It is not too often that Passover is spoken about in synagogue bulletins during the month of March. However, as we look at the calendar and see that the first Seder Night falls on Monday Evening, April 2, it is important that we now begin and prepare for our Z'man Cheruteynu, Our Holiday of Freedom and Redemption from Egypt.
Over the years, our families and our communities have created different Passover experiences. One of them being, creating fun, explorative and engaging Passover Sedarim on both the first and second nights of our spring festival. Our Seders are filled with sanctity, with rituals, with foods whose recipes have been handed down from generation to generation, games for children and wonderful music and songs that are sung at the end of the Seder.
But there is one obligation, one commandment, one Mitzvah that each of us must take on just a bit more this year when we sit down to our Passover Seder tables as B'ney Chorin, as "Free people." We must acknowledge that there are those in the world who are not free right now. There are those in the world who are entitled to their own rights and privileges of being free to make their own choices, and they are not allowed.
Morris Joseph, a British Reform Rabbi and Theologian who was living in the early 20th Century once said: "Passover affirms the great truth that liberty is the inalienable right of every human being." On Passover, each of us has to have the courage to say what is going in places such as Darfur and Iraq is not going to be tolerated. We and our world must take a stand and address the evil that desires to dominate the innocence, the purity and the freedom that everyone in our world is entitled to possess.
Our Torah teaches us that EVERY DAY of our lives, we are commanded to remember the Yetziat Mitzrayim, that we were slaves in Egypt and that we now have the gift of freedom. Just as Passover is known as the Holiday of the Spring, let our Seder tables be the "Springboard" for our conversations, our feelings and our actions that need to send the message that not only is Freedom for the Jewish people, but freedom is for the entire world.
Passover reminds us, the Jewish people that all of humanity is entitled to freedom. Passover is also present for every single one of us in order to preserve the historical experience of freedom that we the Jewish people had with God which we must continue to enjoy, to celebrate with and to never relinquish.
May each of us prepare for Pesach this year with strength, courage and determination to make the world a better place. Michelle, Brianah, Julia and I wish everyone here at Bet Shira a Chag Kasher V'Sameyakh, a Happy and Kosher Pesach.
Kol Tuv,
Rabbi Micah Caplan
