We don’t like to admit it, but we are slaves–to our jobs, to social approval, to our addictions to media, substances, programming, and our ever-growing appetites, to our desire for validation from others, to our own oversized egos. As the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, we too are slaves in our own little Egypt. Our slavery lasts a long time. Most of us don’t even realize we are enslaved.
There is a story of the rich businessman who took off to a small Mexican village on the Gulf coast to relax. While walking the beach, he came upon a man who was fishing and struck up a conversation.
“What do you do for a living?” he asked the fisherman.
“Oh, I fish during the day until I can catch enough for my family. Then I go home and we eat and I play with my children while sitting around the fire. I get up the next day and do it again,” the fisherman replied.
The businessman asked if the fishing was good to which the fisherman said, yes, it was very good. “Then why don’t you catch more than enough for your family and go to town and sell the excess to the townspeople?”
“Why would I do that?” the fisherman asked.
“Well, if you make enough money, you could buy a small boat and venture out a little further and catch more fish.”
“Why?” the fisherman persisted.
“So you can make more money and buy an even bigger boat, maybe hire a few locals to do your fishing for you.”
“Why would I do that?” The fisherman was quite puzzled by the businessman’s plan for him.
Exasperated by the fisherman’s lack of understanding, the businessman explained that if he corporatized his fishing business, others could do the work, he could rake in thousands, maybe even millions. so he could retire someday.
The fisherman paused for a moment and asked why he would want to retire. What would he do then?
“So you can relax and fish when you want and spend time with your family sitting around the fire into the night.”
The businessman was a slave and he wanted to teach that fisherman how to be a slave too so he could be free.
The thing we don’t always understand is that freedom cannot exist unless we know who we are and what is truly important. The fisherman had strict priorities that placed the well-being of his family and his connection to them first. He fished to subsist for their sake and not for the almighty dollar. He found meaning in his life not through monetary success that would eventually buy him what he already had, but to enjoy his life exactly as it was.
That’s us. We often go through enormous effort and machinations to achieve dreams that will get us heartburn, headaches, and high blood pressure, just so we can do what we could possibly do right now, if we could just extricate ourselves from the slavery we submit to so willingly. We seek to connect with temporal things at the expense of the eternal. We nurture relationships to earn respect from people who don’t really care about us and in the process, we sacrifice relationships with those for whom we do care or, worse yet, our relationship with God. In the process of trying to fit into what society wants from us, we forget what God wants from us and for us.
Yesterday we started a new module in my Financial Planning class. It’s called “Earning Power” and digs into things like careers, post-secondary education and its cost, as well as how to make your education fit with the career you want. Our first worksheet was a “dreamer” exercise with three questions.
- Where do you see yourself after high school?
- Where do you see yourself and what will be different when you are 25 years old?
- Where do you see yourself and how will you be living when you are the same age as your parents?
Their parents are approximately the same ages as our children–some are even younger. Their answers fascinate me. The idealism of youth believes they will own their “dream car” and live in a big house when they are 25. They plan to be retired and rich when they are parents’ age with millions in the bank. I don’t begrudge them their dreams and I don’t want to discourage them from thinking big. However, far too few mention having families. Their focus on earning as much as possible as quickly as they can belies their knowledge not just of reality, but of what will make them truly happy.
We are slaves until we walk out of our own Egypt and find meaning in knowing who we are rather than in the things the world provides. We romanticize the life we think we ought to have, our heads in the clouds and our eyes so fixed on the future that we fail to live in the present. That search for meaning in life was articulated best by a man who lost everything and everyone in the Holocaust only to discover that it was purpose that gave his fellow prisoners in that concentration camp the will to survive.
On the second day of Passover which was Wednesday, we began to count the Omer. What that means is that we count up to the day of Shavuot, a celebration of the giving of Torah on Sinai. We are told in Leviticus 23:15-16:
“And from the day on which you bring the sheaf of elevation offering–the day after the sabbath [Pesach]–you shall count off seven weeks. They must be complete: you must count until the day after the seventh week–fifty days; then you shall bring an offering of new grain to the Lord.”
The fiftieth day is Shavuot and as you count the days between Passover and Shavuot, you are to consider your personal development in seven areas: loving-kindness, justice and discipline, harmony and compassion, endurance, humility, bonding, and sovereignty or leadership. Each week you are to explore where you are and where you want to be as a human embracing and exhibiting those characteristics.
The question is why. Why is it necessary, but more importantly, why are these seven weeks of study planted immediately after Passover? The answer is because the Israelites may have been physically free, they’d left slavery behind, but their heads weren’t anywhere close to realizing that freedom.
And that, my friends, is why we all need a Passover and the seven weeks that follow. Passover is our rite of passage out of whatever enslaves us. The seven weeks of counting Omer and studying the traits that will make us better people seals the deal. We are marching towards Torah. We are prioritizing things in our lives. At the end, we should be ready to accept the sovereignty of God over us and the servanthood that will help us find true meaning in life.
Yeah, we’ll fall off the bandwagon from time to time. There will be another opportunity in the days leading up to Rosh Hashanah to get it straight again before we appear at God’s throne on Yom Kippur, dressed in white and ready to capitulate–again–to his leadership in our lives. Six months later we will be back at Passover.
God gets it. Life is cyclical. He gave us His set times that we might be able to navigate this life more successfully. Perhaps you can start now. Identify what enslaves you, invite God to help you escape that slavery and begin to march out of Egypt and towards Sinai and true freedom. Chag Pesach Sameach! Happy Passover Holiday!
I Am My Father's Daughter 