Chapter 5:
Chapter 5:
Chapter 5
One Love: Freedom According to Rav
Summary: True freedom is not about indulgence but about choosing relationships, love, and a deep connection with God.
“I love you, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence.” -- Theodore Dreiser
“We love the things we love for what they are.” -- Robert Frost
If Not Now, When?
In our last chapter, we explored Shmuel’s concepts of slavery and freedom, which begin with the concrete facts of the Exodus: we were once slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and God took us out of there. It is more difficult, however, to understand Rav’s more abstract interpretation, which posits that our earliest ancestors were idol worshippers; but then God brought us close to Him through His service.1 The topic of idol worship seems neither relevant to the historical narrative of the Exodus nor applicable to our current way of life. In fact, the Talmud states that the fervor for idol worship died out during the beginning of the Second Temple Era, about 2500 years ago.2 Yet we know that these two visions of freedom are equally important, so much so that together, they form the backbone of the Haggadah and are intertwined in its climactic text, the arami oved avi.3
We have stated that these two conceptualizations represent two facets of freedom: the physical freedom highlighted by Shmuel and the spiritual freedom emphasized by Rav. However, the connection runs even deeper; these 2 levels of freedom together provide no less than a pathway for our lives.
As we discussed in the last chapter, the first kind of freedom allows us to achieve personal independence within the context of God's universal moral vision. (hakarat hatov & change) And as we shall see in this chapter, the second kind of freedom allows us to choose meaningful relationships, in the context of eternal significance that only God can provide.
This two-step process is captured in the famous words from Pirkei Avot:4 "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, then what am I?" And perhaps referring to the seder: “If not now, when?”5
Love Me or I’ll Kill You
According to Rav’s perspective, freedom on Pesach reaches its apotheosis in the form of freedom to love, because love cannot develop without choice. This idea is most apparent when we consider our own life experience. We all know that you cannot compel someone to love you, and neither can God compel us to love Him. Imagine that someone puts a gun to your head and says, “Love me or I’ll kill you.” That act of force is the antithesis of love and destroys any possibility of a loving relationship. A meaningful relationship can only exist if we enter it on our own volition.
This is why Shmuel's straightforward version of freedom is so critical and serves as a prerequisite to Rav's version, because if you have not fully developed yourself as an independent individual, you cannot make a genuine choice to love or relate to another person. The specific elements that comprise the seder agenda, such as asking questions, recognizing distinctions, and understanding the true meaning of freedom, are designed to promote individuality, and the purpose of that independence is to freely choose meaningful relationships with others, and specifically with God.
That’s why a young unmarried woman or man is called a bachur(a), derived from the root B-Ch-R, which means to choose, because the essence of someone referred to as single is in their potential to make the most important choice of their lives, namely, whom they should marry.
This is also why the Hebrew word kedusha, which as we said previously means special or distinct,6 is the same word used for the bond of marriage, kiddushin.7 The capacity to form meaningful relationships can only emerge after we develop distinct identities and independent selves.
Love Is in the Air
Therefore Pesach, the holiday of our freedom, is all about simple love. This is why Passover falls in Chodesh Ha’Aviv,8 the Spring season, when our climate produces new vegetation growth, when we hear the birds singing and the bees buzzing, and people supposedly fall madly in love. It is a time to reconnect with the newly budding physical world and reinvigorate our personal relationships.
Fittingly, many elements of Passover symbolize love and relationships. Passover corresponds to God's trait of chesed, loving-kindness,9 which is the first quality God used to "build" the physical and spiritual universes in their entirety.10 In the Passover story, the Jewish people are referred to as God’s [beloved] first-born child.11 The prophet Jeremiah related a prophecy that God praises us for the loving-kindness (chesed) of our youth and the pure love of a newlywed bride that we demonstrated to Him by following [God] into the [barren] desert...,12 trusting that God would lovingly care for us on our desolate journey. During Passover in synagogue, we read King Solomon’s Shir Hashirim,13 the Song of Songs, the lover's song between God and the Jewish people. 14 Moreover, the Exodus is used in a Talmudic analogy to a young unmarried couple going on a date. 15 And the Haggadah quotes the prophet Ezekiel, who compares the Jewish people to a young maiden whom God cares for. 16 On Passover, love is certainly in the air!
Furthermore, the Talmud teaches that we were only redeemed from slavery in the merit of Jewish women of Egypt.17 All the Midrashic anecdotes about their venerable actions have two themes in common: they supported life, and they promoted love. For example, it was the Jewish women who lectured the men about not giving up18 and having more children despite the Egyptian decree to murder all newborn baby boys; it was the women who went into the fields to seduce their exhausted husbands into conceiving more children.19 It was the Jewish women who believed in the redemption even during the darkest times.20 It was the Jewish women who were unwilling to abort an unborn fetus,21 and who defied Pharaoh’s decree by keeping the baby boys alive,22 including Moses, who fittingly became the leader of the Exodus. And it was the Jewish women who had such a deep conviction that God would not let them down, that they carried instruments as they left Egypt, in anticipation of rejoicing at the Red sea.23 The Jewish women of the Exodus are the role models for the pursuit of freedom, and it is no coincidence that they exemplified physical life (which is the environment within which we can become independent individuals) and loving relationships (which is the ultimate goal of independence).
Kindred Spirits
Abraham is the personification of Passover24 because he too exemplifies the trait of loving-kindness (chesed).25 When Abraham discovered monotheism, he discovered the God of Creation.26 As the Midrash points out, Abraham was the first person to argue for what we call first cause, or the idea that every particle in the universe derives from the source of all things – the infinite God.27 Based on that remarkable insight, he concluded that all creations are all related, because we all descend from the same source, namely the infinite God. He taught the world that interconnection is the essence of God's premier trait of chesed. This is why chesed is translated as kindness, because in both Hebrew and English, the word implies we are all the 'same kind',28 that we all originate from the same source, and deep down, that feeling is the reason we are kind to others.29 This realization about our connectedness was the discovery which inspired Abraham to serve God out of love,30 and that is why the prophet Isaiah called him God’s beloved.31
Abraham also realized that this infinite God, by definition, has no needs, and as such, He had no other motivation to create the world beyond kindness and love.32 He taught us that knowing God cares about us is what enables us to attribute meaning to our lives. Our tradition teaches that when we discover the God of nature, such as when we look up at the clear night sky and ponder the beauty and brilliance of our vast universe, we instinctively become enamored as one can only feel with a first love.33 The love associated with Pesach is from a simpler time, a time of wide-eyed innocence.34 It’s an idealistic, somewhat naive picture of the world, romanticized, without a trace of cynicism, suffused with the feeling that it’s good to be alive. And even though we can’t help but lose that feeling as we grow older and more experienced (and perhaps more pessimistic), it resurfaces every now and then, when we feel nostalgic or sentimental about life. Pesach is the holiday that most inspires those kinds of feelings, particularly when we can experience the seder with children who proudly and innocently recite the ma nishtana. For many of us, life was so simple back then when we were young!35
The Stranger
Once Abraham discovered that along with the entire universe, he shared this bond with the infinite Creator of all things, he made it his mission to fight idol-worship tooth and nail.36 As we mentioned earlier, he was literally an iconoclast – he destroyed the icons his generation worshipped.37 This was his logical next step, because a life dedicated to idol worship is the opposite of chesed/loving kindness.38 The Torah calls idol worship avoda zara, meaning the service of a god who is a stranger.39 A stranger is someone who has no relationship with you, and therefore no personal investment in your well-being -- the antithesis of the infinite God who created and cares about every one of His creations.
An idol is a god who provides no meaning for one's petty existence, a god that you create in your own image, for your own selfish purposes, a god who uses you in turn for its own gratification.40 A life dedicated to Idol worship is a life of slavery to yourself and your own selfish desires, which leaves no room for loving relationships.41 Devotion and prayer to an idol may work temporarily, as many superstitions do, but service to idols inevitably becomes all about you alone, void of real love and meaning.42
Unconditionally
In the early years after Abraham discovered the infinite God, he could be compared to a lovestruck youth. But over the course of his lifetime, Abraham deepened his relationship with God, and gradually transformed into the epitome of a mature "servant" of God.43 Abraham’s service was borne of true devotion, rooted not just in emotion but in the acknowledgement of ultimate truth,44 made possible only because of his development into a unique, independent individual who was able to freely choose service to God based on genuine love.
Prayer is referred to as the service of the heart,45 which is the work of intense devotion, not the product of enslavement.46 This is the service that Moses referred to when he commanded Pharaoh to let the Jewish people go in order that they could "serve God in the desert."47 We were to embark on a chosen labor of love, not the involuntary labor of servitude that Pharaoh promoted.
In contrast to Abraham, many people involved in loving relationships eventually find that their initial emotional commitment dwindles over time. When do loving relationships typically lose their luster? When the love is based48 on a typical list of the other person’s appealing attributes: charming, athletic, pretty/handsome, generous, talented, intelligent, spontaneous, organized, etc. But that kind of love begins to fade when we’re confronted with reality. After all, no one can consistently live up to that original list, and we come to realize that our partner has all-too-human failings that hardly characterized the person we once fell in love with. Our sages call this kind of love dependent, or conditional love.49
What is the vital factor, then, that allows a relationship to grow into the sophisticated level of deep devotion that Abraham felt toward God? The answer lies with Passover, with leil shimurim,50 with the realization that just as the Exodus was embedded in Creation, the very fact that we are together (in whatever meaningful relationship one is involved in) implies that our relationship is similarly embedded in creation, and we must cherish the fact that we were meant to be together from the beginning of time.51
This kind of love is called independent or unconditional love because it supersedes all checklists and versions of a person we create in our own image, based on our own needs and desires. Passover and Abraham teach us that we must recognize that our meaningful relationships are a reflection of God's reality and were meant to be from time immemorial.
We can see that Rav’s vision of freedom introduces another shade of meaning to leil shimurim, which holds the secret to love and meaningful relationships. This is the Torah's secret message about love - that love is defined as truth.52 Unconditional love will endure because it is based on a bond that cannot be broken, because it was always meant to be. With that conviction, it becomes much easier to grapple with the inevitable complications of the relationship. When we no longer define and confine the person we love, we can freely love in a way that is real, as a function of God's truth rooted in the loving kindness of Creation.
In the same way, Rav's vision of Passover reveals that God's love for the Jewish people is shamur -- it is protected like a beloved treasure, deeply rooted and impossible to break.53
This is how the two visions of the freedom of Passover are intertwined. Shmuel's concept of freedom to choose leads us to Rav's message about enduring, unconditional love which is the essence of Passover. In order to choose love that is true, we must embrace that our ultimate destiny is embedded from the time of Creation.
The arami oved avi passage thus beautifully captures the meaning of Passover: the initial words sum up the lost, lonely, meaningless life of Abraham’s father Terach, who worshipped uncaring gods which made his life a dark existence, devoid of genuine love. But the children of this idol worshipper’s son Abraham, by going through the process of Egyptian enslavement and subsequent freedom, came to appreciate the unconditional, eternal love that God has for them. They felt His love when He delivered them to the cherished land he had promised to his beloved Abraham -- the land of Israel. And as we shall see in the next chapter, this treasured land is the focal point of the seder, because it is, to this day, the expression of God’s love for Abraham, and as such, has become the centerpiece of Jewish history.
Notes
Pesachim 116a.
↩Sanhedrin 64a-b.
↩MT Chametz U’Matzah 7:4. See above chapter 3 “Two Types of Freedom.”
↩1:14.
↩See my book, The Book of Life: A Transformative Guide to the High Holidays, where I explain that Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur correspond to these two types of freedom (in a completely different context, of course.)
↩See Tosefot Kiddushin 2b s.v. d’assar.
↩Kiddushin 2a.
↩Shemot 13:4.
↩See Shelah Hakadosh Pesachim, Pachad Yitzchak Pesach, Siftei Chaim Pesach, etc.
↩Tehillim 89:3 – עולם חסד יבנה.
↩Shemot 4:22.
↩Yirmiyahu 2:2.
↩Rema Orach Chaim 490:9.
↩See MT Teshuva 10:3; Moreh Nevuchim 3:51.
↩See Sotah 2a.
↩Yechezkel 16:17.
↩Pesachim 11b.
↩Pesachim 12a.
↩Pesachim 11b
↩Megilla 14a, Sotah 13a.
↩Zohar Shemot 2:3b.
↩See Sotah 11b.
↩Rashi Shemot 15:20.
↩See Beit Yosef, Tur Orach Chaim (OC) 417.
↩See Shelah Hakadosh Pesachim, Pachad Yitzchak Pesach, Siftei Chaim Pesach, etc.
↩See MT Avodat Kichavim 1:3.
↩Midrash Rabbah 39:3, 95:3.
↩Similarly, in German, the word ‘kind’ refers to a child.
↩This could be why the chasida bird, listed with non-kosher birds in Vayikra 11:19, specifically does chesed with its own kind (see Rashi ibid, Chidushei HaRim ibid).
↩MT Teshuva 10:2.
↩Yishayahu 41:8. Also see Braisheet 18:19.
↩See Avot D’Rebbe Natan 4, Derech Hashem 2:1 etc.
↩MT Yesodei Hatorah 2:2.
↩See Bechorot 44a.
↩For examples of this contrast, see Bloom, H., William Blake's Songs of innocence and of experience (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987).
↩MT Avodat Kochavim 3:1.
↩Braisheet Rabbah 38.
↩See Mechilta Vayechi 4.
↩Mechilta Yitro 5.
↩See Kuzari 1:97.
↩See Shemot 12:12 and Mechilta Pscha 7.
↩See MT Avodat Kochavim 11:16.
↩Braisheet 26:24. Also see MT Teshuva 10:2.
↩See MT Teshuva 10:2.
↩Taanit 2a.
↩See Brachot 29b.
↩Shemot 7:16.
↩I heard this beautiful idea from two of my teachers based on Brachot 8a.
↩Avot 5:19.
↩Shemot 12:42.
↩Please note that this does not mean if someone is abusive you should try to work things out. Even though the crisis was meant to occur in your life for whatever reason, an abusive partner is not in a genuine relationship.
↩MT Teshuva 10:2.
↩See Braisheet 37:11.
↩