Magid Tell the Story Freedom of Speech
Telling the Story
Pesach, our sages tell us, is more than just a commemoration of an ancient people’s drive for independence saga. One of the salient themes of the Seder is the need to feel as if we are actually the ones who are going through this liberation process. Quoting the Mishnah, the author of the Haggadah (the text recited at the seder) states: “In every generation, every individual is obligated to see himself as if he had left Egypt.”
The manner by which we attempt to experience our own liberation is primarily through the recitation of the Haggadah—by way of telling. Of course, there is a need to eat matzah and moror (bitter herbs), but the most important feature of the seder, around which everything else revolves, is the verbal part: simply telling the story.
According to the Ari, the great Kabbalist of the sixteenth century, the very word Pesach (Passover) alludes to the significance of speech in relation to the forces of liberation. The word Pesach is a composite of two words: peh (mouth) sach (speaks).
Chassidic thought explains the words of the Ari in the following manner:
Before the Exodus, the Jews were not only in physical bondage, but their power of speech was also impaired. Speech has the capacity to express one’s innermost and most powerful intellectual and emotional abilities. When speech is not free, the entire person is likewise not free.
The Jewish people were so crushed that they could not fully express themselves. All they could do was to cry out to G-d. Their faculty of speech was thus also in exile.
The Parallel: Divine Speech
The faculty of speech that we possess is a reflection of G-d’s faculty of speech with which He created the Heaven and Earth.
When the Jews were enslaved in Egypt, G-d’s “speech,” as it were, was also concealed and in exile. This means that G-d’s creative power, the words through which He creates the world, were hidden. When one looks around and sees only natural phenomena, failing to see the Divine creative power that is the true animating force of all existence, it could be said that G-d’s faculty of speech is in exile and in need of being liberated.
G-d’s “Celebration of Freedom”
Pesach, with all of the miracles that clearly demonstrated to the Egyptians and the world, that there is a Creator who is in total control of the universe, is the holiday of liberation for G-d as well!
With Passover, G-d’s speech (read: His creative powers and overt involvement in the world) was beginning to express itself.
Passover is thus when both G-d and the Jewish people experience true freedom of speech; freedom of expression.
Two Forms of Speech
But, there are two forms of speech. The theme of one of the Torah portions that coincides with Passover is the parsha named Metzora. This parsha is named after a person whose unbridled negative speech, leads to the development of a skin disorder known as tzara’at, the treatment of which involves quarantining the person so afflicted.
The word Metzora, is actually a composite of two words: Motzi Ra, one who searches for, discovers, elicits and expresses the evil of another.
Speech—good or bad—has the capacity to express latent qualities of either goodness or evil. When one speaks of another person’s faults, it has the capacity to elicit these faults and make them more pronounced. This too is a form of liberation—albeit—negative; liberating the negative energies that may have remained locked up within the individual.
Good and Evil Liberation
This form of liberation, however, is the very antithesis of Pesach. It is identified with the process of Pharaoh, which Kabbalists say is also a composite of the two Hebrew words: Peh Ra, the mouth of evil, or the force that elicits the hidden evil.
Pe-sach, thus, represents the emergence of the power of positive speech. Pesach is not simply a Holiday of freedom, but a holiday of liberation of positive energy. Freedom, in and of itself can be destructive and degrading.
When we speak of the Exodus, we elicit the forces that bring about the liberation of our own Divine potential and the Divine potential of the entire world.
Next Year in Jerusalem!
At the end of the Seder we declare: Next year in Jerusalem! At first glance this seems like a wishful prayer.
In truth, this declaration is more than just a prayerful wish for the end of exile and return to Jerusalem. The very exercise of telling the story of liberation is what brings about our own individual liberation as well as the liberation of the Jewish people and the entire world from exile.
After completing the recitation of the Haggadah (a word that means both telling and “drawing down”) we have not only told a story, but we’ve also engaged in the peh-sach exercise. We’ve liberated our power of speech and the power of Divine speech that will serve to actualize the hidden forces of Redemption so that by the time next year will roll around, we will all be in Jerusalem with Moshiach.
At that time G-d’s speech will resonate throughout the world.
From the book Light from the Future: Haggadah Shel Pesach by Rabbi Heschel Greenberg, published by the Jewish Discovery Center.
