Often we do know what is missing until it is taken away. We miss what we had. In a similar vein we do not understand the significance of what is not missing from our lives because it was never there.
For this reason, tradition dictates that we recite a litany of blessings each day; acknowledging the critical value of our eyesight, the ability to be mobile, our breath… The Talmud teaches that we need to say at least one hundred blessings every day. The underlying rationale is that we need to learn how to appreciate all the things that are not wrong in our lives.
A man was hospitalized and nearly died from toxins backing up in his body. When I sat with him during his surgical recovery he passionately told me, “Rabbi, I will never take that blessing we say for moving our bowels for granted!” (p. 63 in Sim Shalom)
Each morning as I wrap myself in my tallit preparing to daven, I thank the Holy One for a new day, making me in G-d’s image (with nearly unlimited untapped potential), restoring my soul, my vision, blessing me with legs that work, a functional mind, a body that works as it is supposed to… and for not being a slave.
When we make Kiddush on Shabbat we say, zecher l’tziat mitzrayim, “remember the liberation from Egypt.” We sing those words often as it expresses gratitude for being freed from slavery. Freedom is essential and needful for all people. That message is reinforced time and again throughout our prayers so that we feel the gift of freedom, G-d’s beneficence and the critical importance of emancipating the oppressed, the enslaved.
Passover is upon us and we retell the great story of our liberation. Why do we read of the great miracles, the Ten Plagues, the parting of the Sea, and the manna in the desert as gifts from G-d? We recite them because it reinforces the meaning of our existence in the world, imatio Dei, behaving like G-d. Rabbi Moshe, a Hasidic sage, was known to say, “If someone comes to you and asks your help, you shall not say pious words like, ‘Have faith and take your troubles to God!’ You shall act as if there were no God, as if there were only one person in all the world who could help this person - only yourself.”
Appreciation our freedom allows us to understand G-d’s great gift and the need to insure that no one is a slave today. What moves us to work to unshackle the enslaved (think of children and women bought and sold and consider the slave labor camps of North Korea and in China)?
As we approach Pesach we are compelled to face the reality of the ultimate cruelty that humans do to one another. Those who survived the Holocaust understand the ramifications of the brutality of forced labor and labeling people as sub-human and therefore expendable. In America, and virtually every part of the world, human trafficking and enslavement have been part of its history.
Abraham Lincoln said, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” He, who saw the savagery of slavery, was empathic enough to realize that the pain caused to human beings by enslavement has no cost benefit; it only poisons the soul. The scholar Hillel also understood the power of pathos for another human being when he pronounced, “What is hurtful to you do not do to others.”
On Pesach we reawaken to the painful realities of life. We are free and that is a gift not to be taken for granted. Others still suffer under the scorching heat of servitude. I hope that we can find meaning in our freedom this year as we sit and celebrate the marvelous gift we have been fortunate to be born into. At the same time I hope we will speak at our seder tables and commit work to unbind the fetters of those who are still not free.
May this be our focus and prayer of the holy night of Pesach.
