On Pesah, we celebrate the liberation of our people and the difficult process by which we became free. In this class, we’ll look at the story of the Exodus from the very beginning and ask ourselves, how did we lose this freedom? What were the political and psychological factors and forces at work in the Egyptian and Hebrew communities that led to the dire state of slavery and how are those dynamics still at play in our own relationships to freedom, work, and responsibility? Our conversation will center around the commentary of the extremely popular and psychologically astute, 18th century commentary of R. Hayyim ibn Attar, the Or HaHayyim. Recorded at the Rabbinic Yeshiva Intensive 2018.