The Right to Be Different

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s January 1941 State of the Union address bequeathed to us perhaps the most substantial ideological statement of the Second World War, if not of American rhetoric as a whole. He spoke of the “Four Freedoms,” the four essential ingredients of a good society and strong moral order. You may recall them from your high school civics class, or perhaps you heard them spoken by Roosevelt himself: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

What you may not know is that shortly after Roosevelt’s address, Simon Rawidowicz, one of the great scholars of modern Jewish thought, penned a famous essay adding one more item to Roosevelt’s list. His essay, entitled Libertas Differendi, insisted on one more basic freedom that could not be derived from the others: “The Right to be Different,” Libertas Differendi, the inalienable right of people and groups of people to differ from each other.

While fundamental to America and to all of humanity, this “right to be different” has been part and parcel of Jewish identity more than to that of any other people. Since our infancy, from country to country, through history and time, tolerance and persecution, necessity or choice, it has been our badge of pride that while we inevitably adapt to our surroundings, we have fought valiantly to preserve our inherited state of being different, a “people that dwells alone” in the words of the Torah, in the book of Numbers. Even as we celebrate a common humanity, we believe all groups possess a basic right to be different. Jews, in Rawidowicz’s words “the greatest non-conformists in history,” have been the strongest advocates for this right throughout our history.

Jewishly speaking, the right to be free is never, as the song goes, merely “to be you and me.” The point of freedom is to be “us.” A different people, in Hebrew an Am, Goy, or Umah. The thrust of this week’s parasha is the very gift of freedom, liberty from slavery and the yoke of oppression. Over and over again, it is made abundantly clear that we were not freed merely to enable us to be like others. Freedom was granted in order that we should have the right to be different. Our narrative this week is not so much about the end of slavery as it is about the birth of a people, the formation of am yisrael, the nation of Israel. Whether that freedom came at the banks of the Red Sea, the East End of London, Ellis Island, or Galveston, Texas, whenever Jews have arrived safely at the shores of freedom, we have leveraged that very freedom towards writing the next chapter in our people’s history.

Our own moment, though it lacks the high drama of the Red Sea or Ellis Island, is yet another pivotal moment of history. Many of you had the honor of hearing John Ruskay’s remarks on the occasion of his tenth anniversary as the Chief Executive of UJA-Federation of New York. He explained that today we live at an extraordinary, if not unprecedented, moment in Jewish history. The immigrants of the 20th century have long since arrived; the age of rescue is, more or less, over. We live in a time of a Jewish State, and while Israel’s enemies are real and active, Israel today is unquestionably an economic and cultural miracle. In addition, as American Jews, we live, according to Ruskay, “in the most accepting and generous society where Jews have ever lived, having achieved status and influence far beyond what our grandparents could have dreamed.” In New York, in Tel Aviv, in Moscow – Jews exist as free men and women on the other side of the sea, removing the mud from our sandals as it were, contemplating what to do with our new-found freedom.

My fear, to put it directly, is that this generation, our generation, has forgotten that, as Jews, the point of our freedom is to be different, to be a unique people. At this moment of unprecedented opportunity, the eternal and internal tug of Jewish peoplehood, I believe, is eroding to dangerously low levels. If I had to diagnose why peoplehood is on the decline, I would attribute it to at least two interrelated forces, coalescing to form a perfect storm.

First, and this has been well documented, is the rise of the sovereign self to the point of a corrosive narcissism. Despite what the polls say, I believe that American Jews are, for the most part, fine with religion, even with Judaism. Most of the Jews I know, a select crowd to be sure, quite like to think of themselves as spiritual and they are willing to let Judaism give expression to their religious needs. But while Jews are willing to achieve their spiritual goals by way of Judaism, they are only willing to do so insofar as it is done on their own terms. There is an inwardness, a privatization, an individualization or, if you like, a my-way-i-fication of what it means to be Jewish. A colleague of mine recently reflected on how as a rabbi he felt akin to being a personal trainer – creating spiritual regimens tailored to each individual. People want their occasions marked, their loved ones’ names announced, their Chabad rabbi to study with them over lunch, private tutors for their children, their philanthropies funded or created. None of these “wants” is necessarily bad, and institutions need to know that Jews, like all consumers, vote with their feet. But an excessive boutiquishness when it comes to Judaism means that Jewish souls are no longer calibrated according to the Jewish calendar - to Pesah, Shavuot, Shabbat, the occasions that make our religion a communal event. Contemporary Jews have lost the ability to subsume the “I” to the “we” and we are all paying the price. Somewhere along the way we have forgotten, in the words of Mordecai Kaplan, that the “self identification of the individual Jew with [his] Jewish People is the source of the mystical element in the Jewish Religion.” (A New Zionism, p. 114)

The second challenge we face is the excessive universalism of contemporary modes of Jewish expression. When Jews are not looking inward, they are reaching outward beyond what are perceived to be petty parochial concerns towards solving big global problems. Please don’t misunderstand what I am saying. We should be responsive to the crisis in Haiti; I hope that my words and our synagogue’s actions this past week more than make that point. We should and will continue to be concerned with the condition of our shared humanity. But any rabbi knows that it is easier to get a class of high school kids on an alternative spring break to rebuild a church devastated by Katrina than it is to get them to attend their own shul. It is easier to get people outraged about the conditions of migrant workers in kosher meatpacking industries than it is to get them to keep kosher. It is easier to get Jews to give to relief efforts in Darfur than to get them to give to the JDC in order to support a Jewish widow living in a walk-up in the FSU, a nice Jewish lady who, were it not for the whims of history, could be any of our mothers or grandmothers. Concern for the non-Jew is important; in fact, it is an expression of core Jewish values. But if all our creative efforts are aimed at the well-being of humanity and none directed at strengthening ourselves, then in a generation or two we will find ourselves without the very community that has given us the very values we are so proud of today.

There are many reasons why peoplehood is on the wane. Our distance from the Shoah; the fact that our Israeli cousins are, for many of us, now second or third cousins; our inwardness; our outwardness – the list goes on. So too the effects of waning peoplehood can be felt everywhere. The lack of dialogue between Jews of different stripes, the weakening of bonds between Diaspora Jewry and Israel, the fiscal and leadership challenges of AJC, WJC, JDC, UJA, ADL or any institution of American Jewish life, synagogues included, whose currency is derived from the coin of “peoplehood.” As Ruskay said in the name of Natan Sharansky: “identity is [now] the driver for everything we care about. If one is not positively identified, why care about the Jewish poor, renewing Jewish life in the Former Soviet Union, or securing the Jewish state.” Finally, of course, a diminishing sense of peoplehood is directly related to any parent’s ability to articulate a counterargument to intermarriage. After all, why on earth should you not marry a wonderful human being of another faith, if the notion of being different, of peoplehood, holds no value for you? Simply put, peoplehood is the lynchpin that holds everything together.

The task of our generation is not to tell our children that they must be Jewish for fear of anti-Semitism – past, present or future – or that they should be Jewish because they owe anyone anything. The argument for leading a Jewish life today is exactly the same as it was thousands of years ago as we stood on the other side of the sea: You have your freedom, earned or inherited, that freedom is yours. Mazel Tov! Now what will you do with it? Will you use your freedom to make you different? Are you able to understand your being part of a grander narrative, a distinct people permeated by past promise and a sense of destiny? Are you willing to be part of the greatest story
ever told?

Mordecai Kaplan once quoted the famous mountain climber George Malory, who was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. Malory replied: “Because it is there.” So too, Kaplan explained, when asked why be Jewish, we must be able to answer: Because the Jewish people is here, and we are part of it.

We must create engaging, enriching, ennobling, and inspiring Jewish communities. We must give the concept of peoplehood a renaissance, let it regain its religious stature, position it as a compelling point of self-identification for searching Jews. When, and only when, the spiritual wholeness of an individual Jew hangs on being part of a Jewish people and when indifference turns to an embrace of our difference, will our people, the Jewish people, be whole once more.