I spent the better portion of today cooking and trying to remember to think about freedom.

I was cooking – and trying to think about freedom – because Passover starts tonight and it really is a Passover like no other. While we’re doing something very low key tonight with our daughters, tomorrow we’re hosting a large Seder again on Zoom, with family and friends, many of whom have joined on us Passover for decades (some of us have now celebrated together for four decades).

Since we were missing the typical Passover spread, we’ve organized a socially distant, COVID-safe Passover food exchange for midday tomorrow. And so, today, the smell of slowly cooking brisket, simmering chicken soup, brisk homemade horseradish, and other good things have filled our house – and my soul .

Somehow, however, Passover has snuck up on me and I’ve been so busy that I haven’t really stopped to think about what freedom looks like to me at this moment in time. It does feel like we’ll soon be leaving the Egypt of COVID.

What will our journey be like? Is there a post-COVID Sea of Reeds that we have to cross (and is there an act of faith we have to take to cross it equivalent of the Hasidic lesson that the waters didn’t part until they were up to the neck of the first person who had the faith to wade in)?

For that matter, what is the post-COVID equivalent of wandering in the wilderness for the next 40 years, all the time knowing where we want to get to but unable to get there? According to one legend, I believe, because the generation that left Egypt had been slaves they weren’t people who could enter a promised land of freedom (as well as milk and honey). What is the post-COVID equivalent of that judgement?

Speaking of journeys, and freedom, today’s #stampoftheday is a 3-cent stamp picturing a locomotive that, as best anyone can tell, was first used on March 27, 1869. (Back then, they didn’t do first-day issues and all that jazz.). The stamp – which apparently was ranked #18 on the list of the 100 greatest American stamps (by whom or why, I don’t know) – is notable because (contrary to what I wrote about a week ago) it was part of the first series of American postage stamps to feature images, as well as famous people. Other non-portrait stamps in the series portrayed the Pony Express, a wooden paddle liner, and a shield with an eagle, Columbus landing in America, and signing the Declaration of Independence.

Trains, in many ways, represent freedom. As the ever-helpful Mystic Stamp website page on today’s stamps notes, since it was issued the same year as the transcontinental railroad was completed “there was nothing quaint about the locomotive featured on [the stamp]; it was a shining miracle of modern technology. It represented freedom of movement – the opportunity to visit family and friends, or a chance to move on to a new life.”

But trains also represented a way out of the South for Blacks, particularly for the many Blacks incarcerated in the latter part of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century. Ruminating on this idea, I remembered the chorus of “The Midnight Special,” a song the Leadbelly made famous, that I’ve always loved.

To remind you, the chorus goes: “Let the midnight special, shine her light on me. Oh let the midnight special, shine it’s ever loving light on me.” The story I learned (which may or may not be true) is that prisoners where Leadbelly was an inmate came to believe that if lights from a train, called the Midnight Special that ran on nearby tracks shined on you in your cell then you would soon be free.

There’s a somewhat more direct connection between railroads, freedom and Passover. Like many people we’ve incorporated songs from the Civil Rights Era into our Seder, particularly “Go Down Moses,” which some people believe might have had coded references to “conductors” on the Underground Railroad. One of the lyrics we don’t usually sing at our Seder seems particularly fitting right now:

“We need not always weep and mourn,
Let my people go,
And wear these slavery chains forlorn,
Let my people go”

Writing this, I realize that singing this song just a few days after Georgia enacted a wave of unconscionable voter suppression measures, is both poignant and important.

And somehow, my mind turned in yet one more direction,. It’s not a train song, but Tom Paxton’s “Where I’m Bound” is a great song about a journey that seems particularly appropriate at this Passover, in this time of transition. These lyrics seem particularly germane:

“I’ve been wanderin’ through this land, doin’ the best I can
Tryin’ to find what I was meant to do
And the people that I see look as worried as can be
And it looks like they are wonderin’ too

And I can’t help but wonder where I’m bound, where I’m bound
Can’t help but wonder where I’m bound.”

Stay safe, be well, fight for justice, and work for peace. And I hope the light of freedom shines on you and the ones you care about.