To Be Jewish is to Be Free and Beautiful
If you feel that you are poorly prepared when the Jewish holidays come around, take some comfort from knowing that this Rabbi never feels ready. If not for my friends and my family, every holiday would be a fiasco. Orders are coming in for Haggadot and Afikomen presents. With the realization that others were already doing the work, I took the unusual tack of taking up the task myself. While selecting Haggadot for others, I pulled a few myself and started to think.
Passover gets tagged with the names Festival of Our Liberation or Festival of Freedom. What catches me about the words Liberation and Freedom is that they are sometime things. Liberation focuses on a moment of transition where the bonds that hold us back are loosed and we can escape them. Freedom represents a feeling or a state where we are able to make choices without the encumbrance of intervening forces. Liberation, brief as the moments of it are, is real. Freedom is a will o' the wisp.
My vision of what Freedom is always comes with a specific association. You can chafe at the laws that exist that restrict the range of choices that you have in life, but some of them are more ironclad in their enforcement. The Law of Gravity is the one that comes to mind for me. NASA has to train people to work in environments where the Law of Gravity is very lightly enforced. One of the ways that they do this is to take people up on flights that are referred to charmingly as “the vomit comet.” These are flights that go all the way up to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere where the Earth’s gravitational pull starts to fade away. As the plane arcs through that space for a period of ten to fifteen minutes, those onboard are freed for the force of the Law of the Law of Gravity. You can keep your seat-belt on and stay in your place or you can choose to float freely about the cabin.
This to me is what freedom is, that small window where the choice is really yours. This is not to say that we don’t live in environments that are more or less free. Our country was a far freer one a few months ago than it is now. Freedom is an absolute that we experience only rarely, but the space that we open up for freedom can be expanded.
Some people try to expand their freedoms by savaging the freedoms of others. Others constrain themselves to gain freedom for others with the hope that a freer world for others will bring them greater freedom for themselves in the end.
In the story of the Exodus, God liberates the Israelites from slavery in Egypt in order to give them the Torah and lead them to the land of Israel. There is an oft cited, really oft, exhaustively oft, midrash about how the Israelites received the Torah. At Sinai, God held the mountain over the Israelites and told them,“accept my Torah or be buried under this mountain.” This is not freedom. Rather, it is the exchange of one king for another King. The Israelite’s freedom was expressed in their joy at the Reed Sea, but it was also expressed in the making of the Golden Calf.
Jack Micheline, the poet, said, “To be Jewish is to be free and beautiful.” I love this statement, but I find it challenging. Is it actually true? Is it a truth that accords with the kind of Rabbinic Judaism that I have been a part of? Is it true from the point of view of a Secular Jew like Micheline only?
If we understand “to be” to mean “to choose to be,” we see the element of effort and struggle that are so often part of every life (but in very challenging ways are even more effort and struggle for the Jewish people) as being intimately connected to the state of being free. That freedom and beauty are joined together, we see that the struggle for beauty is as important as the struggle for freedom. Beauty qualifies what freedom is outside of the realm of law. Freedom can be ugly, but we are free to choose to make it beautiful, inner beauty, outer beauty, beauty felt or beauty perceived.
The most common view of God’s power is that God is omnipotent, that is, that God’s freedom is absolute. Our lives challenge this notion. Suffering leads us to ask, “if God is both benevolent and omnipotent why does God allow suffering to be a part of our lives?” I am not about to venture an answer to this question here. What I want to take away is that either God’s freedom is also limited in some way, or we are not able to understand any being that doesn’t struggle for/ with freedom.
In the part of the Haggadah, Maggid, which tells the story of the Exodus as an answer to the questions to the four children, we conclude with the song Dayenu, “It would have been enough.” “Kamah Ma’alot tovot la-Makom alenu!”
Menachem Kasher translated this introductory line, “How manifold are the favors which the Omnipresent conferred upon us!” This followed line by line in a recounting of all of the choices that God made from the choice to liberate the Israelites to the point where God allowed them to build the Temple in Jerusalem. Step by step, we respond “Dayenu.” At every step God could have chosen to go in another direction. The story as we know it could have been otherwise. Even as we prepare to tell the story again we offer God the freedom to have been otherwise, certain that God really was free enough to change the story at any time. In this story God is free and beautiful.
In the phrase,“Kamah Ma’alot tovot la-Makom alenu!” God is referred to as “Makom,” - the place. The choices that God makes throughout Dayenu bring us to the point where God inhabits a place, a specific place within the camp of the Israelites. God in the Holy of Holies is the Place in the Place of Places. Every choice that God makes leads to the point God is embedded in community. Communities require us to place constraints on our absolute freedom as individuals. God’s presence and God’s laws place constraints on us as individuals. However, that presence and those laws can guide our community in the struggle to be free and beautiful.
In the past few years we have failed at that task, very sadly so. May we choose another path in the years ahead.
