Today is Martin Luther King Day and I sit between classes in rabbinic school. The parasha is Vaera. The subject is liberation. God is telling Moses all about liberation. I am God the Holy One who will bring you out from under the bondage of the Egyptians. God wants Moses to say this to the Israelites. Ani adonay elohechem hamotzay etchem mi tachat sivlot mitzrayim.
This is what amazes me. When Martin Luther King makes his famous declaration about liberation from under the burdens of human bondage everyone cheers. There isn’t any doubt. I wonder what is in the mind of the Israelites when Moses goes to them with the same message. Cheer? Applaud? They don’t believe a word he says. It takes convincing. It takes signs…a staff that became a snake.
To continue, how do we...given our Jewish heritage… get out of bondage if we’re too under it to even see it... if it has become mainstream, the expected, the way we all are, the way to feel secure, accepted, the minimum requirement for survival. Seeing beyond our own personal bondage is often impossible.
First though, what is bondage? There are many forms. Years ago, when I was a child, we would drive into New York City and on our way to theater we’d see people pouring into the bus station Port Authority in droves. Grand Central Station. Penn Station. Many would be in suits and ties. They all seemed to be going to or coming from important places quickly. I never doubted this importance. I guess I was wondering if this same kind of importance… the one framed with sky-rises and stainless steel…the one invested and then dealt out for a gain….was the one I was looking for. How many of these people, I would wonder, are being their unique selves? I knew, deep inside, that one day I was expected to be one of them, one of us. I was to do whatever might be necessary to fall in line. Leaving the city… out of the question. Stepping out of the professional world…forget it.
Now that I look at it, this is a good portrayal of bondage. First, there is what I was seeing….a feigned exodus, outer movement, a puppet-like response to a civilization praising God-knows-what. Next, I was in my own self-made prison, the expectation taunting me like the very iron bars. And finally, I was in a prison within a prison based on my decision to avoid that lifestyle at all costs. The mystic William Blake speaks of mind forged manacles. They not only control us from the outside but within our very hearts.
Now I wonder, what if someone showed up the day I had the epiphany….I will never live this way…and announced he was going to free us from the whole set-up, a society plugged so deep and hard-wired into a hyper-work ethic that we either can’t see our souls or turn away too fast to see them. Where would he have been taken? To the local rabbi on Fifth avenue? To the mayor? Or to the hospital? My guess is the latter.
What is it about ourselves that we can’t or don’t see our personal prison-paradigms? Or…even more tragically…if we do…what keeps us from stepping up to the plate of freedom? If we had the ability to go-in to that place of God-consciousness (no doubt) we would have recognized Moses from day one. Ah, we would have thought, check out his energy, his vibration. He is buzzzzzing. He has to be a prophet. And if God was the director of this adventure…first finding Moses and showing him the burning bush…then directing him to free the Israelites…how come God won’t let us see Moses? How come the whole happening of the Exodus feels like one in which the stage directions are revealed? After all, God continually says…Ask the Pharoah to let you go but (I’m just letting you know) Pharoah won’t agree. I will harden his heart. And we have to watch anyway, knowing the request will fail and fail again. What does this mean? It means the plot is not about the plot. The whole event could take place…believe it or not…even without the characters. None of this is what it seems to be about. This recognition is an important step to freedom. Honestly, this step shows us freedom from our very egos, from our self-importance as reflected in story.
This is what the Talmudic rabbis say. We need the obstructions to get-out. Without obstruction there isn’t any release. Without hurdles we don’t find the engine within ourselves to move on. We need the continual negation to really see the path to light. The friction creates the release. The evil is just as important as the good. The whole Torah-thing is fabricated because the very fabrication creates the structure of our release. Story is one of the hurdles and of course, there are hurdles within the story.
Imagine this: Someone is working in a dead-end job. He works it for forty years. His father worked the same job. He reads the paper on the way in to town…ignores the slums and the people suffering. He pays for his kid’s schools. His wife is happy because she doesn’t have to work. He pays for the country club. And that’s it. This is his life. He’s honest. He does it right. The problem though is this. He doesn’t go beyond the ordinary, the normal. He doesn’t look to see. And one day he wakes up. This build-up, this year after year of…yes….suffering….creates the kinetic energy that one day propels him like a rocket-ship into his inner truth. And the job doesn’t have to be dead-end. We can be a prominent lawyer or an esteemed professor. And come to this same realization. Obstructions have built up that we haven’t even recognized. We were going along with it and didn’t even know it. But because of the build-up the epiphany carries with-in it the energy of freedom. And openings happen that we never expected. Amazing openings.
What causes us to see, to have this epiphany? Well, as far as I know, it has to be a miracle. Seeing isn’t some expected human trait. Seeing is a miracle. Therefore each hurdle is also a miracle within itself. This is hard to embrace when we’re in it. It’s about as uncomfortable a realization as we can get.
What happened with us? This is what I think. We were suffering so much we were comfortable in it. We were dancing along with it, blind and doubtful. We had become the very darkness that we were later trying to flee. We could not cut off that piece of ourselves because it would be like cutting off our hands or feet. Or so it seemed. This paradigm had become such an integrated part of our systems that it would take repeated signs and threats and inoculations of that same darkness to harness our inner God-energy and see the continual miracle of life with full-vision.
Martin Luther King speaks to a people who are already at the place of seeing. They agree with him before the fact. He is their voice. Moses speaks to a people whose sparks are down to the final glow. They don’t agree and there’s work to do before seeing. They aren’t looking for a voice. At that moment, only God is looking for a voice.
Today I look around. I see people who are open and those who are shut down, people who say and do kind things and those who need (with subtlety) to degrade others. I see rabbinic students who are competitive and tied to facts…and others who glow with some facts and simply a gratitude for God. The echo of Moses and the echo of Martin Luther King, whether for a people ready or not, pulse in the air all around us. That’s because it isn’t a one-time thing. Freedom isn’t just the subject of a good speech or the theme of a Torah parasha. It’s a moment to moment decision…one dedicated to continual self-inquiry and shadow-recognition. One that demands action and an understanding that we must let-go to grow.
So…may we see beyond our ethnicity and religion and human-ness into the glow of loving-kindness, the birth of radiance that pushes out from us all….one community…one people…and propels us all into one love that is the miracle.
And every moment may we listen to the heart-vision, remember it and hold it with commitment, balance, compassion, insight and strength
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