There’s a great old Israeli political joke. After Binyomin Netanyahu beat Shimon Peres for prime minister of Israel, his secretary starts getting the same phone call every single day. Ring! Ring! The secretary picks up the phone. “Hello, is Mr. Peres there?”

“I’m sorry, he’s no longer prime minister.” Click.

Next day, same thing. Ring. Ring. “Is Mr. Peres there?” Click.

This goes on for weeks.

Finally, the secretary can’t take it anymore. “Why do you keep calling?! How many times do I have to tell you?! Peres is out! Netanyahu is the prime minister! Stop already!”

The fellow on the other end says very calmly, “I know. I know. I just love hearing it over and over again.”

The Seder night is the full story. Every detail, every nuance, every prat uprat. But Chazal didn’t want us to hear it once a year and move on. After the great detailed relaying of the story on Pesach night, it’s not over. It’s never over.

Every single day. Every single night. We pick up the phone and dial Egypt. “Hello, are the Jews still there?”

“No. They left. They’ve been gone over three thousand years already.”

“Wonderful. Thank you.” Click.

Next morning. Same call. “Are the Jews in Egypt?”

“No! They left millennia ago!”

“Boruch Hashem.” Click.

You think that sounds repetitive? That’s exactly what we do every night of the year. We have to keep banging this message home, day after day, night after night. Not only because we are reliving the joy and gratitude of the fifteenth of Nissan, but because we are reiterating our personal reiteration of the freedom that we discussed on the Seder night. Slave mentality, in both a physical and spiritual sense, doesn’t pack up and leave just because the chains come off. Unless we act free and remind ourselves constantly that Hashem gave us the greatest gift of freedom, the mindset of avdus can seep right back in. If you don’t actively push back against it every single day, it starts running your life again without you even noticing.

On Pesach night, we go all in. The whole story with every detail. From Metchilah or Avodim Hayinu until the last prat uprat of the story. Up to Chad Gadya in the wee hours of the morning. The Seder is the annual deep dive of emunah and acknowledgment. It’s a self-realization of not only our physical bondage, but of our peduyas nafsheinu. The other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, we make the phone call. Shema in the morning, Shema at night. Zeicher l’Yetzias Mitzrayim woven into Kiddush, into davening, into the fabric of the whole Jewish day. Because Hashem knows us. He knows how easy it is to drift. He built in the reminder.

You are not slaves. Get rid of that slave mentality that America and golus want you to have!

And what does slave mentality even look like today? Do we have something to relate to? Nobody’s picking cotton. Nobody has a whip. So what are we talking about?

Look at what happened after the Civil War in America. Lincoln’s government promised the freed slaves forty acres and a mule. Land, a future, a fresh start. He would make the African-American a “free distinguished man” in a matter of weeks. Then years. Then centuries. The promise was broken almost before it was made. Reconstruction came and went. A hundred years of civil rights battles followed — laws, courts, marches, legislation. And still, generations later, the damage didn’t just evaporate. Because you can pass all the laws you want. You cannot legislate a mentality out of a people. Freedom is not a legal status. It’s something you have to feel in your gut. In your bones. And getting it there takes real, daily, intentional work.

The slavery exists in so many ways in our society today. Slaves to our culture, our gadgets, our lifestyles, and every meshugeneh who starts a trend that is imitated by thousands, if not millions, of likers and followers whose minds are in chains. They are incarcerated by the relentless pull of the American mindset that tells us what to want, what to wear, and what to chase.

The Abarbanel sees our miraculous and immediate, eternal transformation hidden inside the Mah Nishtanah. He says that the child isn’t just rattling off four cute questions about vegetables. The kid is genuinely confused about something deeper. Tonight we eat matzah or the bread of affliction, as it’s called in the Maxwell House Haggadah. Tonight we eat maror, the taste of bitterness. But tonight we also recline like kings, dip like aristocrats, and carry ourselves like free people. So which is it? Are we slaves or are we free? Because the Seder seems to be pointing in two directions at the same time, and that’s not a small contradiction.

The Abarbanel’s answer is stunning. He says that tension is the whole message. Avodim hayinu, vayotzi’einu Hashem. We were slaves, and Hashem took us out. Not gradually. Not the way it normally works in history, where it takes generations for the psychology to catch up with the reality. At Yetzias Mitzrayim, in a single moment, Hashem didn’t just change our address. He changed our identity. We went from avodim to bnei chorin—from slaves to free people to the Am Hanivchar—overnight. No transition period. One night we’re mixing mortar, and the next morning we are eating the Korban Pesach like kings and princes.

That is why the Seder holds both symbols at once — the matzah of affliction and the reclining of royalty. We’re reenacting that extraordinary moment when Hashem redefined who we are from the inside out. The slavery and the freedom existed in the same breath, and we relive it every year so we never forget what we actually are.

We are not former slaves who got lucky. We are bnei chorin — free people — by divine definition and by His guidance. Hashem’s directive is not a historical footnote. It is our identity.

So what does the slave mentality look like today? It looks like spending your life worried about what everyone else thinks. Being afraid to stand up and say, “This is who I am and what I believe.” Being enslaved to your phone, your inbox, the endless noise of a world that wants your attention every waking second. That quiet nagging feeling that you’re not quite good enough. Not quite worthy. Not really free to be who you’re supposed to be.

That’s Mitzrayim. The word itself, meitzarim, means the narrow, constricted places. And Hashem has been telling us for three thousand years: You are out of there. You left. Stop acting like you didn’t.

Pesach is over. Indeed. The Haggados are back on the shelf. The leftover matzah is sitting in a box in the corner, getting pulled out piece by piece maybe as a replacement for the shalosh seudos emergency bulke you could not locate. But the job isn’t over. We are just in a different mode.

Now comes Sefirah. Forty-nine days of counting, of building, of climbing from Pesach to Shavuos. From the freedom of the body to the freedom of the soul, because you cannot truly have one without the other. The deepest freedom is Torah. Ein ben chorin ela mi she’oseik b’talmud Torah. It is not freedom from responsibility. It is freedom from every false master that tries to own you. Cheirus iz charut — it is etched into our essence. But we have to keep etching deeper and deeper.

That’s what the phone call is really about.

Every morning. Every night. We pick up and we dial. Ring! Ring! “Hello. Are the Jews still in Egypt?”

“No. They left. They have the Torah. They are bnei chorin.”

“Good. Just wanted to hear it again.” Click.

I’ll call back tomorrow.

Let freedom ring. Lehovi l’yemos haMoshiach.

Just saying.