Shabbat Chol haMo’ed Pesach 5784 — 04/27/2024
I’d like to take a break from Rambam this week and just discuss some ideas about Pesach in the light of current events.
As we all know, Pesach is z’man cheruteinu / the time of our freedom (or liberation). Many homes this year will have an empty plate and a photo of one of the hostages being held by Hamas. Clearly, they are not free, and if they are not free, neither are we. We can take this to a bigger level. Israel is fighting a very successful war against Hamas, with the aim of destroying it completely, and creating a new reality in Gaza, and perhaps in the PA-controlled areas of Judea and Samaria. Unfortunately, Israel has to contend with some unprecedented opprobrium from a hypocritical world. Unfortunately, in some cases, Israel has had to modify its responses to these attacks to avoid harming relations with some of our friends who have, and continue to, help the state defend itself – both materially and diplomatically. This, too, is not freedom. Sometimes those accommodations cost Jewish lives. Nor is the Jewish community free anywhere in the Diaspora. There are many so-called friendly countries where social conditions have made it unsafe for Jews to live, or to go to certain schools. If we are not free to express our unique culture and traditions, are we really free?
The same considerations obtain on the individual level. Two hundred years ago a person could probably live out in the woods, hunt using a handmade bow and arrow and forage for food and firewood. Nowadays, even someone living completely off the grid is probably filming it on his cell phone and uploading the videos to TikTok. Even 200 years ago, someone had to show our rugged individualist how to make a bow and arrows, and which wild foods are healthy and which are not. And of course, when that person was a baby, they were totally dependent on parents or other adults to survive. The bottom line is – nobody is truly “free and independent” because we are all interdependent.
If I might be permitted to digress into physics for a moment, every time we have a system of interacting objects, the behavior of each object is dependent on the behavior of every other object in the system. The system is interdependent. Now if the objects interact only weakly and/or they are far apart, then the interdependence is reduced. The higher the density of the objects, and the more strongly they interact with one another (“coupling constant”), the greater the interdependence. This shows up in human systems as well. When the US was young, the population was small and spread out. Individual farmsteads were more or less self-sufficient. Our society is very individualistic, prioritizing individual rights over the rights/needs of the community. The debate over gun control is a case in point. What has happened however is that the population has grown and become more densely packed, and as technology has bound us more closely together, this prioritization becomes less and less adaptive. Mass shootings are a case in point. Perhaps this is the normal course of evolution – systems get more and more complex and interrelated and display more and more intelligence. So interdependence is really the norm, and we might say desirable. But if we are interdependent, we are not free, are we?
So we need a better definition of “freedom.” This definition can only be rooted in consciousness. If our consciousness is limited to our individuality, then every time we have an interaction that throws us off, our own sense of self is diminished. We are reduced in stature and we become slaves to the opinions of others. And in those cases where the negative interaction is due to our own improper behavior, that diminution in stature is deserved.
Real freedom comes when our consciousness is fully expanded, and Pure Consciousness is permanently established in our mind along with waking, dreaming and sleeping states of consciousness. In this case, our Self is unbounded and eternal, beyond all the changing values of individualities and their interactions, impervious to the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” We are still interdependent with all the other people in the world, but that is on the level of our individuality. Our Self, being transcendental, cannot be touched. In any event, with our awareness fully expanded, our actions will never be improper, and the environment reacts to us in a positive way.
If we extrapolate to a society, we want to create a situation where the collective consciousness of the society is so strong that it becomes as a shield to the society, so that no negativity can penetrate. We can have friendly relations with all societies, but are threatened by none, and certainly attacked by none. Fortunately, it only takes a small percentage of the population rising to higher states of consciousness for the collective consciousness of the entire society to take off into freedom. It’s our responsibility to create that situation, now that the technology is available.
Chag Kosher v’Same’ach!