March 2014

The Cost of Freedom

Passover is our festival of freedom. Every year, the story we tell and the rituals we enact around the Seder table invite us to ask: What is freedom? Who is free? If the answers we find are ambiguous, so much the better. It is well for us to both feel gratitude for the freedoms we have and recognize the freedoms we lack or deny to others. But push even deeper, and Passover contains another message for those who seek it, a message about the ambiguous nature of freedom itself.

I was vividly reminded of this last month as I witnessed three actors unfold the complex narrative and psycho-spiritual webs of The Whipping Man, a play by Matthew Lopez that tells the story of three Jews—two who have been called slaves, one who has been called free—celebrating Passover in the year 5625, April 1865.

Lee has surrendered, the Confederacy is gasping its last breaths, the Civil War has effectively ended, and Lincoln lies dead by an assassin’s bullet: these events provide the backdrop of the most harrowing Seder you will ever witness.¹

This is good, and not only because it makes all others look delightful by comparison (including the seemingly endless endurance tests Great-Uncle Izzy used to conduct entirely in Hebrew from the Maxwell House Haggadah, and that one year Aunt Sarah became so angry with Bubbe she stormed out of her own house and refused to attend the Seder she was hosting). It is good because, in addition to reminding us of how incredibly blessed we are not to be living in a burned-out war zone before the advent of modern medicine, it powerfully presents us with important insights that lie at the heart of every Seder: oppression (in any one of its many forms) is brutal and insidious, often ensnaring master as well as slave; and freedom, a heavy responsibility, can be painful, too.

The story of Passover tells of a journey from degradation to dignity:

We are meant to rejoice; yet, simultaneously we read, “Now we are all still in bonds. Next year may all be free.”³ Until we achieve the messianic ideal of universal peace, justice, and compassion, until there is freedom and justice everywhere, our freedom, our redemption is always incomplete. As long as we live in a still-broken world, a world still in need of repair, of tikkun, freedom is never free.

Freedom is never free. Caleb, the Confederate soldier who has lost his faith, learns this as he is forced to rely for his very life upon the human kindness of his former slaves. John, Caleb’s slave and playmate from childhood, spiritually stunted by the institution that created him, learns this as truths about his past overpower his desire for material comforts. Simon, the former head house slave who raised both boys and holds all the family secrets except the one that matters to him most, has always known this: freedom is never free.

Freedom is costly and elusive. It demands struggle. What’s more, it shifts. The freedom that beckoned a moment ago may feel like a prison the next. The only way to be truly free, then, is to know one’s self, to know one’s strength—its source, scope, and limits—and to never stray from the path that knowledge lays out for you, however it may wander.

Freedom may not be what you expected. You will not always have it, and when you do, you may not always like it. But freedom—knowing ourselves, and acting on that knowledge—is the only way to redemption. I highly recommend, should you ever have the opportunity, that you attend a performance of The Whipping Man. In the meantime, may your Seder—like Caleb, John and Simon’s, only (I pray) more gently and joyously—bring you one step further along that difficult, lifelong path.

1  General Lee surrendered April 9th; Passover began that year the evening of April 10th, and Lincoln was assassinated April 14th, on the fifth night of Passover. The play is set over the course of 48 hours that include the night of the assassination. It is certainly plausible that circumstances may have prevented many Jews from celebrating the Seder promptly, as the play imagines.

2 Translation from Baskin Haggadah, Revised Edition, CCAR 1994.

3 Ibid.

I love Purim, and here’s why: it’s a festival of contradictions. This is true of many if not all our Jewish holy days, but even more so at Purim. And I like it that way: life is messy and complex; why would we pretend otherwise in our most sacred moments? Wonderful fun for children juxtaposed with a bawdy text much more appropriate for adults; a story that never once mentions God, yet all but demands that we consider our own relationship with God; a festival of masques, an opportunity to conceal the face we usually show the world and to try on different roles, that, when enjoyed with the proper intention, helps us to unlock forgotten or hidden aspects of our personality, revealing us to ourselves. An occasion for prescribed mayhem and debauchery, it is nevertheless stringent in its demands of us, asking us: who are you, really? What is most important to you? For what cause or value would you—like Vashti, like Mordecai, like Esther—willingly risk everything? Your home, your community, your very life?

Recently columnist and blogger Harold Berman in The Times of Israel criticized Reform Judaism for “an approach that has replaced obligation with personal autonomy as its overarching value”; in other words, he charges, Reform Judaism never asks us to make any personal sacrifices for the sake of the community. Though I would respectfully disagree that Reform Judaism makes no rigorous demands of us, Berman does identify a real phenomenon in Reform Jewish life: we are often not inclined to inconvenience ourselves for the sake of Judaism, the Jewish community, and the values we claim to uphold.

We live full, demanding lives, and we like to believe we can have it all: secular success and spiritual fulfillment, conviction without inconvenience, family and career, work-life balance. Sometimes we can. But what would happen if we, like Esther, like Vashti, like Mordecai—even like Ahashverosh in the end—were forced to choose between our comfortable, everyday faces, standard operating procedures, and our deepest values? Is it enough to give as much tzedakah as feels good, or must we give beyond the point of comfort to truly repair the world? Is it enough to light the Shabbat candles when it is convenient, or must we discipline ourselves to make it a regular practice, even when it might cut into other plans, or require us to make what is usually a private family ritual more public than we might prefer? Do we miss holiday observances because the rest of the world does not stop working or going to school? Or do we make arrangements and sacrifices to be with our community, to practice the rituals and customs from which our values flow? In each case, what is lost, and what is gained?

In the Scroll of Esther, again and again, characters surprise us. The passive, beautiful Esther turns out to have a steely commitment to her people. Ahashverosh, a king without convictions, ends up doing the right thing—more than once! Each one of us has more than one dimension to our character, and to our Judaism. Purim gives us a safe space to try on unaccustomed roles, uncomfortable practices. In fact, it challenges us to uncover and explore our own contradictions. Which is the mask, which is truly us?

This Purim, may we have the courage to explore some of these tensions, to test the limits of the different aspects of our identities, to figure out what’s most important to us, to discover the cost of comfort and the strength of our convictions. Chag sameach—may your Purim be hilarious, joyful, affirming of family and Jewish values. And may it make you a little uncomfortable. And may it change you, deeply.