Pesach is called “the time of our freedom.” Rabbi Ayal Vered has attempted to translate “freedom” into terms relevant to our daily lives:
Freedom is to become familiar with that little round, red button that shuts off our phones and to use it every now and then.
Freedom is to take only what we need from a giant wedding buffet, when there is enough food for a herd of elephants and way too much for ordinary people.
Freedom is the capacity not to hear and not to read lashon hara.
Freedom is the ability to tell your employer that you have a wife and children, and therefore you cannot work around the clock, that you cannot leave the house in the morning while the children are still asleep and return at night after they have gone to sleep again. You have other things to do in life. And before you tell this to your employer, you need to tell this to yourself.
Freedom is to know how to live from the money you have, and not from the money you don’t have (not to be perpetually in overdraft, that is).
Freedom is the capacity to remain silent. Not to react to everything. To shut our mouths during an argument.
Freedom is the ability to strive to find the good where no one else sees it. And also to articulate it, with passion. To look positively at reality and not to fall into the pit of grumbling complaint and discontent, rather to be joyful and to give thanks and to know how to make things better.
Freedom is not to honk in anger at the driver in front of us who delays a bit when the stoplight turns green, but rather to signal to him gently with our headlights.
Freedom is the ability to see each individual not as a means, as someone to exploit, but rather as an end in himself.