Jeremy Rosen
Passover: Is it Worth the Fuss?
Summary
Examining the significance of Passover (Pesach) in three stages: the agricultural origins of the festival, the national elements related to Jewish identity and freedom, and the spiritual aspects of the holiday. Also mentioned are the Haggadah, the structure and elements of the Passover Seder, and the contemporary customs and strictness associated with Passover.
Jeremy Rosen
Manchester-born Jeremy Rosen was educated at Cambridge University England and Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem. He has practiced as an orthodox rabbi, as principal of Carmel College in the UK, and as professor at the Faculty for Comparative Religion in Antwerp, Belgium. He has written and lectured extensively in the UK and the US, where he now resides and was the rabbi of the Persian-Jewish community in Manhattan.
Every number you have in the Torah, whether it’s three, seven, four, eight, has multiple interpretations. And every generation adds its own level of interpretation onto it. And so it’s true you have four languages of redemption, although some people say there are five. It’s true you have four sons and four answers, and it’s true you have four mothers.
Because persecution and flight have always been a human condition. We have them today now as much as we had them then. And the question therefore that the Haggadah tries to answer is, freedom in itself is not enough. It’s what you do with the freedom that matters. It’s how you turn it into something positive rather than negative. Not just looking back at how horrible it was, but looking about how fortunate we are now to live in a different situation. But meanwhile around the world, there are people still being persecuted, still suffering, and therefore we need to recognize that.
Well it depends what you mean by freedom. In fact, the word for freedom in the Torah is not in fact the word we use … The word in the Torah is, which means engraved. Freedom can simply mean lying on your backside on a desert island doing nothing. But freedom is meant to get you to be a better person, to have rules, to have regulations, to have disciplines, to have morality. A really free person is not somebody who does whatever he wants, but does what the right thing is. And so it’s an invitation to discuss what we mean by freedom.