The Second Freedom

To the degree that I understand Nietzsche at all, I am pretty sure he wrote something very interesting about the long term effects of slavery. He coined a term in French – ressentiment – that to the best of what I can tell is closely related to what you or I would call resentment. He used the term in his book On the Geneology of Morality, in reference to the Master/Slave relationship. Ressentiment is the altogether human need of a slave to redirect his pain towards the oppressor. The man of ressentiment is in a sense doubly enslaved. First, most obviously, to his actual master. Second, and this is Nietzsche’s big point, he is also enslaved to the bitter and all-consuming passions that build up within a slave mentality. Even a liberated slave, no longer in physical bondage, can theoretically remain in servitude, not to a physical oppressor, but a psychological one. For Nietzsche, it is the ability to allow oneself to be liberated from one’s oppressor, both physically and psychologically, that is the mark of moral development and a nobility of the soul. “Such a man,” writes Nietzsche, “simply shakes off with one shrug much vermin that would have buried itself deep in others.” Conversely, we know it is the person who persists in a mood of discontent, who lives with perpetually wounded sensibilities, who will never be able to reach happiness, never feel true gratitude, never, no matter what his or her circumstance, able to be fully free.

If Nietzsche is right, then on this Festival of Passover, I would like to propose to you that we are celebrating not one freedom, but two. The first freedom, came at the hands of God. By a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, God brought plagues upon the house of Pharoah, parted the seas, and delivered Israel from the house of bondage. But there was another freedom, a second freedom, maybe not a miracle because it came by way of human, not Divine, will. It didn’t happen all at once, in fact, one could make the case that this freedom is still unfolding. The ability of the Jewish people to leave that legacy of bitterness behind, to leverage hundreds of years of physical oppression into spiritual uplift and social responsibility. This is the second liberation from Egypt. This arguably is the true miracle of Passover.

Leon Wieseltier once wrote that if there is a secret to Judaism’s survival, it must be Judaism’s success in making individuals remember things that never happened to them. This may be true, but I think the secret of Jewish survival goes much deeper than that. The secret to our survival is not just what we do or don’t remember, whether the Exodus did or didn’t happen. The secret to who we are and who we have become is how we have chosen to process our remembrances, how we have insisted on shaping our individual and collective consciousness towards our present healthier self-understanding.

Imagine yourself to be a historian of religion. What sort of people would gather year in and year out, retrieving our darkest of moments, almost a self-inflicted post-traumatic stress disorder? “Remember that you were once a stranger in a strange land, remember the Exodus from Egypt.” As Jews we are always anchored in our past. Yet we all know that the effect of the seder is not to immobolize us, but just the opposite. We don’t turn to the story to stew in our sorrow. We do so to appreciate what we have, where we have come, the blessings of our lives and the responsibility to use our blessings today.

Odds are that no matter who you are or what your background may be, you are familiar with the haggadah song Dayyenu. Think about what you sang last night, what you will sing about this evening. It would have been enough. If we had only been liberated, but not brought into the desert, if we had only been brought into the desert, but not to Mount Sinai, if only to Mount Sinai but not to the Land of Israel. Dayyenu. It would have been enough. Dayyenu’s message is one of gratitude, a sentiment made all the more extraordinary because it is voiced in the same breath as the recollection of our enslavement. The message of Dayyenu is in a sense the message of the Passover Haggadah – hakarat hatov in Hebrew, gratitude for someone’s beneficence. In this case, our thankfulness to God. No finger pointing, no griping, no grudges. Just the opposite – an overflowing sense of gratitude, hakarat hatov, appreciation for the blessings of our lives.

It is hard, very possibly the hardest thing in the world, to achieve a second freedom. I suspect each and every one of us in this room can identify a moment when we were liberated or liberated ourselves from a difficult circumstance. A professional or personal state of affairs from which we extracted ourselves, or, as is often the case, moments of loss that were not by our own choosing. No matter the circumstance, there is for each of us a second liberation that has remained on the horizon. Not some pollyannish hope that flattens the heartbreaks and disappointment. Rather, the quiet possibility that embedded within the human soul is a God-given resilience to recover the good this world has to offer, and insistence that we never resign or surrender to despair.

In his Passover Haggadah, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin writes movingly about the biblical figure of Jacob, who, at the end of his life blesses his grandchildren, asking that “the God who has redeemed him from all evil during his lifetime, bless these children.” It is a touching scene, as Jacob prays that the blessings extended to him continue into the next generation. What makes the scene remarkable is that Jacob’s life was one of the most tragic of the entire Bible. A youthful falling out with his brother Esau; a deceptive father-in-law Laban; a love with Rachel delayed and then cut tragically short by her death in childbirth; the suffering from the behavior of his children Dina, Simeon, and Levi; the belief that his son Joseph had been dead for twenty years. If anyone had tsurus it was Jacob! And yet here he was on his deathbed filled with gratitude, overflowing with a sense of hakarat hatov.

Far too often, I think, we mistakenly fall into the trap of framing life in black and white terms. We or our loved ones experience suffering. There is illness, a setback, a loss – occasionaly localized in time and space, but more often than not extending well beyond a single point in time. In absorbing the gaping chasm between the world as it is and the world as we think it should be or wish it to be, we put our faith in abeyance. After all, what sort of God, what sort of world would allow such a thing to happen? And while I understand that impulse, I think Passover asks us to consider the possibility that faith, trust and belief need not be binary decisions. One can, and arguably should, go through life filled with hope and a readiness to see the beauty of this world. I am reminded of the distinction between an optimist and a pessimist. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is true. When it comes to matters of faith, I would choose to be, in Heschel’s words, an “optimist against my better judgment.” It is not that I am blind to the pain of others, and there are still private and public freedoms that we have yet to achieve. I would simply contend that even with eyes wide open and hurting hearts, we can make the the redemptive steps toward the second freedoms for whom we only need ourselves to be redeemed.

Without a doubt, my favorite prayer of the Jewish year is Tal, the prayer for dew, that we will recite momentarily. The imagery, the poetry, set to our tradition’s most sublime music. This year it occurred to me that this prayer asking God for the sweet and gentle blessing of dew was written from exile. It is the most hopeful prayer in the siddur written from the darkest hour, each stanza reflecting a cautious optimism that we be delivered from bondage and taken back by God. Tal is the natural extension of the Passover message. If there are people in this world who have experienced a first freedom but remain slaves to their own bitterness, then why, Tal asks, should we not take the argument one step further? What if we, men and women wholly of this world, in all its disappointments and challenges, all of our physical and spiritual exiles, refuse to live lives of resentment? Tal opens up the possibility that there is love, beauty and meaning for anyone seeking it in earnest. We can – in all our limitations – be free men and women, seeing the good, the very good, that this world and our God has to offer on this spring Festival of Freedom.