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Tam. 1.: AWL. F18 u 7 53 Tim" 'p'ARAISdk'BE inalimfifiétébdfi Tam. 1.: AWL. F18: For as from out the house of bondage‘went The host of Israel, in their midst they bore The heritage of law and freedom, blent In holy unity for evermore. And still from rising unto setting sun \ LIBRAEOLLEGE Shall this our heritage and watchword be: "The Lord our God, the Lord our God is One, And law alone it is that makes us freel" ’TLLLL cril nu might recall those words. Thei)ComE from a poem by Alice Lucas, sister of Claude Montefiore, Epich we shall sing presently as our concluding hymn. an4k ‘ Anélthey state a paradogfi gar we tend to think of law and freedom as opposites - the more law, the less freééom; the more freedom, the less law. Yet the poem asserts, not only that they can be "blent in holy unity" but even that "law L.)- M mpum Hx. pm». -%1one" actually "makes us free". It is a paradox which has often intrigued me and which I thought we might explore a little this morninggj It is of cofirse rooted in thé Bible, an? more precisely in the story of the Exodus, where more than once Moses says to Pharaoh in God's name, Shallach Egg; v'xa-avduni,*"Let.My pgople go £hat they may serve Me" (Ex. 7:16, 26; 9:1, 13). Actually, the Hebrew is more starfling than the usual translation conveys, for za-avduni comes from the same root as Exgg, ‘slave'. The meaning thergfore is: Let the Israelites cease to be Pharaoh's slaves End become God's slave; instead. Yet this exchange of one slavery for another is the great liberation whiqh Pesach celebrates: The same point is made, more explicitly, in the 25th chapter of Leviticus, in the context of a provision for the emancipation of Hebrew slaves in the Jubilee, the reason for which is stated in these words: 5; ii Elggl xisrael avadim, avadai hem, "For to He (that is, to God) the children of Israel are slaves they are Servanté" (Lev. 25:55). And on that verse servantipr ; Mi -2— the Talmud comments: Q§§&$i hem, ;}16 QQadia iéLéQAéifi, "They are 31 servaflts, and not servants to servants" (B.M; 103). The Ense isE—of course:]that to be in bondage to fellow human beings, like Pharaoh, who themselves owe obedience to God, is degrading; but to be in bondage to God is uplifting, }é liberating. We find the same idea in Philo, the Jewish philosopher of first-century Alexandria, who wrote, "That man alone is free who has God for his leader" (J.L. Baron, A Treasury 2: Jewish Quotations, 311.41). But it recgives part— icular emphasis in Rabbinic literature, and especially in the Ethics of the ‘ mkwbl-WWWI Fathers. There we read, for instance: "Wfigsver tafiés gpén hgmsélf the yoke of the Torah, from/him beLgaken away the yoke of political oppression and shit} economic hariihip; and w;%;;er throw off the yoke of the Torah, upon 'm shall be laid the yoke of political oppression and economic hardship” (3:8).- Better known is a saying, in a chapter appended to the same tractate, by the third-century rabbi, Joshua ben Levi. It is a comment on a verse in the 32nd chapter of Exodus which refers to the second pair of é£one tabléts inscribed with the Ten éommandments, the ones Moses received on Mount Sinai after he had broken the first pair, ayd says: "Ihe tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, charut a; ha-luchot, engraved upon the tablets" (v. 16). The comment makes one of the famous puns of Rabbinic Liiigfture: "Read fiot charut,’engraved, but cherut, freedom, for no 5:: is free but hé who occup hégself ixtthe study of tfig Torah" (Avot 6:2). That comment, in turn, was expounded by Rébbi Israél Lipschutz of the 18th-19th centuries, in his gpégt Mishnah commentary, __"__——_Tif'ere£ Yisrael, as followé: "For only kég;ho occupié: §{MMQLW;WAL "—7__:;1 > higfielf‘in the study of yfig Torah ié not enslaved to materialism, and thi9,is what freedom is: that one's soul is not the slave of bodily desires" fig lgg.) The point that energes, then, isfighis:1that there are two kinds of liberation: externally, from political Oppression, and internally, from bondage to bodily _ 3 - appetites or, more generally,unwor¥h1 goals, oé—whéeh—éhe—besk—exam§le_éa— iée;e%ryv~ And which of these does the Exodus from Egypt exemplify? The answerE; of course21is: 2933. There is, as a matter of fact, a dispute in the Talmud as to which of the two, external or internal freedom, is to be chiefly stressed in the celebration of Pesach. The dispute is between the two leading scholars of Babylonian Jewry in the 3rd century: Samuel, the founder of the academy of Nehardea, and Rev, who founded the academy of Sura. Bothg of course;]accepted the principle laid down by the Mishnah, that the telling of the story of the Exodus must p£oceed from slag: to shevach, from degradation to glory (Pes. 10:4). The point at issue was, Egg. Samuel favoured the passage beginning Avadim hazinu l'far-oh b'mitzra im, "We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt"; that is, he wished to stress the external,: iolitical aspect of the liberation. Whereas Rav pro- posed the passage beginning Mi—t'chillah ov'dey avodah zarah hayu avoteynu, "In the beginning our ancestors were idol worshippers"; that is, he wanted to emphasise the internal, spiritual aspect of the liberation (Pes. 116a). Eventually,[és you know, QQEQ passages were inc;uded in the Haggadah; but it is Rav's concept of inner liberation which is our theme this morning. It is a theme much stressed in the Kabbalah, the tradition of Jewish mysticism, and it is well sfimmed up in a passage froéiProfessor Gershom Scholem£:the great— est living authority on the Kabbalah, which is included in our new Haggadah and reads as folloyg: "The exodus from Egypt, the fundamental event of our history, cannot, according to the mystic, have come to pass once only and in one place; must cérrespond to it an event which.takes pfiage_%:M;u§s€}yes, an exodus frfP (fiE‘K-jl‘ 1m (LN! an inner Egypt in which we ‘are all slaves" My This recognition, that political freedém is not enough, that ;3% also need; an inner freedom which is perhaps even hardér to attéin, and which resulfs from self-submission to God's will,[§§at insighglis not, of course, confined to Judaism. _ # - $¢r}“A¥mH“LI There is)a Christian prayer which refers_to God as "the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service i5 Berfect freedom"£;and there is a Christian hymn that begifis: How happy is/he born and taught, ‘That serveth not another's wiI1;‘ Whose armour is his honest thought, And simple truth his utmost skill; Whose passions not his masters are... \ / , , , “ ~'~» ’ And it concludes: . _\ /M > y\ This man is freed from servile bands of hepe to rise, or fear to fall; Lord of himself, though not of lands; And having nothing, yet hath all. (Henry Wotton, 1568-1639) [ge might also call to mind the well—known lines of Richard Lovelace which make the point that the possession of inner freedom can, to a degree, compensate for the lack of outer freedom: Stone walls do not a prison make Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage; If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free; Angels alone, that soar above, Enjoy such liberty. (23 Althea, Eggg Prisoii] But let us adduce some more Jewish witnesses before we pull the threads together. Moses Reds/wrote: "That beifig is free...whose will coincides with the divine law" (Eggg Egg Jerusalem, p. 133);3;Morris Joseph wrote: "They only are truly free who subordinate their inclination to a higher will, who submit themselves to God's wholesome yoke" (Judaism g5 ggégg Egg gigs, pp. 231f). And the prologue to the Reconstructionist Haggadah, quoted in our new one, says: _ 5 _ "The freedom we strive for means more than broken chains. It means liberation from all those enslavements that warp the spirit and blight the mind, that destréy the soul even when they leave the flesh alive. For men can be enslaved in more ways than one. Men can be enslaved to themselves...When laziness or cowardice keeps them from doing what they know to be right, when ignorance blinds them...they are slaves..." (ULPS Haggadah, p. 61).j So there is a whole chorus of voices proclaimingte same message, he same paradox, that freedom is not unrestraint. Without laws, without rules, without principles, we are liable to become ensnared and enslaved by passions and fashions which, far from enlarging, actually restrict our freedom. If your life is dominated by an irresistible urge to gain more power, more pleasure or more r « ‘ an . 1m wealth, or if your mind is riddled with prejudice you truly and/hatred,[3ge / WC. Mk UK ' \ / free? Of course notl:)M§d"i6 so made that hé functionfi to the fullest extent mu our of yié capabilities only when his life is governed by a set of rules, and only if they are the right rules.[:}n a sense much broader than the advertising slogan, "Everyone needs standards"; everyone needs an ideology.
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