On the Difference Between Adult Freedom and Childish Freedom - A Sermon for Shabbat HaGadol with added quesitons.

Shabbat HaGadol

Freedom is celebrated in an oddly sedate manner.

No wild parties on the streets.

Very opposite of Bacchanalian celebration.

4 measured cups.

Bitter herbs, salt water.

Freedom comes dipped in the suffering.

Freedom hurts.

 

Empathy as so central.

Hayav Adam Lirot Et Atzmo keilu hu yatzah miMitzrayim

 

Heart of Passover is the ability to see beyond the self.

Put oneself in the position of another human being.

Test of humanity.

 

From perspective of child development,

Tiny baby knows only own needs. And if these needs are not immediately met scream.

Then there comes a moment when a small child becomes aware of the other – that the world become aware of otherness.

That’s the beginning of emotional growth.

Hopefully later on there comes a moment when a growing child accepts obligations to the rest of the world, accepts constraints and limitations on their own choices and freedoms because they know that their lives are enrichened by their taking care of others.

We call that moment the Bar Mitzvah – adult freedom.

 

So there is such a thing as a child’s freedom. Oblivious to anyone else’s experience of my own potential, focussed only on what I want and what I get.

And there is an adult freedom. A freedom make more real by partaking in the notion that our freedom can be measured by our willingness to take care of others, feel their concerns, needs and dreams.

 

Two moments around the Seder

Fast of the Firstborn – feel the losses of the Egyptians – marked Monday after Shacharit. All welcome.

And then, the most perfect ritual in the whole seder.

The pouring out of wine when get to the plagues.

16 times with the 16 mentions of the plagues

 

15^th Century, Don Isaac Abarvanel

Proverbs – rejoice not when your enemy falls, let your heart not be glad when he stumbles.

 

This is the custom that makes our celebration of our own freedom adult.

 

Magnificent 20^th Century Jewish theologian and philosopher, Immanuel Levinas

My being in the world, or my place in the sun, my being at home, have these not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man whom I have already oppressed or starved or driven out into a third world.

The sensitivity to this dynamic is the root of ethics

This is the root of adult freedom.

 

To come right up to date

 

Obama – in Israel & Palestine this week.

Spoke beautifully and movingly about the coming Passover, the Jewish people’s relationship with freedom and the overthrow of slavery.

Spoke beautifully about the establishment of the Israeli state and powerfully about the right of this State to defend itself and its people from terrorists and military attach.

But also said this.

 

The Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized. Put yourself in their shoes [Obama told his audience of Israeli students] – look at the world through their eyes [he continued]. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. It is not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished... Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.

 

Obama’s talking about an adult kind of Freedom. The one that comes with the recognition of cost and the fear of what my freedom does to my neighbour.

 

Religion gets a bad press.

Those opposed to religion like to blame religion for the closed mindedness of those who only understand a child’s version of freedom, no matter what their age.

But it’s a terrible mischaracterisation of religion – of Judaism certainly.

 

Central of Jewish thought is the notion of plurality of humanity.

Mishnah

When King of flesh and blood

When the King of Kings, Holy Blessed One – everyone comes out different.

 

There is even a blessing to be said when see a great number of human beings, recognition of the difference between us can only be owned by God, can’t be subsumed by any human.

Levinas diagnosed a totalitarianising tendency to force all humanity into a conformity that can never be. A tendency that needs to be fought back as we learn to accept we cannot subsume all humanity to our own needs – like a tiny child.

 

Leading American Orthodox Rabbi, Brad Hirschfield, new book

You Don't Have To Be Wrong for Me To Be Right

Reads verses from Isaiah, in fact reading the entire Biblical and Rabbinic canon.

We don't all need to be the same. I don't need everyone in the world to be Jewish. I don't need every Jew to choose the form of Judaism I myself have chosen, even though I love and am enlivened by this version of my tradition!

Why [should] being right depend on everyone else being wrong? Do other women need to be ugly in order for my wife to be beautiful? 

Wanting to make everyone else just like me is narcissism. Learning to interact with, to respect, and even to love people who are different from me [is the heart of truly] spiritual work.

Not only that religion is not the cause of blinkered self obsession and totalitarianising tendencies, rather that religion is the pathway which opens our eyes to the suffering of others,

Religion reminds us, even at the highest moments of our own celebration of our own freedom, that we cannot be free when another Divine creation is suffering.

Religion reminds us to be pluralists, aware that the other doesn’t need to be wrong for me to be right.

Religion, and specifically the religious notion that all humans are created in the image of the Divine is secret to the enormous possibility of plurality.

 

So at this time of questioning.

At this time of celebrating Freedom, perhaps only the childish freedom, but if we are so blessed, a celebration of an adult freedom.

Some of my questions for the upcoming Festival of Freedom.

 

What breaks us out of the self-obsession a childish sense of Freedom and allows us to feel the broader perspective of adult freedom?

What do we need to do to acknowledge that ‘You don’t have to be wrong for me to be right?’

How can we cultivate more space in our hearts.

 

Shabbat Shalom,

Chag Pesach Sameach, A wonderful Pesach celebration to all

 

Heschel & The Price of Freedom

Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Price of Freedom

 

Who Is Man?, Lectures Given at Stanford 1963

The first thought a child becomes aware of is his being called, his being asked to respond or to act in a certain way. It is in acts of responding to demands made upon him that the child begins to find himself as part of both society and nature. This is the most important experience in the life of every human being: something is asked of me. Meaning is found in responding to the demand.

Indebtedness is given with our being human because our being is not simply being, our being is being created. Being created means that the ‘ought’ precedes the ‘is.’ Religion begins with the certainty that something is asked of us, that there are ends which are in need of us. It is in man’s being challenged that he discovers himself as a human being. Do I exist as a human being? My answer is: I am commanded therefore I am. There is a built-in sense of indebtedness in the consciousness of man, an awareness of owing gratitude, of being called upon at certain moments to answer, to live in a way which is compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living.

 

Speech to conference on, “Religion and Race” (14 January 1963)

At the first conference on religion and race, the main participants were Pharaoh and Moses. Moses’ words were: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, let My people go that they may celebrate a feast to Me.” While Pharaoh retorted: “Who is the Lord, that I should heed this voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and moreover I will not let Israel go.” The outcome of that summit meeting has not come to an end. Pharaoh is not ready to capitulate. The exodus began, but is far from having been completed. In fact, it was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses.

Religion and race. How can the two be uttered together? To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child. To act in the spirit of race is to sunder, to slash, to dismember the flesh of living humanity. Is this the way to honor a father: to torture his child? How can we hear the word “race” and feel no self reproach? Few of us seem to realize how insidious, how radical, how universal an evil racism is. Few of us realize that racism is man’s gravest threat to man, the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason, the maximum of cruelty for a minimum of thinking. Perhaps this Conference should have been called “Religion or Race.” You cannot worship God and at the same time look at man as if he were a horse.

 

Telex To JFK in Moral Grandeur, 1963

A telex to President Kennedy

TO PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, THE WHITE HOUSE, JUNE 16 1963

I LOOK FORWARD TO PRIVELEGE OF BEING PRESENT AT MEETING TOMORROW AT 4 P.M. LIKLIHOOD EXISTS THAT NEGRO PROBLEM WILL BE LIKE THE WEATHER. EVEERYBODY TALKS ABOUT IT BUT NOBODY DOES ANYTHING ABOUT IT. PLEASE DEMAND OF RELIGIONS LEADERS PERSONAL INVOLVEMENT NOT JUST SOLEMN DECLARATION. WE FORFEIT THE RIGHT TO WORSHIP GOD AS LONG AS WE CONTINUE TO HUMILIATE NEGROES. CHURCH SYNAGOGUES HAVE FAILED. THEY MUST REPENT. ASK OF RELGIOUS LEADERS TO CALL FOR NATIONAL REPENTENCE AND PERSONAL SACRIFICE. LET RELIGIOUS LEADERS DONATE ONE MONTH’S SALARY TOWARD FUND FOR NEGRO HOUSING AND EDUCATION. I PROPOSE THAT YOU MR. PRESIDENT DECLARE STATE OF MORAL EMERGENCY. A MARSHALL PLAN FOR AID TO NEGROES IS BECOMING A NECESSITY. THE HOUR CALLS FOR HIGH MORAL GRANDEUR AND SPIRITUAL AUDACITY.

 

ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL

 

The Reasons for my Involvements in the Peace Movement, Moral Grandeur

For many years I lived by the conviction that my destiny is to serve in the realm of privacy, to be concerned with the ultimate issues and involved in attempting to clarify them in thought and in word. Loneliness was both a burden and a blessing and above all indispensible for achieving a kind of stillness in which perplexities could be faced. Three events changed my attitude.

One was the countless onslaughts upon my inner life, depriving me of the ability to sustain inner stillness.

The second was the discovery that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself. The most wicked men must be regarded as great teachers, for they set forth precisely an example of that which is unqualifiedly evil. Cain’s questions ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ and his implied negative response must be regarded among the great fundamental evil maxims of the world. The third event that changed my attitude was my study of the prophets. From them I learned the niggardliness of our moral comprehension, the incapacity to sense the depth of misery caused by our own failures. It became quite clear to me that while our eyes are witness to the callousness and cruelty of man, our heart tries to obliterate the memories, to calm the nerves and to silence our conscience.

 

Death As Homecoming, Moral Grandeur

Our greatest problem is not how to continue but how to exalt our existence. The cry for a life beyond the grave is presumptuous, if there is no cry for eternal life prior to our descending to the grave. Eternity is not perpetual future, but perpetual presence. The world is not only a here-after, but also a here now.

This is the meaning of existence: to reconcile liberty with service, the passing with the lasting, to weave the treads of temporality into the fabric of eternity.