Yes, it all starts in a big rush - matzah on our backs, doors flung open, a people rushing toward freedom. (We’ve all seen the movie!) But the initial journey stretches for forty years. Freedom, it turns out, is not a moment. It is a process.
It's a long process.
We left Egypt quickly. But Egypt did not leave us so quickly.
The Torah’s name for Egypt, Mitzrayim, shares a root with meitzarim, narrow straits, constraints, confinements. Egypt was not only a place; it was a mindset. A set of internal limitations that told a people who they were - and who they could never become. To truly be free required more than crossing a border. It requires transcending those inner boundaries.
We all need Yetziat Mitzrayim, to exit those boundaries. And that is a much longer journey.
This year, that journey feels heavier. We are not just telling the story of difficult departures. We are living them. In recent weeks, Israelis have found themselves on bewildering, circuitous journeys just to get home for Pesach - flying east to go west, crossing into Jordan or even Egypt, retracing ancient paths in reverse just to find a way forward. Back to Egypt…in order to make it to the Seder to experience leaving Egypt!
Layered on top of this are the meitzarim we feel everywhere: the strain of the war with Iran, the disruption of normal life, and the rising tide of antisemitism across the globe. A quiet, persistent unease has settled in. We feel it. And into that feeling, we sit down at the Seder and declare: “Ha lachma anya…This is the bread of affliction…Now we are slaves; next year we will be free.”
It’s a striking declaration. We are not slaves, and yet we say we are. Perhaps the Haggadah is teaching us something essential: We cannot understand freedom without confronting its opposite. We cannot appreciate expansiveness unless we have felt constriction. We cannot become free if we do not recognize the ways in which we are still confined.
“Now we are slaves” is not a statement of fact. It is a statement of awareness that there are still parts of us that are not yet free. And that awareness will help set us free.
Few embody this truth more powerfully than Natan Sharansky. As a Prisoner of Zion in the Soviet Union, he spent nine years in brutal imprisonment, repeatedly threatened with death. Yet, he insisted that he was the free one. During interrogations, Sharansky recounts telling anti-Soviet jokes to his captors.
One of his favorites was how Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader known for his arrogance, crudeness, and senility, demanded that Soviet cosmonauts outdo the American astronauts who landed first on the moon by rocketing to the sun. Wouldn’t that be impossible as they would be incinerated? Brezhnev reassured them it would be ok as they would make the attempt at night…
They wanted to laugh but were too afraid. Sharansky said to them, “You cannot even laugh when you want to laugh, and you want to tell me that I’m in prison and you’re free?”
Sharansky modeled that freedom is not defined by our external conditions. It is defined by our inner world - our identity, our convictions, our sense of self. He reflected that it was precisely his Jewish identity that gave him that inner freedom. That connection to a people, a history, and a destiny allowed him to transcend even a prison cell. As he put it, identity gave him the strength to become free even in a Soviet prison.
The deeper message of Pesach is we did not just leave Egypt and then become a people. We left Egypt by becoming a people. Freedom and identity were born together. A Jew who knows who they are - who is rooted in the past and committed to the future - is not easily confined. Not by circumstance. Not by fear. Not by the shifting currents of history. When our identity weakens, so does our sense of freedom.
The wilderness was not a detour. It was the training ground. Because slavery, for all its cruelty, has a certain predictability. Freedom is far more demanding. It requires us to step into the unknown, to take responsibility, to choose who we will be. Again and again, the Israelites faltered. They complained. They longed to return. Because it is easier to live in Mitzrayim than to transcend it.
Our challenge this Pesach is not only to remember that we left Egypt but to ask ourselves: What Egypt still lives within us? What fears still narrow our sense of possibility? What pressures make us hesitate to live fully, proudly, courageously as Jews? What parts of our identity have we muted in the name of comfort or acceptance?
This year, we have seen Jews crossing borders, navigating uncertainty, determined to get to a Seder. In Israel, the Seder will likely be celebrated alternating between the dining room and the bomb shelter. There is something deeply powerful in that image. It is messy. It is uncomfortable. It is uncertain. And yet beneath it all is a quiet, stubborn insistence: We will get there.
That is the Jewish story. Not that the road is easy, but that we keep moving. Not that we are untouched by fear, but that we are not defined by it.
“Now we are slaves; next year we will be free.”
This year, perhaps, we understand those words more deeply. Freedom is not a given; it is something we must choose. Something we must cultivate. Something we must fight for externally and also internally. We must break through the meitzarim to reclaim our identity. We must live not as a people constrained by the moment but as a people shaped by redemption.
We are still leaving Egypt. Our existence is a journey, and, with God’s help, we are still on our way.
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