Diary of a Chief Rabbi

Why Pesach is not the end but the Start of Freedom

It's not what you would call one of Judaism's most dramatic moments - counting the 49 days between Pesach and Shavuot. The counting of the Omer is rarely accorded a leading place in accounts of Judaism as a way of life, nor does it figure among the great ideas that shaped the Western imagination. But it deserves all this and more. It really is significant - more than significant, fundamental.

We sometimes forget that the story of the exodus - the subject of Pesach - has had an influence far beyond the Jewish people. Oliver Cromwell spoke about it in his opening address to the new Parliament under his protectorate. Thomas Jefferson used it as his image when designing a Great Seal for the United States. When black Americans sang of freedom they used Moses' words, "Let my people go." Even Nelson Mandela referred to it when he called his autobiography The Long Walk to Freedom.

The exodus became the West's great narrative of hope. It told of how a crushed and afflicted people could triumph over tyranny. It spoke of how God himself had intervened on behalf of slaves. It said that heaven is on the side not of power but of the powerless. No story could have been more revolutionary. To take the exodus seriously was, and is, to believe that there is justice in the affairs of mankind; that totalitarian rule, however dominant, will not triumph in the long run; that human dignity and freedom are ultimate values; that no tyrant, no dictator, no denial of human rights, will ever win an ultimate victory. More than the Jewish story, the Exodus has become the human story.

But it did not end there - and that is the point of the counting of the Omer. Pesach was not the end but a beginning. The real culmination happened seven weeks later when the Israelites stood at the foot of Mount Sinai and made a covenant with God. That was when they became a nation, not just a group of liberated slaves. It was then that they received the Torah, our 'constitution of liberty' as a people under the sovereignty of God. Without this, the Israelites would have won their freedom but lost their identity. They would be, today, no more than a memory and a museum piece, along with the Canaanites, Jebusites, Moabites and all the other transitory groups that briefly clashed in the ancient Near East and then disappeared, leaving little to the collective heritage of mankind.

Shavuot represents a tough truth, not an easy one. Freedom, it says, is not won overnight. It is not just the overthrow of a regime, the end of a period of persecution. It is the long slow process of building a society that respects the human person, built on the foundations of law and righteousness, justice and compassion. No people, no faith, have had a more exalted vision of law as the architecture of freedom - law as the word of God, the defence of liberty, and the guarantor of the equal dignity of rich and poor, strong and weak. Without law and the ethics it embodies, freedom becomes the possession of the few, not the many, the manipulative but not the vulnerable. There is all the difference between winning freedom and sustaining it. Societal freedom needs a constant effort of education and self-restraint. It is and always will be a moral undertaking.

That was the towering insight of the Torah. It was as if God had said, "By bringing you out of Egypt, I have given you the possibility of freedom, but now you must make it a reality. I cannot do it for you, but I can show you how it is to be done. Here are My laws, My statutes and commands. Live by them and you will create a great society. Abandon them and you will become like every other nation in history. You will flourish for a while, but then others will arise, stronger than you, and they will defeat you. That is what has happened to every nation in history. Don't think you will be an exception; you won't be. You have only one thing that makes you different - My Torah, your constitution as a people."

Freedom is a journey that begins with exodus and culminates at Sinai. That is the path whose 49 days we count between Pesach and Shavuot. And whereas the exodus story became a universal narrative, the Shavuot story did not. All too often, even in recent times, we have seen nations win freedom only to lose it again. That has been the recurring fate of societies in Africa, the Balkans and the countries of the former Soviet Union. Even in the West we are beginning to lose the sense of connection between liberty and law, freedom and morality, rights and responsibilities. When that happens, there is no happy outcome. Ancient Greece and Rome were the two greatest empires of the classical world, but they declined and fell when they were unable to sustain the ethical discipline necessary to a free society. That will be the fate of the West unless it can somewhere discover a compelling source of moral energy.

Jewish survival is neither mysterious nor uncanny. It happened because generation upon generation of Jews gave their best energies to marriages, families, children, schools and communities, the places where we learn and live the ethics of Torah - that marvellous mix of duties to others, to the past and future, and to heaven, that is at the core of the restless Jewish passion to perfect the world under the sovereignty of God. Moses knew, and taught us to see, that the exodus was only the beginning, which is why we count the days to Shavuot and the giving of the Torah - still the greatest code of responsible freedom mankind has ever known.

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