Avadim Hayinu: Freedom Is As Important Now As It Was During the Exodus

With Passover coming up this weekend, it is difficult not to think about freedom. It is such an essential component of the holiday that one of the names for Passover is זמן חרותנו, which is Hebrew for "time of our freedom." During the Passover seder, we recount the story of the Exodus. After asking the Four Questions, the reply is a passage called Avadim Hayinu. While the passage is about a paragraph long, the popularized song goes something like this:

עבדים היינו, לפרעה במצרים עתה, בני חורין.

We were slaves to the Pharaoh in Egypt. Now we are free. 

It is elegant in its simplicity. The fact that the Exodus story is part of what it means to be Jewish cannot be emphasized enough. It is Jewish practice to remember the Exodus every day (Deuteronomy 16:3). On top of that, the Talmud (Pesachim 116b) states that Jews are not simply meant to retell the Exodus story during Passover, but to actually relive it as if we were there. I love that directive because it means it is not confined to the past. It is something we can make relevant for us in the twenty-first century. To quote the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:

We do not tell the narrative of the Exodus to know what happened in the past. We do so because each telling engraves that event more thoroughly in our memories, and because each year adds its own insights and interpretations. Judaism is a constant dialogue between past and present, and since the present always changes, there is always a new juxtapositions, a new facet of the story...The story of Pesach [Passover] never grows old, because the struggle for freedom never ends, and therefore each generation adds its own commentary to the old-new story.

We can view this contrast between slavery and freedom, between new and old, in modern times. One is that slavery still exists. According to the most recent estimates of the International Labour Organization (ILO), there are still 50 million people on Earth who are in some form of physical slavery, whether that is human trafficking, debt bondage, forced labor, or forced marriage. That is close to one percent of the planet that experiences the hardship of slavery that the ancient Israelites would recognize and emphathize with. Given the damage done to political and economic freedom during the pandemic and due to the lockdowns, I lament the trend away from freedom and towards authoritarianism, a trend that is decidedly contra the spirit of Passover. 

While Passover recalls the physical slavery of the Israelites building pyramids and being reduced to squalor conditions, it is much more than that. There are millions on the planet that are trapped by grinding poverty. For those who are fortunate enough to be spared the vicissitudes of poverty, you can physically be free while still having a slave mindset. 

There is a spiritual or mental version of slavery, whether that comes in the form of negative habits, limiting beliefs, addictions, not surpassing past traumas, consumerism, keeping up with the Joneses, social comparison on social media or a job that burns you out and sucks your energy. As I wrote in 2014, slavery was about removing the slavery mindset as much is was removing the literal chains of bondage. The Sefat Emet taught that we see ourselves as coming out of Egypt because there is a dimension of Egypt that resides in us. Each of us carries some form of slavery inside us that we continue working on and working through. True redemption, much like the revelation of receiving Torah, is a continuous process. Spiritual liberation is working on what holds us back and freeing us from those forms of slavery. 

You might respond by saying "That's easier said than done." Newsflash: that is the case for everything in life. Freedom is not G-d performing a miracle and everything is hunky-dory. It is a process that we are meant to participate in if we want to be free. The lyrics of Avadim Hayinu both recognize the painful parts of our past and recognize that progress is in our grasps. It also recognizes that change is possible and that who we were before does not dictate who we are and who we can become. 

That recognition gets at being free. The Hebrew for gratitude (הכרת הטוב) literally means "recognizing the good." If we cannot recognize the good, if we only look at the bad, we cannot be free. It is such a poignant point that I pointed out a few ways we can use the Passover story to be freer, with gratitude being one of those paths. The more we can find ways to reflect on the contrasts between slavery and freedom, the more that we can surmount these slaveries, and the more we can apply these ideas to our daily lives, the more we can relive the freedom that the ancient Israelites felt all those centuries ago.