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Presentation
03

Mankind's struggle for freedom has echoed throughout history, never louder perhaps than in our own day when so much stress is being laid on the dignity of the human person and the individual's right to basic freedoms. Paradoxically, this very struggle only serves to highlight the frightening curtailments of these basic freedoms that have been and still are being perpetrated in this "enlightened" twentieth century of ours.
This issue deals with one of our basic freedoms: the right to religious liberty. If we seek to outline mankind's struggle for this freedom down through the centuries, we could find no better paradigm than the history of salvation as portrayed in the Bible, for what else is this Book of books than the story of this struggle. The Jewish people came into existence as a result of their call to shake off the shackles of slavery into which they had been bound by the Egyptians.
God revealed himself to Moses and chose him to be the leader and lawgiver of his people because
"I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt... and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey..."
(cf. Exodus 3:7 ff)
As a result of this revelation and choice, Moses was sent by the Lord to Pharoah with the request, or rather, the command:
"Let my people gò, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness."
(Exodus 5:1)
"Let my people go!" Why was the journey of the Exodus undertaken? - to allow the Israelites the freedom of worshipping their God, the first recorded instance in the history of the People of God of the granting of the inalienable right to religious liberty to the new nation about to be formed on Sinai.
Each year at the time of Passover this Exodus experience of freedom is not merely remembered but lived in a mystical but very real manner by every participating Jew. After the narration of the deliverance of the Israelite slaves out of Egypt, it is stated:
"In every generation each person should feel as though he himself had gone forth from Egypt..."
and the service concludes with the celebrated wish and prayer which sums up all that the deliverance from slavery to freedom means:
Next Year in Jerusalem!