Freedom is the ability to do what you want. A slave cannot do what he or she wants. His
will is imprisoned. We live in a country where we can, for the most part, live the life we
want. (I’m speaking in general terms and not in terms of the current political culture
which may seem limiting to some.)
Yet many of us are still not truly free. To be free, one has to know what one wants out of
life, to have big picture clarity. Living a life based on fulfilling one’s bucket list of
desires may seem empowering but may in truth be a very limited life. The will is only
fully free when it knows what it’s living for. Most don’t know what they’re living for and
by default live limited and impoverished lives. The ultimate danger of lacking big picture
clarity is that one is likely to be a slave to the values and perspectives of the prevailing
culture.
To fully free the will, one must think deeply. This is why the great rabbis said, “The only
truly free person is the person who is involved in the study of Torah.” Involvement in
Torah demands rigorous and independent thinking, which is the only way to ensure that
one will not become a slave to the values of one’s society.
Passover is called the time of freedom. The Jewish people were slaves in Egypt. Their
ultimate enslavement was not the enslavement of their bodies but the enslavement of
their minds and will. Passover offers us the opportunity to slay the gods of our society
and pursue a more expansive life vision.
Slavery is comfortable. It’s more comfortable to let someone tell us what to do and do
our thinking for us. (At the risk of offending some, could there not be a better example of
this than the Covid lockdown?) The challenge is that it’s uncomfortable to think and even
frightening. To free the will, we must think deeply. Will we once and for all ask
ourselves the big questions of life and seek to expand our life vision or continue to stay
enslaved to our narrow visions (In Hebrew the word, Egypt means narrow)?