Freedoms and Duties (Spiele 2020 pt. 4)

Part 4: Why is this night different (in theologico-history)

Think for a moment about the Bill of Rights. ‘Rights’, in this case, is synonymous to ‘freedoms’, insofar as both mean things that we’re allowed to do. Let’s just take the first one for now to illustrate a point. If I have the right to free-speech, that doesn’t come from nowhere. If I were living on my own in the middle of Siberia or the Saharan desert, I would not need a Bill of Rights; I could say whatever I want. What’s going to happen? Forget about guns, I could buy a bazooka and fire it into a hill. What’s going to happen? The rest of the rights don’t really work considering a person in isolation though, because rights always come with something else, specifically a duty. I have the right to speak freely but a duty to tell the truth and not to harass others. I can own a gun but have a duty to use it only when my other liberties are threatened. I have a right not to be enslaved and a duty not to use my agency to enslave others and so on and so forth.

When we think of Jewish laws—and maybe you could wish to liken the 10 commandments to the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights—we might think of these like anything else passed by a government: a set of guides for how to behave and interact with society at large, but that method is backwards. Instead, think of them like this. I have a duty first, a duty to serve G-d and the chosen people, and all of those rights fit in the middle. I have a duty, for example, to say as many blessings every day as I can—a round estimate I like to aim for 100 per day—but the nature of those blessings, and the wording around them etc. are mine to choose to an extent. Often people tend to get in the habits of the same sorts of ones, but often for a given blessing there are several to choose from, and room to invent more when necessary. Our right is for to structure our lives around these duties. And this is enshrined—or more literally engraved—into Jewish law. 

The word for freedom in Hebrew is Cherus, but in that form it is it used not once in the whole of the Tanakh. Indeed, another of the names not mentioned in part 1 of this for Pesach is Zman Cheruteinu: festival of freedom. However, as Rabbi Sachs puts it, “it begins with the line “Ha lachma anya: This is the bread of affliction, today we are slaves but next year we will be free.” However, the only time this root word meaning freedom is used is in “Charut al ha’luchot”. This doesn’t mean ‘freedom’, though, the phrase means “engraved into tablets”, describing Moses’ first tablets. That piece of information on its own is fairly well known, though my Hebrew is not good enough to have deciphered that on myself. Still, we can think about the ramifications of this message. It is not the only word for ‘freedom’—I don’t have the chops to dissect Biblical Hebrew any more though—so just consider that those Israelites, who were just escaping from hundreds of years of bondage in Egypt, now had a new set of laws. Not all of them like it either; in Exodus through Deuteronomy there are many examples of Jews trying to rise up against this established covenant, but the covenant was always stronger, or they would be punished. That’s a bit like the rest of society. People are free to live their lives so long as they don’t infringe upon others, and if this happens then either the social fabric will make this transgression seem like ripple in the ocean, or the law will crack down upon the transgressor. This makes inherent sense, which is why many, especially the communists and socialists have turned away from G-d and tried to replace it with the government. That doesn’t work, but that could not have made logical sense in the past before this moment. It was simply impossible that in a pagan, idolatrous society in which truth was subjective, because there were multiple gods and therefore multiple reasons why something could happen, but no laws. If I did something to upset the gods, in their eyes, this was a serious problem, but not one that could be totally expected. The story of Exodus and the rest are basically just accounts of the Jews moving to the Holy Land, all the while breaking commandments left-right-and-center. They were punished, but they knew why. There was sense. They could do what they wanted and they knew, for the first time in human history, a step-by-step breakdown of why this was, and what they could do.

So, going back to Shabbos, we aren’t slaves to follow the laws. However, if you can’t break those habits of the things which keep pulling you back in, then maybe it isn’t idolatry in the traditional sense, but you are clinging onto your machinery in a way which blurs that line. Well, Shabbos is one example of hundreds if not thousands, ranging from things big to small, but Passover is when it all started. Passover, a chag and therefore something meant to be observed in a similar way, is the holiday of the Jewish people because it is the holiday commemorating what made the tribe of Israel into the religion of Judaism. We may commemorate the journey of the Jews in tents in Sukkos—a similar period in time narratively—but Passover is the holiday commemorating when sense was finally brought not only to the cosmos, but to the understanding of truth and reason. Passover is the holiday commemorating a freedom from Egyptian slavery, and we should always remember this, but it is the holiday which gave us laws, and therefore gave us freedom to operate with our own agency, and able to live together as one people. In that way, it is really the holiday for every Jew, because secular or fundamentalist, we all recognize what it means to yearn for a society that works for everyone, and a destiny that is our own.

Chag sameach everyone, now let’s eat.