Spiritual Reflection, April 2023

Called to Freedom

“In every generation one is obligated to see oneself as having come out of Egypt” (Passover Haggadah).

Israel is delivered from slavery to freedom. This deliverance isn’t an event of the glorious past. It is granted here and now. Today each of us is beckoned to resist the alluring aroma of Egypt’s fleshpots, and to journey into something unknown, uncertain, and frightening. In peaceful times it is easy to say these words of the Haggadah, but now they are a heavy daily reality for tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, dispersed all over the world; for Russian men escaping from forced mobilization because they don’t want to be killers; for Byelorussian and Russian political dissidents fleeing from their pharaohs. The history of the exodus continues now and asks challenging questions.

The first of them is about the meaning of this freedom. The Haggadah says that it isn’t enough to be physically delivered from slavery. True freedom requires a radical inner turn, metanoia. The beginning of a new life isn’t safe, but it has space for trust, wonder, and hope. To be free means to hear, to be open to God’s unpredictability and sense of humor.

Moreover, to be free means to remember. "Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there…. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Deut 5:15; 10:19). We protect the most vulnerable not because we are “good,” but because we were slaves and strangers ourselves. Memory of one's own slavery becomes a source not of self-pity or resentment, but of compassion. Freedom means response and responsibility, because again and again the Almighty brings us out of slavery.

Jewish history, Christian history, and our personal histories all prove that it is easier to bring us out of Egypt than to bring Egypt out of us. However, the same history of falling and rising, of pain and compassion, of human stiff-neckedness and God’s wonderous deliverance encourages us to say to our inner pharaohs: “Let my people go!” Not because we are brave, but because we are “called to freedom” (Gal 5: 13).

Svetlana Panich