How The Rules System of Passover
Can Grant us all Freedom Today
© Rabbi Daniel Lapin

I want to tell you a little mystery in the form of a tip for stress management. Did you ever feel so burden by responsibilities that the weight of all the must-do's in your life seem to press down like an elephant balanced on the back of your neck? Actually, with a lot of folks the pressure tends to settle in a hot little knot at the base of your spine - the kind of back pain that can only be relieved by a long hot soak in the bathtub ... but there's no time for that! You've got to finish that report for the boss, pick the kids up from school, don't forget the groceries or your dental appointment, call your parents, get those shoes fixed, drop off the dry cleaning ... noooo! It can't all be done!

Too much to bear? Try the following. Get a desk calendar, the kind with the a little line at every hour and half hour - 2:00 p.m., 2:30 p.m., 3:00 p.m., etc. - and write down every single thing you have to accomplish, when you need to accomplish it, and how long that will take. Don't leave anything out. Are you done? Now ... don't you feel better? Try it. It really does work.

Logically, it shouldn't. Having filled your calendar with umpteen niggling appointments, duties, and tasks, you paradoxically feel more relaxed than before, when your calendar was perfectly empty. Anyone looking at your calendar before you set in filling it up with groceries and dry cleaning and dentists would think you were the freest guy or gal in the world - and you felt crushed. Now you've got every minute packed, and feel suddenly unburdened. Almost ... free.

Here's a principle from the Lord's Language that will begin to clear up the mystery. In English, or any other language except Hebrew, if you take a word and reverse the order of the letters, the resulting new word will bear no relationship to the word you started out with. Take "evil." Spell it backward, you get "live." Or how about "dog." "God"? Nothing there, Lord knows. Most English words when spelled backward produce mere gobbledygook. No so with Hebrew. A three-letter Hebrew root, spelled backward, almost always produces another meaningful, which in any many cases is the exact opposite the word you started out with. Like for instance PaRaTZ, which means to shatter or spread out. Spelled backward, it is TzaRaF, meaning to bind together - precisely the opposite of the first meaning.

OK, so you're all stressed out and want nothing so passionately as to be liberated, free, from the burden you're under. Well, why not look up in your Hebrew dictionary the word that means "free." It is ChoFeSH, spelled chet-peh-shin. (The letter peh can be pronounced, depending on circumstance, either as a "p" or an "f.") Now reverse the letters of this three-letter root, and you get shin-peh-chet, which is interesting.

One word that's formed from this new, reversed root is miSH'PaCHah, or "family." From this we derive an important lesson. What is a family, in essence? Yes, it's a group of people bound by blood and by love. But more critically, it a group bound by an unbreakable web of mutual duty, obligation. The idea of a "duty" is as important in the Hebrew Bible as the idea of a "right" is in modern America. Hebrew has no word for "right," as in "children's rights," or anyone else's for that matter: animal rights, gun-owners' rights, gay rights, right to privacy, right to life. In the language of the Bible there are only obligations and duties. So no one has a "right" to life or privacy. But you and I have a duty to respect either other's privacy and guard each other's life. Just so, it's a fine thing to love your family, but even more important to be aware of and consistently act on your duty to them. A family is the opposite of freedom. That sounds like a bummer, I know. But it's not. Be patient, gentle reader. I shall explain.

The same root that produced the word mishpachah, family, also produces ShiF'Chah, a slave. The opposite of freedom is, needless to say, slavery. But what is "freedom," really?

I've known people who, looking forward to a well-earned vacation from work, lean back in a chair, look contentedly up at the ceiling, and exclaim: "I can't wait to get free of that office! I'm gonna take those two weeks and spend them just doing nothing!" This is very sad - an unfortunate misunderstanding of what it means to be chofesh, free.

In the Bible, when is a person most free? On the Sabbath. What happens then? Nothing? One might be forgiven for thinking that the essence of Sabbath rest, as formulated in the Fourth Commandment, is to spend 24 (actually 25) hours doing nothing whatsoever. The Hebrew word for Sabbath, ShaBaT, comes from a root that means to "stop" or "cease."

On Saturday, I as a Jew cease all creative activity - an acknowledgement that all creativity ultimately stems not from me, a human, but from the Creator. However, look at the wording of the commandment: "Six days shall you labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your G-d. On it you shall not do any work" (Exodus 20:9-10). The commandment deals not just with the seventh day but with the entire week. This is a key piece of data.

The essence of Shabbat is not to stop and do nothing - but rather, after spending six days in the activity of creation, imitating the Creator, only then to stop. The approach here is wholistic, you might say. Built into every human being is a kind of spiritual odometer, which works at maximum capacity only if, each week, it is reset to zero. Think about food. You'll enjoy dinner much more if you haven't been snacking, filling your stomach since lunch. Hunger makes food taste better.

No food is more tasteless than matzah, the dry, thin, unleavened cracker Jews eat during the festival of Passover. But many Jews have the custom of not eating mitzvah for two weeks before the onset of the holiday, and of not eating anything at for most of the day before the first festival meal, in the course of which much matzah will be consumed. The result? You're pretty darn hungry, and that first piece of matzah tastes ... surprisingly good!

Just so with creative activity. G-d wants us to imitate him, join Him in the work of improving the world the world through the sweat of our brow. But He knows that if all we do is work, work, work for 7 days a week, not only our creativity itself but our ability to enjoy creativity will suffer as a result. The reverse is also true. A person who turns 65 and retires, thus having no work at all to do on any day of the week, can not observe the Sabbath. For 7 days a week he abstains from creativity. The seventh day for him becomes just another day.

So doing just plain nothing is not what Sabbath-observance is about. Doing nothing is actually very depressing and frustrating. This is why many people find art museums tiring. A piece of art, such as a painting, is intended to stir your soul, and the best art does just that. But in a museum, picture after picture is paraded before you. Though you walk about the gallery on your own power, your role is basically passive. You are reduced to an object. The result is boredom.

Compare that to the experience of discovering a beautiful art work - like for instance in a church, or in someone's home, or maybe on a Paris or New York sidewalk where it's being painted at that very moment by some young, as yet undiscovered artist hoping to break into the market by selling his pictures to tourists. Now that's exciting! And it is one reason why people flock to the gift store, sometimes even before touring the museum itself. At least there, sorting through the posters on hinged racks or the postcards in their display case, you might actually make a discovery.

We humans are programmed to find enjoyment and stimulation only when we've worked for it. The truth is we only appreciate freedom - the freedom of a Sabbath or of a vacation - in the context the effort that makes it possible, the preparation. It's actually a mistake to think that a Jewish Sabbath really begins (as technically speaking it does) at sundown on Friday. In reality a Jewish family begins the Sabbath in the form of Sabbath preparation long before, say on Thursday, even earlier. Any delicacy we come across during the course the preceding week we should tuck away to enjoy on Friday night or Saturday.

When Jewish women light Shabbat candles at sundown on Friday, they are signaling the warm glow of the candles the successful completion of all the work they did to make the blessing of Shabbat possible. At the end of the Sabbath, Saturday, Jews signal the day's completion by holding up a cup a wine. The cub must literally overflow its lip, a symbol of our anticipation of the week of overflowing creativity we look forward to as we launch immediately into preparing for the next Sabbath.

I've had some experience with long-term preparation that makes this idea personally relevant to me. My family has a tradition of taking sailing trips for a month or so each summer. Half the fun is getting ready for the trip. When you sail, especially on an ocean, failing to prepare can be fatal. One summer we set out to sail from Los Angeles to Hawaii. Some goodly distance across the Pacific, I decided to check on the amount of fresh water we had remain. I happened to be exhausted; and bleary-eyed, I stuck a dip-stick into the water tank, brought it out and - to my horror and astonishment, saw that it was - empty! This was some weeks before we expected to make landfall again. It was my worst nightmare come true! I imagined nursing my little children with whatever moisture could be drained from cans of stored fruit and vegetables. Here darling, I'm sorry you're thirsty, have a bottle of beer.

Later, when I was a little more rested, I tried the dip stick again. Thank G-d! Somehow I had misread it the first time. In fact, the fresh-water tank was full.

So you see what I mean about preparation. It it stressful, and the consequences of failing to prepare even more so. But I can testify that nothing about the trip drew my family more closely together than the need to make sure that absolutely everything we needed was ready and on-board before our little boat left the dock and we set sail.

Yet I can also tell you that nothing makes you feel as free as sailing across the Pacific Ocean. So we begin to see glimmering of a resolution of the chofesh-mishpachah-shifchah mystery.

The Talmud hints at the answer when it comments on the Hebrew work CHaRuT, which means "engraved." The context here is a discussion of the Ten Commandments, which the Bible says were "engraved" on two stone tablets. A rabbinical sage notes that the word for "engraved," charut, can also be read with a change in one vowel: CHeRut, which means "freedom." The two words share the same root: chet-resh-taf. (I won't trouble you with a technical explanation of the difference between cherut and chofesh.) What the rabbi meant is that freedom is somehow the same thing as engraving.

You've heard the expression "It's not written in stone," meaning that whatever is being discussed - a date, a time, an obligation, a duty -- is not absolutely necessarily or obligatory. Idiomatically, "cast in concrete" means the same thing. In other words, putting the Talmud's somewhat cryptic statement as clearly as possible: We are most truly free when our lives are engraved: "written in stone," "cast in concrete." Sounds crazy? Not at all. Remember how you felt after you wrote out all tasks, an excruciating detail, on hour-by-hour desk calendar. You felt a lot freer than you did when your calendar was empty. The prospect of doing nothing is actually very oppressive for us.

I used to have a synagogue on the board walk in Venice, California - a rather, shall we say, countercultural sort of place. To that beach came young and old people in search of freedom. They slept till noon on the park benches, drank beer on the sidewalks, played drums and guitars if they felt like, went in search of pot to buy and smoke if they felt like that. No homes, no jobs. Free!

Not so fast. These same people had no money, no transportation, no medical care - none of the advantages that allow those of us with more settle lives to fully pursue our ambitions and enjoy our the Creator's world. Basically, they were stuck there on Venice Beach - a very attractive setting in which to be imprisoned, but imprisonment it was nevertheless.

Compare their situation with that of a typical husband or wife with (like my own) a large family. A family man is strapped, one might say, by his family - obliged, engraved, cast in concrete. And yet, surrounded by a cocoon of love and help which he receives every day from his wife and children - whose duties are to him just as his are to them - he is free all the desperation to which, however they might deny it, the free-living denizens of Venice Beach are subjected. Freedom, chofesh, comes through service, even the rigorous service of a shifchah.

The application of this idea extends beyond the Sabbath, beyond vacations, even beyond the unfortunate concept of mandatory retirement at age 65. All our lives are a preparation, a service, which gets us ready for the ultimate freedom - redemption, liberation -- when, at the end of our lives, we meet G-d. It's said in Jewish tradition that the Sabbath is a mere foretaste of this experience, called the World to Come. If we start preparing right now, there will be time enough to make ourselves ready, day by day, hour by hour.

Now, where did that desk calendar of mine get off to? It was here a second ago...