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 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…
