Wise, Wicked, Simple, and One Who Does Not Know How to Ask
Jakob Steinhardt, Germany 1923
The Immigrant Family", Chicago Haggadah, 1879
Lola, USA, 1920
Arthur Syzk, Poland, 1939 Siegmund Forst, Europe & USA, 1959
"The Haggadah in Memory of the Holocaust" by David Wander, 1988 Feast of Freedom, 1982
Eli Valley, "On Egyptian Freedom" c. 2011, Arab Spring
The Power of Choice
(שמות יט, יז) ויתיצבו בתחתית ההר א"ר אבדימי בר חמא בר חסא מלמד שכפה הקב"ה עליהם את ההר כגיגית ואמר להם אם אתם מקבלים התורה מוטב ואם לאו שם תהא קבורתכם
א"ר אחא בר יעקב מכאן מודעא רבה לאורייתא
אמר רבא אעפ"כ הדור קבלוה בימי אחשורוש דכתיב (אסתר ט, כז) קימו וקבלו היהודים קיימו מה שקיבלו כבר
"And they stood at the bottom of the mountain (Exodus 19:17)-" Rabbi Avdimi the son of Chama the son of Chasa said, "This teaches that the Holy One, Blessed be He, held the mountain over them like a barrel and said, 'If you accept the Torah, fine. And if not, here shall be your graves!'"
Rav Acha Bar Yaakov said, "From here there is a great claim against the Torah!"
Rava said, "Even so, they accepted it again [willingly] in the days of Ahasuerus, as it is written, (Esther 9:27) 'They upheld and accepted' - they upheld what they already accepted."
- Can we consider what God did to the Israelites to be coercion?
- How much choice did the Israelites really have in accepting the Torah?
- Thinking about what the Matzah symbolizes for us, what life circumstances force us to change?
- How does the power of choice help set us free?
- Rachel Naomi Remen, My Grandfather's Blessings
- What are the parallels between freedom and choice?
- As David Foster Wallace discussed in "This Is Water", what might be unknown to us about making a conscious choice? What makes choice so hard?
- In what ways is freedom a process?