New participants welcome. Please join us on Zoom.

This week we’ll look at the following text:

The seder includes numerous contrasting symbols: parsley in salt water and bitter maror in sweet haroset; death in the shank bone next to the egg of life on the seder plate; matzah both as a symbol of freedom and bread of affliction. What is the connection between these contradictions and freedom?

Human beings are deeply conditioned to crave the pleasant and the sweet and avoid the unpleasant. This is a natural tendency. However, to be free means relating fully to all experience and choosing how to act because we wish to realize our values and commitments.

As free beings tonight we embrace all experience and are not shaken or driven by our fears and desires to make our experience conform to our expectations. We are free insofar as we do not automatically identify pleasant and unpleasant with good and bad, with desirable and undesirable, with true and false. Freedom entails a perspective that is wider than our likes and dislikes.

Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg