What's this Freedom For?

Dear friends,

We have some live virtual theater coming our way tonight, so I’ll begin with a line from a play:

PHARAOH: When you finally get this freedom, Moses, what are you going to do with it?

That line from my play, Pharaoh (that's him in the picture above) which was scheduled to open a year ago, keeps coming back to me these pre-Passover days. We are used to thinking about this holiday as a story of slavery to freedom. The deeper story though, might be about after freedom is achieved. The reading of the Shma, said three times a day, ends with the following statement:

אני יי אלוהיכם אשר הוצאתי אתכם מארץ מצרים להיות לכם לאלוהים

I am Adonai your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God.

We did not come out of Egypt for the sake of being a free people, but for the sake of being God’s people. We are not, as Hatikvah the Israeli national anthem puts it, Am Chofshi, a free nation, but Avdey Hashem, Slaves of God, as Rabbi Yehudah Halevi put it.

What’s interesting about this is the notion of being freed in order to be a slave of God is that to some people it is the saddest, most convoluted and dark expression of freedom, while to others it implies the only true purpose, infused with total and complete liberation. Personally, I suffer from split personality on this one. Sometimes I abhor the notion, reject it and deny that it is has anything to do with the truth. Other times I yearn for it, pray for it and work hard to make it a reality.

It hinges, of course on the meaning of this word, God. If God is ultimately the LORD, as appears in many biblical translations, if it is the ultimate authority, mascot of the patriarchy, punisher of deviants, confiner of what we eat, who we befriend and how we think, then none of us at TNS want to be a slave of God. If, however God is יהוה, being in all tenses which we can sometimes forget ourselves to, the boundless, indivisible source of all, the Kol Dmamah Dakah, sound of perfect silence, which transcends our lives and deaths, the wind and the care and the pleasure and the coming together: well hey, sign me up to be a slave to that.

In other words, God is both total freedom and total limitation, depending on your perspective. Whatever we land on, Passover is an opportunity to look for a way to be with and in the infinite, the true. We invite Kol dichfin and kol ditzrich, all who are hungry and all who are in need, without differentiating between one person and another. We invite the parts of ourselves that are hungry, needy, ill at ease to join the table and sit comfortably in the momentary expression of the eternal.

It is likely that we were given our freedom for the sake of celebrating Passover; to enjoy being alive, to feel the love of those we are with, to ask questions and contemplate what is, to sing what is known as the Hallel Mitzri – the Egyptian Praise Session, to know that even when we feel like things are missing, Dayenu, our cup overflows.

When we meet this evening at 6pm we will, however be taking a serious look into the opposite of all of this, the vision of freedom offered by The Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition as brilliantly elaborated by Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1879. We must look at the lies of freedom in order to get free. We must see the frighteningly compelling manipulation that is presented to us by the world and ourselves in order to rid ourselves of it, before we celebrate the Passover.
For this purpose we will be gathering this evening to witness and discuss a short play, using only the words of Dostoevsky, performed by an incredibly skilled and experienced actor named Jon Huberth, and directed by the equally talented and celebrated theater director, Michael Posnick.
I can’t wait.

I hope you can all join us at 6pm for an evening that will include some prayers and music, but will focus primarily on this excerpt from The Brothers Karamazov.

Wishing you all a happy, peaceful, Passover. May we all find the pleasures of freedom and use them to be slaves of all the right things.

Shabbat shalom and chag sameach,
Rabbi Misha

PS. If you'd like to pass this on here's the link to the letter on Medium.