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Most Americans think of the Jewish Passover holiday as a "Feast of Freedom." But a deeper understanding of the festival acknowledges a simultaneous emphasis on law and order.
Watching the frenetic, exhausting preparation that characterizes religious Jewish households in the days before the holiday, it's reasonable to question how the meticulous rules relate to themes of personal liberty. The biblical requirement to avoid every crumb of leavened baked goods for eight days of the festival means not only scrubbing refrigerators and stoves, but also moving any inappropriate foodstuffs out of sight. Most families also switch over to a special set of Passover dishes, reserved for the joyous spring festival and no other time.
Yet all the scouring and scrambling can sometimes seem more burden than joy, leading up to the elaborate dinner on the first night of Passover. That initial feast — with its four cups of wine, four questions with elaborate answers, retelling of the Exodus story and multicourse meal usually served late at night — suggests obligation as much as liberation.
Finding the order in Passover
In fact, it's called "Seder," which means "order" in Hebrew. According to tradition, the scrupulous completion of that order, with its 15 steps proclaimed aloud at the Seder's beginning, clarifies the true essence of the holiday: not a free-form encouragement of each individual's instincts and impulses, but a disciplined recreation of the deliverance from Egypt that all Jews are meant to experience every year, as if they'd been personally and communally rescued.
The holiday does not commemorate freedom from obligations and rules, but the freedom to embrace new regulations commanded by G od rather than pharaoh. Just as the degradation of slavery has always involved an attempt to reduce human beings to the status of domestic beasts, so the purpose of the godly rules that the liberated Hebrews ultimately received at Sinai meant to raise them to a higher level of humanity.
Unfortunately, one of the most beloved of all American spirituals, a moving song that inspired runaway slaves, helped to perpetuate misunderstanding and simplification of the timeless, universal Passover message. "Go down, Moses!" that immortal hymn proclaims. "Way down in Egypt land/ Tell old pharaoh/ Let my people go!"
These words follow a translation by the King James version of Exodus, 5:1: "And afterward Moses and Aaron went in, and told Pharaoh, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness."
More recent translations of the famous phrase "let my people go" restore the original meaning of the Hebrew and render the demand to pharaoh as "send my people out" or "send my people forth," as in the excellent 2021 "Koren Tanakh," supervised by the esteemed late rabbinic scholar Jonathan Sacks. That language asks pharaoh not to release the children of Israel to follow their own wants and inclinations, but rather to dispatch them on a mission with a unifying, higher purpose: "Send My people forth so that they may hold a festival for Me in the wilderness"
This connects directly with any lingering confusion over what, exactly, Passover celebrates. Ancient Jewish scholars describe the holiday as Z'man Cherutaynu, best translated as "the season of our liberation" because of the plural emphasis of the words. Jews stress a national deliverance, more than a personal one, in this festival season.
Law and ritual
Sacred law and communal obligation play dominant roles in the Haggadah, the liturgical text for the Seder nights. The description of four sons, prototypical offspring from the wise to the wicked, honors or condemns them, based on their attitude to biblical law and ritual. "The wise son, what does he say?" the text inquires. "What are the testimonies, statutes and laws that the Lord our G od has commanded you?" The wise child is specifically praised for acknowledging the distinct categories of godly rules, while recognizing them all as authentic commandments of the Almighty.
Of course, Jewish people didn't stop composing their own, updated versions of the Haggadah 1,700 years ago. In 1969, religious reformers began promoting a controversial "Freedom Seder" to promote the civil rights movement and to condemn the Vietnam War. Other variations have focused on vegetarianism, gay rights, feminism and other causes.
This difficult and disorienting year, however, seems to offer a suitable occasion to rediscover the original Passover message that has inspired the Jewish people from the time of Exodus, emphasizing law and order to a turbulent world that seems, at the moment, painfully lacking in both.
Michael Medved, a member of USA Today's Board of Contributors, hosts a daily, syndicated talk radio show and is author, most recently, of "G od's Hand On America: Divine Providence in the Modern Era." (Buy it at a 55% discount! by clicking here or order in KINDLE edition at just $14.99 by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.)