices? Were not all free men and women, thus, limitless in their abilities (a question raised at other historical moments of newfound freedom such as the Renaissance and the period of the great European revolutions)? Were not human beings potential challengers of God in their own right?

"Limits are set even on the course and speed of the planets," the Midrash tells us, "but not on Hashem's acts." The freedom of the Jews was created with limits. God alone could work miracles, human beings were bound by natural law. The Haggadah of Pesach makes a mere incidental mention of Moshe Rabbenu by name, for, despite his momentous leadership, "God Himself - not by any messenger, not by any angel - brought us out of bondage into freedom." The Haggadah is designed to prevent any, even fleeting, confusion of Hashem's  miracles with Moses and Aaron's mortal messengership.

It is no accident, then, that the celebration of this Pesach night of miracles is called the Seder, "the order," for it serves to balance the significance of the evening. Freedom for God is limitless, it encompasses miracles; freedom for men and women, on the other hand, is limited - it must be prescribed and patterned, we believe as Jews, structured and programmed if it is to be true. The Seder thus orders the holiday and orders the Jewish year as well, Nissan, the Pesach month , the month of yetziat Mitzrayim, serving as the first month of the calendar, and it reminds us of life's order under God.

This is why the holiday of Shavuot, the feast of mattan Torataynu which follows seven weeks upon Pesach, the festival of freedom, is called in the Talmud "atzeret shel Pesach,"  the conclusion or completion of Passover - to affirm that human freedom, to be consequential, must observe the law of God. "Men and women possess no rights," to paraphrase the French writer Malraux, "until they first meet their obligations."

The Sochotchover Rebbe would not permit his Chassidim to attend Pesach Seder at his table for, he explained, the psychological enslavement of chassid  to  rebbe, of student to master, would prevent them from tasting the true freedom of Pesach. At the same time this true freedom can be experienced only with the recognition that indeed there is a Master from whom our freedom is a divine gift and a model of order for all humankind.