Remember to Be Free

By Moshe Kohn

The connection between liberty and responsibility ’Remembrance is the key to Redemption,"said Rabbi Yisrael Ba’al Shem Tov, the 18th-century founder of Hassidism.

"Judaism and the concept of the messianic Redemption are founded on the idea that God remembers forgotten things and people," said Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Yemay Zikkaron).

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," wrote philosopher George Santayana (Life of Reason).

Most of us — individuals and nations, including the People of Israel — are unredeemed, and are as harnessed to our past and condemned to repeating it again and again, as the threshing ox is harnessed to the grinding-stone it pulls around and around in its rut. Few of us know how to remember or, remembering, know what to do with our memory. For many of us, historical memory has become a burden that we would dump as we charge forward blindly into the future.

There is a beautiful spiritual interpretation concerning the physical features of kasher animals, i. e. chewing the cud and having cloven hooves (Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14). A kasher animal must possess both attributes. Neither the camel, which only chews the cud, nor the pig, which only has cloven hooves, is kasher. The explanation is that to be kasher, a creature must have both memory — openness to and the ability to handle, history ("chew the cud‘) — and hope — openness to and the ability to move firmly into the future (’cloven hooves").

Remembrance is a central — perhaps the central — theme of Pessah. Indeed, it is a central theme of all the holy days ordained by the Torah, and a central theme of the entire Tanakh (Jewish Bible). But the Tanakh doesn’t call on us merely to "summon up the remembrance of things past‘ so that we may wallow in regrets about our ’dear time’s waste‘ (as Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 30), or so that we may sigh about ’the good old days" (a foolish pastime, according to Ecclesiastes 7:10).

The Tanakh mentions "Remembrance" scores of times in its various forms. And it is almost invariably linked to a call to action. Usually it is the basis for a Divine call to do right because of the lesson taught by some event in our history.

The Torah contains many ritual precepts, the purpose of which is to remind us that God delivered us from slavery in Egypt. Reminded of this, and thus reminded of the experience of enslavement, the Torah commands us here, and in several dozen additional ethical-moral precepts, to conduct ourselves toward our fellow human beings according to high standards we are expected to have learned from that experience.

Let us look at three of the Torah-ordained "Remembrances‘ that, according to one source, ’pious Jews have the custom of reciting each morning after the Shaharit service,‘ or according to another source, that ’it is fitting for every person to recite daily.‘ One source lists four ’Remembrances"; another adds two, and a third lists 10, including these six.

The first on all three lists is what Jerusalem philosopher Emil Fackenheim calls the People of Israel’s "root experience,‘ the week-long celebration of which we begin tomorrow night: ’Remember this day on which you came out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery‘ (Exodus 13:3). Remembering this, we are to remember: ’You shall not oppress an alien, for you know the feeling of the alien, having yourselves been aliens in Egypt" (Exodus 23:9).

There is much more: "…you shall love [the alien] as yourself, because you were aliens in Egypt… You shall not pervert justice… You are to have honest scales, honest weights, honest measures [because] I am God, your god Who brought you out of Egypt‘ (Leviticus 19:34—36). And, ’You are not to deprive aliens and orphans… When you reap the harvest in your field and forget a swathe, do not go back to pick it up… When you beat your olive trees, do not strip them afterwards… When you gather the grapes from your vineyard, do not go over it again: what is left is to go to the alien, the orphan, and the widow. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt: that is why I command you to do this" (Deuteronomy 24:17—21).

Remarkably, it is written, "…you shall not despise an Egyptian, for you were a sojourner in his land" (Deuteronomy 23:8). Rashi elaborates (I paraphrase): You are not to despise the Egyptians at all, even though they threw your sons into the river. For when you were in need — when famine hit the land of Canaan and the Patriarch Abraham and Matriarch Sarah sought refuge and sustenance in Egypt, and when famine hit the land again and Jacob and his family came in search of food — they extended their hospitality to you.

These are only a few of several dozen examples of behavior we are commanded to emulate, as people who experienced slavery and liberation. The Prophets later remind our backsliding ancestors of this many times.

Second on the long list of "Remembrances" is the fourth of the Ten Utterances, the commandment concerning Shabbat observance. The Torah states it in two versions, combining the two central elements that, in the Jewish worldview, distinguish humanity from animals on the one hand and from angels on the other. These are: recognition of a purposeful creation by a purposeful Creator, and recognition that this Creator is also Liberator Who wishes us to be free.

In the first version (Exodus 20:8—11), we are commanded: "Remember to keep Shabbat Day holy.‘ We, our slaves, our cattle, and ’the alien living among you‘ are to rest on Shabbat, because ’in six days God made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and on the seventh day He rested: that is why God blessed Shabbat day and hallowed it.‘ Remember: the ordered world, ordered life, are not an accident, nor are they a product of haphazard cosmic circumstances. ’Order is an arrangement that is inherently impossible," wrote physicist Edward Teller (The Pursuit of Simplicity).

In the second version (Deuteronomy 5:12—15), we are to "Observe‘ Shabbat Day by hallowing it, thereby remembering that ’you were a slave in Egypt and God… brought you out of there."

The third thing to remember is that liberty entails responsibility. We are told (Deuteronomy 4:9—10): "…be very careful and watch yourself scrupulously so that you do not forget the things you have seen with your own eyes and so they do not pass from your heart so long as you live; and teach them to your children and your children’s children: the day you stood before God, your god, at Horeb [Mount Sinai, to receive the Torah]."

It is noteworthy that the first of the Ten Utterances God issued at Horeb was not a commandment at all, but a declaration of His role as Liberator. Both versions begin Exodus 20:2; Deuteronomy 5:6): "I am God, your god, Who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery."

Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel, who was Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Tel Aviv after Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, explained the connection between liberty and responsibility with a beautiful metaphor. He saw an intimate connection between Pessah, the festival of "the Spring Month" (as the Torah calls Nisan), and Shavuot six weeks later, the Time of the Giving of the Torah which is also the Firstfruits Festival.

At Pessah, he said, we celebrate our flowering as a free, sovereign entity. At Shavuot, we celebrate our "firstfruit‘ as such an entity, the receiving of the Torah. ’Flowers,‘ he said, ’are wonderful to behold, but they do not nourish or sustain. The Exodus from Egypt was only a means; the purpose, the goal, was the Torah."

Indeed, the Torah reports Moses’s demand of Pharaoh in God’s name, "Let My people go that they may serve Me.‘ Not ’Let My people go that they may have self-determination for its own sake," but so they may serve a sublime purpose.

In our own time, humanity has paid, and is still paying, a heavy price in blood and misery for the freedom-without-responsibleness-and-without-purpose of individuals and peoples.

Rabbi Yitzhak Nissenbaum characterized the Exodus as the source of the "vitality not only of Shabbat and the festivals, but of the whole pattern of Jewish life.‘ It ’informs the way we go about our daily tasks and dealings as human beings, and our lifeways and hopes as Jews" (Moadim, his collected festival sermons published in Jerusalem in 1980).

Rabbi Nissenbaum, a communal rabbi, a pre-Herzlian Zionist activist, a leader of Herzl’s Zionist movement, and then a founder of the Religious Zionist movement, was murdered by the Germans in the Warsaw Ghetto.

He noted that the Torah warns against partaking of the sacrifices offered by gentiles and marrying their children, lest that lead Jews to worship alien gods. At the same time, he continued, the Torah commands us to "be holy, because I, God Who took you out of Egypt to be your god… am holy" (Exodus 34:15—16; Leviticus 11:44—45).

But, he said, that same God commands us not to harass non-Jews living in our land, but to love them. It also commands us to keep honest weights and measures; to help needy aliens living in our midst as well as needy fellow Jews; and in everything to act in a manner that sanctifies God’s Name — i. e. reflects well on Him — and not commit acts that profane His Name — i. e. reflect ill on Him.

Hence, "This Exodus, which safeguards the unity of the People of Israel, also most vigilantly safeguards the honor of its God and the dignity of its people, and also preserves in the heart of the people love for all members of the human race… This, indeed, is the very stuff of liberty; this is the cachet of a truly free people. By means of this Exodus concept the People of Israel preserves itself and makes it possible for outsiders to live in its midst…"

’It is hard to be a Jew,"we have been told. Since 1948, we’ve learned it’s harder yet to be a sovereign Jew, a Jew running a state that God in His artistry created with such variety. Be that as it may, it is by living in terms of what Rabbi Nissenbaum called"the cachet of a truly free people"that we earn the paean that William Blake sang to us:

Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, Mock on, ’tis all in vain.
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a gem
reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back, they blind the mocking Eye,
But still in Israel’s path they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton’s Particles of light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.