I have walked past the kiosk in the mall countless times. But this time, a couple of weeks after Passover, the sign over the shelf of gold, silver, and glass tchotchkes caught my attention. The booth sold items one gives to mark special occasions under the title of "Memories & More." They offered free engraving to personalize the gift.

What grabbed my attention was the juxtaposition of "free" with "engraving."  I couldn’t help hearing the classic rabbinic commentary on Passover being the “Holiday of Freedom, Chag HaCheirut.”  Our sages tell us to change the pronunciation of cheirut, freedom, to charut, engraved.  They were subtly linking the freedom theme of Passover to the Shavuot theme of receiving the Torah’s teachings on two engraved tablets.  The liberation from slavery achieved in the heady events of the Exodus needs to be reinforced through the basic laws and disciplined behaviors etched in stone.   Only then can a people build a healthy society in their land- which we celebrate on the third pilgrimage festival, Sukkot.  As implied by the title of the “booth” a nation’s memories and more (values, legacy, reputation), are best cultivated in the tension between freedom and responsibility; in the merging of universal symbols with a personal message.

This insight certainly gives us perspective for observing the political revolutions around the Mid-East and Africa.  Their exodus from one situation can not be complete until they have arrived at something else.  We can only hope that it will not take forty years of wandering for their societies to taste true freedom.

On a personal and communal level, our tradition gives us a tool to help us bridge the free and the engraving, tying the celebrations of Passover and Shavuot.  In Temple times in the Land of Israel, we would count the days from when the first measure of barley (omer) was offered at in Jerusalem – the second day of Passover- until 49 days later when the entire new harvest was ripe.  After seven times seven days passed, the Festival of Weeks, Shavuot, was celebrated as the real ending of the Passover story. The fruits of our labor were offered in gratitude for God’s guidance of our ancestors through history.  Even after the Temple and its offerings were gone, our marvelously nimble tradition retained the link between the holidays by maintaining a daily count of the days. This could be remembered using another Hebrew word play: we continue to “recount” the freedom story (l’saper) by “counting” (lispor) the days to receiving freedom’s instruction manual, the Torah.

The Kabbalists couldn’t resist adding another layer of wordplay.  The sefira counting of 7X7 days ending in a jubilee sum of 50, became an opportunity to measure ourselves by the spiritual emanations of God’s character, the sefirot.  Each week, we can meditate on God’s standard of wisdom, loving kindness, power, mercy, beauty, understanding, and success.  Each week we can recount the stories of people who strove to meet these standards and how their example inspires us today.  Each week we can count our blessings to be living in communities where we have the freedom to choose to worship and serve God as an expression of that freedom.

As the news seems to overwhelm us with human and natural disasters, it may be difficult to find the good in our lives.  The dayeinu song on the seder night is an example of how to break down our gratitude and appreciation into small components.  If only we had our health- it would have been enough; if only I remembered what I wanted from downstairs without returning to upstairs- it would have been enough.  Each of you can help us count our blessings of freedom, or recount a wise teaching that is engraved upon your heart.  Send it to learnwithus@pjll.org so we can share them on our web site www.pjll.org.

That is the stuff of “memories and more.”

by Avi West, Master Teacher and Director of the Shulamith Reich Elster Resource Center, Partnership for Jewish Life and Learning.

Published in the Washington Jewish Week, May, 2011