Inner Journey of Passover: What is Freedom?

What is the slavery from which Israel escaped? The Haggadah cites two rabbinic sages who disagree: Shmuel argues that the escape is from physical slavery; Rav believes that it was idolatry and spiritual degradation that we escaped. David Teutsch, in A Night of Questions, comments: "It is hardly accidental that the Haggadah here gives both answers. There can never be complete spiritual freedom without physical freedom, and we cannot maintain physical freedom without spiritual discipline and clarity of mind."

Please see Shir Tikvah's Haggadah Supplement for Passover resources relating to bringing physical justice to the places the world needs help today. In this sheet, we explore a range of texts that speak to the inner journey of liberation, which accompanies activism for more equity and justice in the world.

The first section includes texts that explore the notion of freedom as being awake to and welcoming of all of life's experiences. The texts describe spiritual enslavement to our yetzer ha-ra, our impulse toward wickedness or bad or numbing habits. Freedom is in mindfulness and gratitude.

The second section explores the Passover custom of ridding our homes of chametz, leavening, and the spiritual symbolism of chametz as it relates to enslavement and freedom.

In order to become free, people need to work on themselves. We need to tell the truth. We need to set conscious intentions. We need to confront our distractions, our fears and the places where we cause and endure suffering. We need to learn to live with constant change, and still make wise and loving choices. Practice in community is the path to develop human qualities that we identify as Divine because they lead to happiness, equanimity, fulfillment, aliveness and wisdom. These are wholesome qualities like generosity, gratitude, patience and joy. We learn to see the factors that lead to suffering and harm such as greed, hatred, delusion, disconnection, resentment and blame. We experience what invites freedom and release from the old patterns of hurt that manifest as self-centered fear. We need time and space for this. That is why we have dedicated periods in the life of a Jew to practice, to perform mitzvot.

The Ba’al Shem Tov of blessed memory taught that this verse “Come near to my soul, redeem Her” (Ps. 69:19) is a prayer for personal redemption for our soul from the exile of the yetzer hara (our inner wicked inclination). When each of us experiences personal redemption, collective redemption will follow and the messiah will arrive, [may it be] speedily in our days, amen. All of us will know (yed’u/da'at) the One (God) “from the smallest to the greatest” (Jer. 6:13), doing everything for the sake of the blessed One alone.

During this season of liberation, our teacher invites us to consider what keeps us personally enslaved to our baser impulses, both as individuals and a species, and what might support our personal and collective liberation from exile. That enslavement to the yetzer hara is described by the Ba’al Shem Tov as a form of exile moves our notions of exile and redemption from the geopolitical realm to the inner life. The origins of the former lie in the latter. Universal redemption for the human species thus depends on a collective awakening at the individual level.

If collective redemption depends on da’at, intimate awareness of the divine Presence, we might infer that for the Ba’al Shem Tov personal redemption depends on da’at as well.... The root of our individual enslavement thus lies in a lack of intimate awareness with our inner life. The root of our liberation, therefore, lies in turning toward and reconnecting with what is stirring beneath the radar of conscious awareness. It is the restoration of such intimacy that enables us to move toward personal mastery over our baser instincts.

Human beings have a multitude of feelings; they move within us like thin and trickling streams. When we open them and draw them to capacity, they flow like a mighty river whose waters never cease, but if we fail to widen them, they pass as if they never were created. There are times when a person feels, as an example, vaguely ill at ease. He is not sure what is troubling him. Should he eat something or rest or have a drink? The feeling is thereby transformed into its opposite, when in fact, he had felt a tentative probing of the soul. She was trying to find expression in the world. The same is true for fleeting sensations of joy, and so on. These subtle sensations are not garbed in physical attire, so they are difficult to identify. The troubled man cannot quite articulate what he is feeling inside—this tickling, this pressing of his soul! So he pours himself a drink, he eats, or he does some other mundane task.

He does not succeed in quelling the spasms of the soul; he simply amplifies the rattling and rumbling of the body so the cry of the soul is inaudible […] The bodily sensations thunder so loudly that the quaking of the soul passes as naught, as a sort of spiritual miscarriage.

We therefore adjure our community in the strongest possible terms: learn how to observe. Whatever transpires within you and around you, learn how to see what it is. Visual watching is not the essence! More exactly, we midwife and give birth to the whole; thus, we can examine the content and the context of our feeling. Whatever sensation arises, we must look at it clearly. We explore it in depth to see where it leads and what comprises it. We pay attention to our sensations and amplify the subtleties until we have a whole form to examine. We notice and examine the form and function of what we perceive and what we feel. Whenever a person senses something, they must pay attention. They must examine the sensation and the situation to understand the whole content of the message […]

We exhort you in the strongest terms: teach yourself to watch. In general, become a person who looks for God. Perhaps in your looking you will uncover God’s subtle presence—you may sense [God’s] holiness. When you seek [God], you will surely find [God]. And where will you find [God]? In yourself and in everything around you. Now, if that is your goal, you must clearly, consistently, and diligently, slow down. When you rush, you cannot work with deliberation and mindfulness.

Rabbi Marc Margolius, IJS, wrote a beautiful teaching about Hakarat HaTov, recognizing the good, as it relates to mindfulness middot and Passover: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YNRTURsIySQTW-vjOxcTi4QUmTfNwTqy/view?usp=sharing

For more information, contact [email protected]

See essay by Haviva Ner David in Spring Holidays volume

.... Just as the 'kabbalah' comes (instructing us) to eradicate chametz and to check (livdok) the house in nooks and in cracks, so too we are obligated to search and check the chambers of our inner being for bad thoughts (machshavot) and bad ruminations (hirhurim). Just as bedikat chametz (checking for chametz) is not valid by sunlight, nor by moonlight, nor by the light of a torch, but only by the light of a candle, so too the bedikah (checking) of the yetzer hara (wicked inclination) must be by the light of the neshama (soul) which is called 'ner' (candle), this is what is written (Proverbs 20:27) "the neshama (soul) of the human is the candle of Hashem (God) which searches the chambers of one's inner being."

One of the mitzvot associated with Passover is that of removing chametz, leaven, from one’s domain. In contemporary practice, this involves not only getting rid of pasta and cookies from the cupboard, but also, for many, cleaning everything (most especially the kitchen) thoroughly, covering up countertops on which chametz has been prepared, taking out dishes on which chametz has never been eaten, and a lot of other things. It’s a rigorous, physically demanding process of cleaning, wiping, boiling, and sorting. But at the end of it, as Passover starts, there’s often a gorgeous feeling that one has purified, in a way, one’s physical surroundings.

These preparations for Passover can feel deeply spiritual in one way, but also invite us to ask whether we’re removing the spiritual chametz from our lives along with the physical stuff. A lot of traditional commentators describe chametz as fluffy, swollen (think of bread rising), and talk about spiritual chametz as the puffy, overextended parts of our ego; the way we try to posture and preen, to achieve renown rather than just existing as we are, being gentle and modest; a mere humble matzah, if you will.

It’s a lot harder to sweep out our illusions about ourselves, the ways in which we try to put ourselves first, the ways in which we hear others a little less well because we think of ourselves as more important, the ways in which we take shortcuts on our integrity and deepest values. There’s no cabinet in which we can lock away our pettienesses and our meannesses for a week.

Rather, we have to seek them out. Like the search for physical chametz that happens in the dark, with a candle, we need to be intentional in our attempts to collect all of the parts of who we’ve been that are not nourishing, that are dragging us down. We need to look for it, and we need to be willing to find it; to confront it, to face it, to name it, to take it from where it’s been hidden all this time. This work requires tremendous bravery.

And then, when we find it, we must burn it to give it up completely, to let it go, to transform ourselves by putting the worst of who we have been on the pyre.

We know, on some level, that like the cookie crumbs under the sofa, that some of it might come creeping back after Pesach is over. But it is the act of seeking it, naming it, and releasing it, to committing, year after year after year, to purifying the self and becoming the holiest version of who we are meant to be; it is the work of seeking out and releasing our internal leaven that is, in itself, an offering to God.

Overall / Concluding Questions: