from slavery to freedom

I was thinking about Pesach this morning. We are supposed to look at
ourselves as if we are actually going from slavery to freedom right
now. That is very hard to visualize, as our lives are not physically
changing as they changed back when the Jews actually left Egypt.

This afternoon we are having a toast at the office in honor of the
holiday and I was wondering if there was any connection between the
holiday that I will be celebrating and the holiday that the other
employees (non-religious) will be celebrating.

An idea hit me that Pesach is also called the holiday of spring, which
signifies rebirth. What is the idea of slavery? Slavery is having no
control over events. You have do what you are told to do. There is a
foregone conclusion to actions. What is freedom? Freedom is the
ability to decide the outcome based on your actions. It is the ability
to be your own person and change what should/could happen by natural
events by doing something to "shake it up."

I think we can look at slavery as the past. You cannot change the
past, whatever happened already happened. It is locked in place
without any ability to improve. Hindsight is 20/20, but by that time
that game is already over.

On the other hand, you can look at freedom as the future. You can
change the future by your actions. You can wake up in the morning and
decide where you want to go today, what you want to do and what you
hope to accomplish.

Now it is a lot easier to understand going from slavery to freedom and
connect every Jew, whether religious or not, in the celebration of the
same holiday. Pesach is the holiday where you look forward to the
future, where you declare, the past already happened and there is
nothing I can do about it, but now we have the rebirth of spring, we
are going forwards towards freedom, towards the ability to choose how
we want our lives to turn out.
We are leaving slavery, the past that cannot be changed, and going to
freedom, where the world is wide open for us to make of it what we
will.