Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.

The seder plate is never too full to examine how liberation, the central concept of Passover, applies today.

Questioning how to free oneself, or how to stretch the boundaries of what being Jewish is, elicited lively responses from a sampling of Bay Area Jews.

Personal freedom can mean a lot of different things to different people. For some, the notion is basic, while others take a more healing-the-inner-child approach.

For Holocaust survivor Selma Blick of San Francisco, "liberation needed only to happen once."

In February 1945, Blick was freed from the Kaiserwald concentration camp in Poland.

"I'll never forget the feeling," said the 70-year-old. "It's like being given your life back. I guess it would be like having successful open-heart surgery — God giving you another few days."

In sharp contrast, playing basketball represents pure freedom and joy for family counselor Steven Pechter Freemire of Berkeley.

"I have loved playing basketball all my life," said Freemire, who specializes in working with Jewish men's groups in his therapy practice. "Going all-out on the court is a kind of meditation for me. Being in a zone is like almost no other experience, being in the flow of something without any sense of being outside it."

Freemire recently conducted a workshop called "The Season of Liberation: A Passover Invitation to All Jewish Men."

No, the sessions didn't include hoops.

"Picking up the Passover theme, I was helping the men look at [how] their lives…are enslaved, psychologically or spiritually," he said.

One confining Jewish male image has to do with "being a mensch" — a decent human being. "The challenge," he noted, "is being able to incorporate the parts of ourselves that aren't so mensch-like: anger, cockiness and selfishness."

San Francisco-based comedian Sara Felder, currently on tour with her one-woman show, "June Bride," has her own slant on liberation. At a seder she hosted a few years ago, she staged a non-traditional ritual to rid herself and her guests of "the things that were keeping us slaves."

To liven up the evening, especially for her young nieces and nephews, she had everyone write on pieces of paper "what [was] preventing them from participating in the world in the way they would like."

No one revealed what they had written. Instead, each guest lit his or her paper and let it burn in a big pot, "saying out loud, `It's Passover and I'm cleaning out my house.'

"It was powerfully symbolic."

Daniel Lev has his own method of housecleaning — getting liberated from negativity.

"When I'm feeling hopeless, a Jewish way to look at it is to take action," said the Berkeley psychologist, professional storyteller and maggid, which he defines as a spiritual leader who uses narratives to pass Judaism on to others.

If he views his problems "as a disease, then I can't go anywhere except to a doctor," he said. "Or I can swallow Prozac. But I look at it as a challenge. God is putting this painful thing in my life for a good reason. From this we grow."

One liberating action the 44-year-old took last year was to form, with two collaborators, his own congregation in San Francisco. It is called Keneset Ha-Lev, which he said means "community of the heart."

He describes the services, held at a Mission District church, as a cross between Jewish Renewal and traditional practice.

"We sing. We dance. We meditate and we pray," he said.

And Lev tells stories.

For poet and Judaic scholar Marcia Falk, creativity coupled with motherhood led to self-liberation.

Falk said she had two passions in her youth: writing and painting. "Because it was too hard to do everything, I let one of them go."

Until 1996.

After spending 13 years working on a Reconstructionist prayer book, "The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival," she had intended to dive right into the next installment.

"The Book of Blessings for the Turning of the Year," which she recently completed, has taken two years.

But as she began, "I was so exhausted that I couldn't immediately write," she said. "I found myself turning back to my love of painting."

Her 8-year-old son Abraham often joins Falk in her Berkeley home studio to draw or paint, which inspires her.

"My son is a great model for openness. He encourages me by example. He gives me critiques. He's insightful because he looks at it with these fresh, intuitive eyes."

Recently, Falk was about to tear up one of her drawings she didn't like. "He said, `No, no. It's beautiful.'

"He's very supportive of my creativity and embraces his own," Falk added. "He understands who Mommy is and who she has to be. She has to write her books and paint her paintings. Otherwise, she would suffocate."

Twelve-year-old Joseph Robbins, a seventh-grader at the Orthodox South Peninsula Hebrew Day School in Sunnyvale, would like to be liberated from anti-Semitism.

Not too long ago he was minding his own business while playing in a schoolyard near his Palo Alto home. A couple of boys who noticed he was wearing a kippah called him a "dirty Jew."

"It didn't feel very good," said Robbins. "I just left. But today I would say something. I would tell them I was proud of my religion."

Such an expression might well be liberating.

For some Jews, however, the Jewish community itself can feel limiting, without sufficient room to roam.

"There's not one right way or wrong way to be Jewish," said Freemire. "It would be nice to be free from the need for any Jew to have to prove his or her Jewishness."

Liberating Judaism is the key to "bringing people back into the fold," said Falk. "We need to stay open in a childlike way to the new visions. That's the only way the Jewish community will persevere.

"People will not come back to the synagogue based on feelings of guilt, nostalgia or fear. The focus should be on creative flourishing of meaningful new traditions that will connect the past but speak to us in our own time."

When the "synagogue becomes interesting, meaningful and engaging, dare I say fun," she continued, "then people will come back."

To Lev, the keys to liberating Judaism include "having love be the center of Jewish life, and infusing services with joy and heart. I mean, where's the juice?

"Spirituality will save Judaism. People are hungry for it."

Lev also noted that a commitment on some level is crucial. "You only have to take the bite. We need to let people know they can commit to being Jewish in their own way."