Freedom and Commitment

Sermon Parshat Bo 5782

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

At the beginning of every football bowl and playoff game this season, following the longstanding tradition established by baseball, the Star Spangled Banner, our national anthem, is always sung.  And the conclusion of that stirring song stuck out this week: you all know it, it’s the line singers struggle with, “the land of the free, and the home of the brave.”

My high school textbook for AP US History—they called it APUSH when my kids took the course—was called Land of the Free, as I recall.  That dedication to freedom, and thus liberty, has always been a central proposition of our country’s heritage.

America, we are told in song and pledge, is the sweet land of liberty, dedicated to the proposition all are created equal, and each of us has the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of material possessions or happiness, whichever comes first.  We know the definition we use here for freedom includes some brilliant and noble conceptions: freedom from want and fear, freedom of conscience and public expression, freedom of the press, of thought, of religion, freedom from coercion and tyranny.  We tend to think that the Lockeian ideals of individual rights are the first, foremost, and only way in which human beings can seek freedom, and that freedom is, in and of itself, an unassailable, intrinsic, greatest possible good for all human beings.  We even seek actively to export freedom to all the peoples of the world—or at least those we can reach by military expedition or to commercial advantage.  We even take it to extremes, pretending there is a freedom so central and powerful it precludes having any responsibility to other citizens.

Freedom is a big deal in America.  But shockingly, America was actually not the first entity to address the concept of freedom, or to accept its necessity for human contentment.  As important as the American dedication to the notion of freedom—a notion that has spread in recent years to include exporting freedom to the rest of the world, by force if necessary—as important as that notion is, it is predated by a few millennia by the freedom story we read this Shabbat in the book of Shemot, in Exodus.  And the Jewish notion of freedom, ancient as it is, has something to teach us.  In fact, it had a few things to teach Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers of American freedom as well.  And those Jewish teachings about cherut, freedom, reach to the core of what it means to be truly human, and to live lives of meaning, purpose, and importance.

First, let’s recap where we are in this great tale of ours.  The Israelites have been slaves in Egypt for the better part of four centuries, servants to Pharaoh.  They have been employed building mud brick store cities for the richest country in the world. 

Please understand that slavery was a way of life in the ancient world, that the majority of people alive in those days were not free.  Some societies—like the ancient Greeks, who invented the democracy on which our own system is based—had cultures in which something on the order of 90% of the people essentially served the other 10%.  Egypt, in this respect, was no better or worse than other contemporary kingdoms.  Most of the people lived lives that mirrored Hobbes’ definition of nasty, crude, brutish, and short, and were also fettered and delimited by servitude of one kind of another.  They did not own themselves, their own bodies, their own lives.  They were subject to the control of others.

That part of the world, northeastern Africa, still houses slaves in the year 2022, by the way.  The Sudan, Egypt’s troubled southern neighbor, still has an active slave trade, mostly conducted by Arabs buying and selling black Africans.  So does Somalia, another failed state in that region.  It’s remarkable how little attention this gathers internationally.  I guess Sudan and Somalia just aren’t on most people’s radar, including most of the NGOs and other agencies and organizations entrusted with advocating freedom in the world.  This shouldn’t shock us.  The world, even the free, democratic world, has long tolerated slavery as a fact of life.  Until 156 years ago—less than two lifetimes—slavery was actually legal here in Tucson, Arizona.  It is not at all inconceivable that some of your parents actually knew people who had been slaves, or people who owned slaves.

In any case, back when our ancestors were slaves, so were lots of other people.  The idea of slavery wasn’t novel, or even interesting.  But the idea that slaves could become free was both. 

You see, an individual slave might run off from a master, and escape for a while.  But an entire class of slaves, a whole category of servants was very unlikely to rise up en masse and suddenly claim freedom.  There are many historical documents from the ancient world, but few seem to demonstrate such an event taking place—save our own Torah.  Perhaps this is because the masters tend to write history—I am reminded of Bertolt Brecht’s great poem about the unnamed masses throughout history.  It begins “Young Alexander conquered India—he alone?” and continues “The books are filled with names of kings.  But was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?”  The records of our past are not written by the nonentities, by the humble illiterates who toil in the fields and shlep the building blocks.  They are written by priests and academics, the storytellers and entertainers of the aristocracy.  And perhaps we simply don’t know about many such rebellions throughout history.

But somehow I doubt it.  For this record we Jews have preserved, this dramatic narrative of our oppression and escape is too well documented, too deeply ensconced in our literature and our memory to be just one of many such events.  We weren’t part of some mass movement of the time, nor are there many such accounts from the ancient world—that is, up until modernity, more or less—that record similar events.  A successful grand escape of slaves, effectuated by God or otherwise, is pretty much unique.  Whether the Israelites were released through a progressive series of miraculous plagues, or by a sequence of natural disasters, or by a mass uprising; well, frankly, it doesn’t really matter.  It is, in historical terms, simply something that didn’t happen much in the ancient world. 

Rabbi David Wolpe created quite a furor a few years back when he told his Conservative congregation, Temple Sinai in west Los Angeles, that he didn’t believe the Exodus actually happened as it says it did in the Torah.  While this was not exactly a startling revelation to members of Reform congregations, most people missed his larger point, which was that whether it happened as described or not, the dramatic Exodus narrative of liberation was so important and powerful that it didn’t really matter if it factually occurred.  But I would go further than Rabbi Wolpe: I think that this narrative of liberation has to have elements of truth in it or it would never have survived, even it didn’t exactly happen this way.

In this week’s portion of Bo our ancestors experience freedom for the first time.  They are out of Egypt—out of Africa, too—headed on to a new life.  There is a giant celebration to come, next week, a great song of redemption and liberation, of salvation from slavery and from death.  Mi Chamocha ba’eilim we will sing next week in the the Torah portion of B’shalach—and we’ll enter into a communal life based on a new concept, freedom, with individual liberty as a central feature of it.  It is an exhilarating moment.

But it is also the beginning of a problem, and struggle.  Do you remember the words Moses was instructed by God to use before Pharaoh when he asked for freedom?  Shalach ami v’ya’avduni, Moses says, Let my people go, Shalach ami—we all remember that part.  But the last word of that demand is v’ya’avduni, “that they may serve Me.”  Let my people go—that they may serve me.  That is, give us freedom from servitude and slavery, so that we may come to serve only God—so that we will become, as it were, ano avdo d’kudsho brich Hu, as the Zohar says—servants of the Holy, Blessed One. 

And herein lies the paradox.  For the Jewish definition of freedom is not simply an absence of compulsion, a lack of requirement.  Freedom is not just the ability to be out from under the lash of slavemaster, under the thumb of a tyrant or dictactor or king or mullah.  That may be the first requirement of freedom, but it is only a prerequisite.  It is not enough to be out of chains, although that is a great blessing.  It is not enough to have no demands, no obligations.  That, as it turns out, is not going to be Jewish freedom.  That is merely anarchy.  That is abdication of responsibility.  That leads to chaos—and perhaps to January 6, 2021.  That is, in its own way, enslavement—slavery to our natural base impulses, slavery to the random vicissitudes of our nature and our world.  Freedom like that is, in the words of that old pop song, “just another word for nothing left to loose,” a negative freedom from choice—the freedom of the lost child, immature, ultimately ineffective, compromised, lost.

True freedom, for our people, requires commitment.  It means that we are free to choose whom we will serve, rather than having it dictated to us by birth or armed force.  But it means making a choice to serve someone, or something—as Bob Dylan once put it, you got to serve someone.  Or, more specifically: our Jewish choice is to serve the highest and holiest, to serve God.  Only when we make that choice, on our own, do we achieve true freedom.

That, in fact, is the heart of the Jewish understanding of freedom.  Free will is the ability to choose to serve God, or not.  It is the freedom of the educated, open mind, the freedom to make a moral decision between good and evil, between an ethical life based on principle and holiness, or an empty life founded on nullity.  Our choice, our blessing, our freedom, is the choice of moving toward God or away from God.

That choice is still ours. In America, we sometimes forget the obligations of freedom, the requirement to choose to live to standards and holiness, to choose that which is good and comes from God.  We remember the freedom to choose, but abdicate the need to actually make such a choice with principle, authenticity and commitment.

That is what progressive Judaism truly represents—the freedom to choose to live as Jews, to pray and study, to work to improve the world, to choose to be free as Jews understand true freedom to be: devoted, dedicated, to our religion, to education, to God, to goodness, and, thus, to our people.

It is by making this dedication a choice that we exercise our freedom in grown-up ways, that we find ourselves newly inspired to live lives of holiness and meaning.  It is through this process that we work to remake the world, to complete Tikun Olam, to model the generosity and goodness that are the primary forces for positive change in our world.

On this Shabbat of parshat Bo, may we so choose to live lives of commitment to God—and, so, again, become fully free.