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Our Rabbi's Message
April 25th 2008
By Rabbi Aaron KriegelPesah is about freedom; Shavuot is about law. Our tradition ties both ideas together, although both ideas seem to conflict with each other. Unfettered freedom is freedom without law. Law can imply life without freedom. There are no hard and fast rules to separate one from the other. There are no hard and fast rules to define either with any sense of precision.
Our founding fathers promised us Freedom of Religion in the Constitution, and since that time the Justices of the Supreme Court have argued what freedom of religion means. Our founding fathers promised us freedom from unreasonable searches, and from the time that Amendment was added to the constitution the same Justices have tried to define what freedom from unreasonable searches means.
On Pesah at the Seder we ask the four questions to define our freedom, but the four questions do nothing but limit our freedom. We sit like kings because we are not allowed to sit like peasants. We act life free people because we are forbidden to act like slaves. We eat matzos that we remember the origin of our freedom, but we are not allowed to eat bread for eight days. On Pesah our freedom is more limited than at any time during the year. Even the laws of Kasruth on Pesah are far more severe than at any other time during the year.
The tension between freedom and law is so great that we tie both concepts together for forty-nine days when we count the Omer in order to tie Pesah to Shavuot. And because of that tension we are forced to conclude that there can be no freedom without law, and law without freedom is not worth anything. We are forced to conclude that those two concepts, like so many other concepts, have to be defined by each other.
In all of its detail, Pesah teaches that life is not very simple, and ideas that we can express in their simplicity are simply not complete ideas. Our world is too complex to define any idea with only one word.
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