The First Act of Freedom Is to Share Your Bread |
We like to imagine freedom as a moment of triumph, a sea splitting, a people rising, chains breaking with a loud and final crack. And yet, when we sit down at the Seder table, we do not begin with power. We do not begin with miracles. We begin with something almost embarrassingly simple:
“Ha lachma anya di achalu avhatana b’ara d’Mitzrayim…Kol dichfin yeitei v’yeichol, kol ditzrich yeitei v’yifsach.”
“This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.Let all who are hungry come and eat; let all who are in need come and join”
It is a strange opening. If we are here to tell a story of liberation, why begin with the bread of poverty? If we are here to celebrate dignity, why return to a symbol of deprivation? Why, on the night that tells the story of our becoming a free people, do we begin not with what we gained, but with what we lacked? Unless, of course, this is precisely the point.
The Haggadah is quietly teaching us something radical: freedom is not defined by what you have, but by what you are able to give.
To understand this, I want to take you to a very different place in history far from the Seder table.
In “If This Is a Man”, Primo Levi describes a moment in Auschwitz, in the final days before liberation. The Nazis had fled. Those who could walk were sent on death marches. The rest, the sick, the weak, were left behind with almost nothing. And then, something unexpected happened.
When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to give out heat, one could feel how the tension in everyone relaxed. Suddenly Taborowski (a twenty-three-year-old Polish-French Jew, sick with typhus) turned to the other sick men and suggested that each should offer a portion of his bread for those of us who had been working. The proposal was accepted. Only a day before, such an event could not have taken place. The law of the camp said: ‘Eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbor.’ There was certainly no place for gratitude. Indeed, Taborowski’s proposal truly marked the death of the camp. It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that we can say that at that moment the process began that restored us (those who survived) to the society of men. Sharing food is the first act by which slaves become free. The man who fears for tomorrow does not offer his bread to another. But he who is able to share his food with a stranger has already proven that he is capable of fellowship and faith, the two things from which hope is born.
When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to give out heat, one could feel how the tension in everyone relaxed. Suddenly Taborowski (a twenty-three-year-old Polish-French Jew, sick with typhus) turned to the other sick men and suggested that each should offer a portion of his bread for those of us who had been working. The proposal was accepted. Only a day before, such an event could not have taken place. The law of the camp said: ‘Eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbor.’ There was certainly no place for gratitude. Indeed, Taborowski’s proposal truly marked the death of the camp. It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that we can say that at that moment the process began that restored us (those who survived) to the society of men. Sharing food is the first act by which slaves become free. The man who fears for tomorrow does not offer his bread to another. But he who is able to share his food with a stranger has already proven that he is capable of fellowship and faith, the two things from which hope is born.
In the very place where humanity was stripped away, freedom reappeared through generosity. “Sharing food is the first act by which slaves become free” This is not poetry. It is a spiritual law.
Perhaps this is why the Seder begins exactly where it does. Before we tell the story of redemption, we are asked to perform it: “Let all who are hungry come and eat.”
Not when we have enough. Not when it is comfortable. Not when life is stable. Now!!! With whatever bread we have. We are taught, that giving is a luxury. But the Haggadah insists otherwise. Giving is not the result of freedom.- Giving is the condition for it.
This is true socially, where communities are only as strong as their willingness to see the most vulnerable among them. In the Exodus, we did not run as individuals, we moved as a people. And a people does not walk at the speed of its strongest, but at the pace of its most fragile. Because a freedom that leaves someone behind is not freedom at all. Because when we extend our hand to another, we do not only change their reality. We redefine our own. We become free.
On this Passover, the question is not only what freedom means, but whether we are willing to give, even now, and in doing so, become free.
Wishing you a Passover of freedom