The Festival of Passover is referred to as zeman herutaynu-חרותנו זמן- the season of our freedom; רותֵח, the Hebrew for freedom, encompasses the meaning of harut-רותָח, inscribed, imprinted, etched into. In other words, what is implied in this term is the notion that freedom is intrinsic to the human soul. Passover thus becomes a challenge to reach into the inner soul and rediscover or retrieve the dimension of freedom that lives deep within our very being.

Freedom is the soulʼs signature; the spiritual journey demands the removal of barriers that stand in the way of our gaining access to this deeply recessed part of our souls.

Rumi, the Persian poet of the soul, understands the meaning of love in similar fashion:

Your task is not to seek love

But merely to seek and find all the barriers

That you have built against it.

The same can be said of freedom; we build barriers against it, barriers born of fear-fear of death, fear of not having enough, fear of not being enough, fear of being happy. An antidote to these fears is gratefulness; when we cultivate our awareness of life as a gift freely given, instead of our enslavement to greed we learn the liberating power of gratitude; we recognize our thankfulness for who we are rather than being trapped by the compulsion to be perfect; rather than the fear of and the fixation on, tomorrow, we feel the joy of the moment; we discover the capacity to shed the chains of paralyzing guilt and embrace instead the redeeming possibilities of gratefulness as the impetus for doing the good and the compassionate in life.

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity. It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.” Melodie Beattie, Gratitude.


haggadah Section: Introduction
Source: The Gratefulness Haggadah