Family Festival of Passover

The Time of Times: Only those who have experienced the lack of freedom understand freedom. This primacy is irreversible. Thinking about freedom is just as much a part of Jewish history as the lack of freedom itself. Ranging from Isaiah Berlin to Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Lévinas, or Nelly Sachs and from Rosa Luxemburg to Karl Popper, particularly Jewish thinkers of the 20th century ultimately searched in their works for answers to the question of what the concept of freedom really means. They scrutinize the idea of freedom following the Enlightenment and in light of revolutions, colonialism, and mass murder. Together with many others, they thought ahead to the modern age that guarantees the most peaceful, safe, and socially equitable times ever for today's generations in Europe and North America. But freedom is not always freedom.

The Night of Nights: The 2012 Passover (Pesach) is different. This year, the stories about the exodus from Egypt are presented within the context of revolutions throughout the entire region. The past and the present unite symbolically; mythology and reality meet this year in the desire for freedom. The parallels are obvious – but Mizrahim is not Egypt,
Hosni Mubarak is not the Pharaoh, and myth does not equal history. The Seder Night does not teach revolution but freedom. It does not teach a Maccabean hero epic of freedom fighters but the cultivation of modesty, reduction, and the creation of meaning.

Human Being among Human Beings: Passover is a festival of families, friends, and the community. Passover is the beginning of a community not in a nationalistic sense but in the sense of how it appeals to a codex; ultimately to the book that is celebrated for 49 days after the first Seder Night on Shavuot. This is a codex that only really kindles the dialectic between the community and the individual on the path from slavery into freedom. It does this through laws that create the basis for living together in every community on a large scale and through conventions in families on a small scale. Consequently, it is no coincidence that the individual thinks from the perspective of the community and not the other way around in Judaism. The attachment to the community releases the individual into a freedom that has its basis in common sense instead of radicalness. And so nothing else is as meaningful in the worldly realm as the Seder Night.

The Question of Questions: Is religion ultimately the condition for freedom or the opposite of it? Does faith include freedom or not? Can the human mind, enlightened reason, and freedom go hand-in-hand with the transcendental? Perhaps one of the Jewish answers is the here and now and the radical focus on the human being. Jews wander in this world and Moses formulated the first constitution – the first laws in human history – since everyone who lives in the here and now needs laws. Those who want to function within a community and revoke the laws of nature and the rule of those who are stronger needs laws. Those who grant rights and justice to individuals need laws. As a result, monotheism not only mutates into a rejection of polytheism but also into the beginning of the concept of freedom; this implies that God is a mythical possibility instead of a demanding condition. The individual is released into freedom – free to believe, free to be, and free in thinking.

The Book of Books: The Haggadah is the anti-manifest and not a codex. It is a story and not a set of rules. Written by no one and understandable for all. A didactic play and masterpiece for educating people to be free – education for a free society with free individuals. The Jewish thinkers of this tradition that range from Martin Buber to Gershom Scholem, Josef Agnon to Franz Rosenzweig or Sigmund Freud to Albert Einstein are increasingly being replaced by ideologies, bureaucrats, and party fanatics, who take away the freedom of Judaism and the Jews with the aim of defining and mandating the supposed Jewish doctrine, cause, and promise. But Judaism is neither a dialectic nor a party. Judaism is not a shell but essence. There is no “Jewish correctness.” The more lobbyists, politicians, or false friends suffocate the inner-Jewish debate aiming to trim a culture of dialectic that is misunderstanding itself into a standardized mainstream, the more they rob the freedom and meaning of Jewish culture, tradition, history, and wholeness of its essence.

The Time of Times: A person who only knows freedom does not know what it means. The story of Passover teaches how a community is formed by sending it on its way. Judaism emerged from the commandments at Mount Sinai. The Jews started to see themselves as a community after gaining freedom. The 2012 Passover is different because the sanctions against Jewish pluralism, against free Jewish thinking, and freedom of expression have increased dramatically within the Jewish community over the last years. The influence exerted on the Jewish community by extremists, missionaries and zealots, lobbyists, bureaucrats, and pedagogues toward an ideology versus freedom misconstrues the teachings of the Haggadah and the Jewish idea of freedom that should be brought to mind again during Seder by focusing on the family, the community, and the individual inside the whole in the question rather than the answer – and therefore through freedom. ●

Yves Kugelmann is the editor-in-chief of the JM Jüdische Medien AG and the aufbau monthly magazine.