Chag Sameach!

So Pesach is coming up which is super awesome, but at the same time kind of annoying. If you are going to a seder, you are probably just going to have to sit a table with your family and maybe even a few other people until really late at night. So what are we doing here anyways??!?!?!? Is pesach not the holiday that we are celebrating our FREEDOM!? How are we free if we are forced to sit at the table for hours and hours!!?!?!?!! Even more so, if we look at the hebrew word סדר (seder), it means order. So, if we are free, what is up with having order?!?!?!!

Okay, so lets think back. So, we were slaves in Egypt working for a horrible man named Pharaoh. Yes, its true that we were not free, but we also had no meaning to our lives. All we did all day was do work for a nasty man, get treated horribly, eat food that only allowed us to barely survive and more. Ok, so then Hashem does this awesome thing: Gives all the Egyptians the plagues, then splits the sea (NBD), and then after a while, he gives us the Torah( also NBD.) But if you think about it, the Torah is a set of laws. So were free and now we get this whole other thing that we have to follow? Thats not freedom! What’s going on here!?

OK HERE COMES THE ANSWER: It is a huge misconception that pesach is JUST celebrating the concept of Jewish freedom. While it’s true and super awesome that we are free, there is more too it.

Lets take people in jail. Statistics show that almost HALF of people that are in jail once, go back again. Why? Because they are SO focused on the fact that they are free. They go out and they go overboard on all the things they could not previously do, and then soon enough, they get themselves into trouble again.

The first mitzvah in the Torah, is Rosh Chodesh (celebrating the new month) aka a mitzvah giving us a concept of time, a symbol that we are free. While it is true that we are free from being slaves, we are not free from doing nothing with our lives. Hashem, being extremely smart to say the least, did not want us to be so focused on freedom that we started to rebel just for freedoms sake. Thats one of the reasons he gave us the Torah. A set of laws to make our free life MEANINGFUL, not just free. If this is not done, you might otherwise be a slave to society. So while pesach is about celebrating and recognizing the freedom we are so thankful to have today, it also about realizing the necessary order in our lives.

Chag Kasher V’Sameach and Shabbat Shalom!

Ariel Cohen and ideas given by Miriam Blackstein