Freedom To....?

Freedom To....? Passover is a week away and I honestly don't have time to write a ramble, but there you go. Life marches on, and we fit our seasonal responsibilities around it, right? But Passover specifically feels like the Big Daddy of all holidays. So much to clean, prepare, buy, cook, and clean. It's like life as we know it has to pause. I was listening to a lecture about Passover and gratitude, and the speaker, Esther Baila Schwartz, was contrasting her experience last Passover with this one. She and her husband were terribly ill with Covid last year, to the extent that her husband was in the hospital and she had absolutely no energy to do anything other than cook a pot of eggs. Her children had to swoop in and rescue the situation. The stores in her neighborhood in Monsey, NY, were empty. The parking lots, normally terribly congested, especially this time of year, empty. The fear was palpable. No one knew what was ahead. No one knew who would live and who would die. A year later, the contrast is enormous. Of course the virus is still here, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. We know what to do. We know where we're going and how to get there. Here in Ohio, everyone over 16 will be eligible for the vaccine on March 29th - which is the second day of Passover. We are slowly being liberated from our jail cells. Slowly experiencing freedom from fear, freedom from immobility, freedom from masks soon, God willing! Philosopher Isaiah Berlin discusses the difference between "freedom from" things like oppression, imprisonment, abuse. That's called, he says, "negative liberty." But there's also something called "freedom to" -- which is called "positive liberty." When we are liberated from things that shackle us, it opens up a space. A vacuum. Now we have the ability to do other things -- but what will we do with that freedom? What does that freedom now enable you to do? Now that the light at the end of the tunnel beckons, now that the freedom of Passover is calling our name, what will we do with it? What have we learned? Whom shall we become, that we couldn't have become before? What is your freedom allowing YOU to do? Shabbat Shalom, Ruchi