PASSOVER:

How To Really Feast on Freedom:
Some Thoughts on Passover and Oppression

by Rabbi Lawrence Troster
Congregation Beth Israel of Northern Valley, Bergenfield, NJ

During the recent, often absurd, debate in the Senate on raising the fuel economy standards for cars, SUV's and light trucks, opponents of raising the standards claimed that two values were essential to all Americans: personal freedom and personal safety.

One senator, after holding up a picture of an European car that gets 70 miles to the gallon (but is quite small), claimed that raising fuel economy (or CAFE – Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards would force Americans into driving such cars. And this would be an affront to their personal freedom. Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland also opposed the change in mileage standards because she claimed that it would eliminate SUV's from the road. She then said, "American women love their SUVs and minivans ... because of their safety."

The defeat of the increased fuel economy standards, coming so close to Pesach, has made me think about personal freedom and personal safety. Most people assume that personal freedom means that we are free to do whatever we want. No other person and no government should stop us from exercising our personal freedom. While we all believe this, we also know that personal freedom has its limits. We are not allowed to injure others in pursuit of our freedom. In other words, our freedom cannot be practiced at the expense of others. Many of our civil and criminal laws are designed to protect the life and freedom of every individual from the improper exercise of free choice.

What do we also mean by personal safety? When we refer to personal safety we are often making the assumption that we can create through technology a kind of protective bubble around ourselves and our families that has no reference to anyone else except those who might threaten us. But we all know that in reality that we can never live in complete isolation from those around us and that true personal safety is also community safety.

If personal freedom and personal safety does not mean that we must consider the safety and freedom of others in addition to our own, then how can we in the Passover story condemn Pharaoh and the Egyptians? Were they not only exercising their freedom to create slaves out of the Israelites since they considered them to be a threat to Egyptian security, safety and freedom?

Car emissions are one of the main sources of greenhouse gases that are causing global warming. Millions of people, in the poorest countries of the world, who are the least responsible for global warming and who are the least able to deal with its effects, will suffer the most. How is our personal freedom causing the oppression of others?

In our own country, air pollution is increasing asthma for children and recently has been implicated in causing cancer and emphysema. What is the price of our personal choice in cars and SUV's? What personal safety do we really provide for our children?

Continuing dependence on foreign oil from unstable areas of the world will mean that in the future American soldiers will have to die to defend that oil. Whose children will then be safe?

At the seder we begin with telling the story of the past: Avadim ha-yenu: we were slaves, now we are free. Why today should we see ourselves as slaves? Haven't we put that behind us? Hasn't there been closure?

We can still be slaves to our own selfishness and desire. To be truly free is not only to have freedom from external oppression but also from the internal oppression of our egos. So while we may think we are free, we are still slaves to our own selfishness. And that selfishness can be the source of the enslavement of others. Therefore every year we still need to tell the story and we still need to remind ourselves that we are not yet truly freed. Every year we have to remind ourselves how the illusion of our freedom could become the oppression of others.