A Libertarian Gentile at Passover Seder

My gentile self humbly accepted an invitation to attend a Passover seder this past Friday evening.  As I playfully joked, all I knew about seder I had learned from .  I expected less hijinks certainly but definitely not to detect any libertarian themes in the experience.  However, there are obvious themes of freedom in the book of Exodus and the Passover seder.  This is, after all, the Jewish holiday which celebrates the end of their ancestors’ enslavement by the Egyptians and their circuitous return to the Promised Land.  I truly didn’t realize when I accepted the invitation just how often I’d be nodding my head in affirmation; “right on, Passover!”  between the mutilated mutterings of my Hebrew prayer transliteration.

In any case, we poured ourselves glasses of social lubricant (grape-flavored) and planted ourselves at the long dressed table.  At every seat was found a packet created by Rabbi Amy Scheinerman, which all members of our table were to hold and read from in order to complete the seder ceremony. Within its pages lay too many pro-freedom passages for me to quote directly, but the choicest specimens now follow.  The packet originated with Passover’s overarching context:

Tonight we celebrate [the Biblical Jews]‘s freedom and ours.  But we also remember all those of our generation who are not yet free.  May this seder kindle in us the zeal to work for the freedom of all.  May this seder inspire us to light the torch of freedom for all the world.

… Approximately 4000 years ago, our people were slaves in Egypt.  If God had not brought us out of Egypt, we would still be slaves there.  Every year we retell the story, because it is our people’s story and because it is wonderful to tell.  We also retell this story each year to remind ourselves of the importance of human freedom.  The story of our people’s Exodus from Egypt reassures us that freedom is possible; deliverance can come; salvation is within our reach; the dream of redemption can become a reality.

In this celebration of Jewish freedom four cups of wine which are symbolically consumed, although explanations for this folkway are allegedly numerous.  Rabbi Scheinerman lists some of them (four empires which ruled over Israel, four seasons, four corners of the universe, etc.) but preferred in her version to focus on the “four types of freedom.”

The first cup of wine is called the Kiddush, which “represents physical freedom, the most basic freedom of all.”  The text obviously utilizes the context of Jewish enslavement and persecution but extends these values to gentiles the world over who were/are facing similar conditions of degradation.  As they celebrate their own emancipation (while drinking lots of wine) they also yearn somberly for the freedom of all people.

Passover is generally a very happy Jewish holiday (contrast this to the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur) but in its moments of remembrance and acknowledgement of the struggles of the oppressed there are, naturally, bittersweet moments.  After the Kiddush comes the Karpas (green vegetable) which is dipped in salt water.  It is to symbolize the tears of the Jews crying in Egypt while under domination.  It carries a convocation, “may we never be so comfortable that we become complacent, forgetting the pain of others.” Later one does a similar act with the maror (horseradish) to remember that the happiness one is now able to celebrate is the removal of a great negative, which others still currently feel.  Its not all morose though.

At some point during these proceedings the Afikomen (package of matzah wrapped in cloth) is hidden by the head of the household to be hunted for later.  Besides being one of the few things about seder I had learned beforehand from Larry David, this process of replicating the unleavened bread the Jews had time to bake before making their run from the Pharaoh is powerful imagery.  It is the clearest and most enduring popular symbol of Jewish freedom, at the very least for Passover.

Shortly following, the second cup of wine, the Midrash, has an incredibly libertarian message.  It “symbolizes intellectual freedom – freedom of the mind.  Closed minds lead to misunderstanding and human suffering.  We need to open our minds to new ideas and try to understand the ideas and beliefs of others.  Knowledge and understanding will lead to greater freedom for all in our world.”

Liberal inquiry is one of the foundations of an open society.  Jonathan Rausch and his hero, Karl Popper, have made this abundantly clear in their work.  A free society which has a marketplace of ideas will ensure that in the long run better ideas will be adopted and bad ideas will be left behind.  Facilitating the accumulation of the knowledge generated by liberal inquiry without the negative influence of power is one of my biggest goals as a libertarian.  It holds the best chances to diminish misunderstanding and human suffering, and by having a decentralized society these ideas can be more quickly and freely put into place to prove to the rest of us at large how it could be or how it should not be.

The Midrash is about more than intellectual freedom though.  It is only filled halfway in a melancholic gesture.  When the Israelites were celebrating the drowning of their Egyptian pursuers in the Red Sea and their successful exodus out of Egypt “God rebuked them, saying: ‘How can you sing Halleluyah when My creatures are drowning?”  The glass is half empty because “our gladness [should be] diminished by any human suffering: even the suffering of our enemies.”

This message connects deeply with the libertarian theory of justice.  Justice isn’t about strictly punitive punishment for crime, like death or jailing.  Such processes are negative sum games in which every participant loses, even in the case of drowning Egyptian slavers.  A theory based upon vengeance against one’s enemies and/or creating more disutility by reducing the number of producers/traders is not just and certainly not directly beneficial to anyone in society. Justice is about making victims as whole as possible as they were before their predation, not about relishing in the suffering of the predator.

The third cup of wine (one is pretty tipsy at this point) is for spiritual freedom.  Jews, having been dominated both as the nation of Israel and as members of a disparate diaspora, have maintained a strong cultural identity for millenia. Though they have often been religiously persecuted (pogroms in Russia, crypto-Judaisim in Spain) they have now generally gained the ability to practice Judaism unhindered.  This, as you well know, isn’t true for all people of all faiths (or the absence of faith) in many parts of the world.

Now, before the final cup of wine Elijah’s cup is filled and placed by the door to be left unmolested by the patrons.  It’s like leaving cookies and milk out for Santa Claus but a few orders of magnitude more serious considering it is done in anticipation of “messianic freedom.”  This world event will allegedly not happen until the “world is whole and at peace, until justice and compassion reign where corruption and bigotry now hold sway.”  Judaism, and I guess Christianity as well, may be seen as inherently utopian.  This hope for a better world runs bright at seder.

The fourth and final cup of wine participants get to, ahem, consume, “reminds us of our responsibility to be God’s partners in bringing freedom to those enslaved, peace to those at war, food to those who hunger.  This is our purpose as Jews. May we live to fulfill it.”

Mikhail Bakunin’s famous quote operates along similar lines:

No man can emancipate himself, except by emancipating with him all the men around him. My liberty is the liberty of everyone, for I am not truly free, free not only in thought but in deed, except when my liberty and my rights find their confirmation, their sanction, in the liberty and the rights of all men, my equals.

The corollary to this belief in human liberty is and should always be a distrust of all forms of power.  That’s right, ladies and gents, Passover has this awesome feature too:

The Holy One, blessed be God, could have given the Israelites the power to avenge themselves upon the Egyptians, but God did not want to sanction the use of their fists for self-defense even at that time; for, while at that moment they might merely have defended themselves against evil-doers, by such means the way of the fist spreads through the world, and in the end the defenders become aggressors.  Therefore, the Holy One, blessed be God, took great pains to remove Israel completely from any participation in the vengeance upon the evil-doers, to such an extent that they were not even permitted to see the events. (Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamaret of Mileitchitz)”

Here we have a general skepticism of power, noting that it is always and everywhere a corrupting influence and that even those who originally seek to use it for just means (self defense against oppressors)  such practices should be minimized and mitigated as much as possible.  This theme is continued with the icon of the pesach; a lamb’s shankbone which is placed upon the table’s seder plate.  It symbolizes the lamb the Jews sacrificed before they fled, but it is also rather meaningfully the animal the Egyptians worshiped as part of their practice of idolatry.

In our own time, we have witnessed the results of idolatry when people place complete, unquestioning faith in someone or something other than God. This occurred in Germany, where eleven million souls, including six million of our own people, were tragically and cruelly lost.  The presence of the shankbone on our seder plate reminds us of our obligation to combat idolatry whenever and wherever we encounter it, in order to insure the spiritual freedom of all.

The distrust of power is thematically summoned constantly in the Passover service.  Maybe I just wound up with the ‘social justice seder’ packet, as it was a progressive service. Overall I believe that any celebration of Passover will probably include strong libertarian themes, but I am an outsider and really don’t know for sure.  I grew up being bored in Catholic mass thinking about sex and waiting for the donuts.

Let’s just say you’d have to go pretty far out of your way to downplay the Passover message of freedom, considering it is the story of an enslaved people who successfully fled from bondage.  That’s about as libertarian as it gets.

Next year in Jerusalem, my Jewish brothers and sisters!

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