Free To Choose

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Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck on the Eighth Day of Passover, April 14, 2012

For all of us who have tried, unsuccessfully, to mop up our remaining soup or gravy with a piece of matzah – have no fear.  Challah, or perhaps a nice crusty piece of sourdough bread, is on the way. 

Looking back on the week, we can recall all the times that we spoke, sang, dipped and ate.  Maybe we had to do a little political negotiation with family and friends at the seder – wouldn’t be the first time.

But what do we really carry with us when the holiday is over?

I want us to focus on the idea of responsibility.

If there’s one concept I want us to digest fully, it’s the notion that our choices and our actions have more profound consequences than we tend to imagine.

I actually believe this is the most important message of Passover.  We might say, “No, the most important message is that God saves us!”  But I disagree.  I believe that God’s saving power may be the loudest message of Passover.  But it’s not the most important.

The second movement of Beethoven’s 7^th symphony has two melodies, one loud and insistent; the other, soft and enchanting.

Using this music as a metaphor for the Exodus from Egypt, I would ask us to consider that the louder theme might represent God’s saving power while the quieter, yet to my ear more melodic theme, represents human initiative.

So while the 10 plagues and the splitting of the sea attributed directly to God were undoubtedly dramatic, no less important were all of the human acts that required courageous choices – the midwives and Pharaoh’s daughter who defied Pharaoh, the Egyptian people who displayed basic human kindness unlike their leaders, and the Hebrews who woke up each day with enough inner strength to face their servitude.

Divine intervention and human initiative.

Both melodies combine to create the symphonic strains that lead מאפלה לאורה me’afela l’ora, from darkness to light, משיעבוד לגאולה mishe’abud lig’ulah, from servitude to redemption. 

Centuries after the events described in the Passover story, our ancestors living in Persia told a story where God’s intervention went completely un-described, whether it was felt or not, and the story was entirely about human initiative.  In the Purim story, there is no mention of a strong hand and an outstretched arm, only human beings doing their best in a thorny situation.

Millenia after both of those stories were first told, we do not read much about God’s direct intervention.  We may wonder about it, we may intuit it, we may joke about it.  But we seem to be recognizing, more and more, that however we understand God, our initiative matters profoundly.

Specifically, our choices matter.  We are responsible for ourselves and not just for ourselves.

Robert Penn Warren, author of All the King’s Men, wrote the following about a turning point in the worldview of the main character, a man whose initial idealism was shattered by the corruption all around him:

He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide.

In the Torah, we have the expression נפשו קשורה בנפשו nafsho k’shura b’nafsho – one soul is connected to the other – a more positive way to describe our interconnectedness.

We can choose to behave in ways that demonstrate our awareness that the web embraces each of us, that our souls are connected, that the stakes are high.

Recently, two members of our congregation collaborated to write a very special book.  Millie Werber, mother of Marty and David, met regularly with Eve Keller to share her story about her experiences during the Shoah.

The book, called Two Rings, tells her story.  I urge everyone to read this touching and beautifully crafted book.

For now, I’d just like to describe one portion of the book which profoundly illustrates the power of human choice and responsibility. 

I’m quoting from an article that Eve wrote about the book for The Daily Beast:

Millie is 15, a frightened, fragile girl, working in a forced-labor ammunitions factory in Radom, an industrial city in Poland. Every night in her 12-hour shift, she must drill precisely-measured holes into 1,500 metal slugs. One night she somehow errs in every one: all 1,500 holes are wrong. She learns this the next day from the Polish supervisor of the factory, who is a man she doesn’t know, and a man who doesn’t know her—she is one face among thousands slaving in the dim light of  the factory floor. The Germans will kill her for her mistake. But this supervisor—a Pole, a man well treated by the Germans, a man whose job it is to keep the Jews in line, who must guard against Jewish error, Jewish sabotage—decides to hide her mistake and save her life, surely at risk to his own life, and for reasons Millie will never know. They never spoke before this incident; and they never spoke after.

Eve asks: 

What prompts an act like this? This is not the grand gesture—the resistance leader organizing an against-all-odds escape for his comrades, the landowner hiding families in the cellar of his country estate. This is heroics of a different order. On a daily basis, the smallest choice: Take this bad slug from the box and substitute this good one. Is this not the grandest gesture?

The impact of the choice this Polish supervisor made is immeasurable.   The spider is distracted.   A life is saved.

From the storehouses of Egypt to the camps of Poland, from the fields of Israel to the neighborhoods of Great Neck, human choice matters.  Recognizing our responsibility for ourselves and others makes a difference.

Hopefully, we will not find ourselves in the kind of dire situations that were typical during the Shoah.  Still, we need to consider carefully how to act and what to say because it makes a bigger impact than we imagine.

A few days ago, I viewed a video of a speech given by Amos Oz, renown Israeli author, at the J-Street convention. 

Oz spoke about the need for compromise – he said, “where there is life, there is compromise.”  The opposite of compromise is fanaticism and death.

He spoke about something his grandmother once said about relations among the different religions in the old city of Jerusalem.  She was speaking at the time about Jews and Christians.

She said, “my dear boy.  The Christians say that the Messiah already came and left and will come again.  The Jews say the Messiah has yet to come.  If, one day, the Messiah shows up and says, “Nice to see you AGAIN” we will apologize to the Christians.  If he says, “Hi, pleased to meet you, I’m the Messiah” the Christians will apologize to us.  Meanwhile, live and let live.

I could take that story in many different directions.  Right now, I just want to say the following.  Consider the impact this woman had on her grandson.  She chose the message, she chose to deliver the message and she chose how to deliver the message. 

Decades later, her grandson still remembers what she said and he is still making the case for reconciliation and peace.  Who can measure the impact she had on him?

The Passover story dramatizes the importance of having courage despite fear.  Courage to say what needs to be said and to do what needs to be done.

In a few moments, we will remember, as we ask God to remember, all of our loved ones who nurtured us, loved us, shared whole stretches of life with us.

We will think about the many choices they made to act and speak that inspired us and possibly impacted others, as well.

Here’s something I occasionally hear from people, especially after they experience the death of a life-partner. 

I can figure out how to handle the house and the finances.  The hard thing, is to handle all of the emotional issues that come up with the family that we used to share.  Now all of those challenges fall on me.

I want to say, and I hope you won’t think it chutzpah – to each person in that situation:  You have more strength than you realize.  You can channel the insight and courage of your loved one.  Imagine what he or she would have said to a child or a grandchild, filter it through your own sensibility, find your own words, and add this to your repertoire. 

You now have more responsibility, but you also have the capacity and the strength to say what needs to be said and to do what needs to be done.

Today we remember Egyptian midwives and princesses and Polish supervisors and Israeli grandmothers and mothers and fathers and spouses and children who made tough choices because they intuited that their words and actions strengthen the human fabric and move humanity from Egypt toward the Promised Land. 

Today, as children or parents or both, as siblings and lovers and friends, the most powerful message of the holiday of freedom lifts us up and inspires us to say and to do things we didn’t know we could. 

We are responsible for our selves and one another.  We are free and able to choose how to speak and act, more than we often know.

One day, those who love us will say, “I am where I am because of what he did, because of what she said.”

After we raise the glass and acknowledge the transition from darkness to light, from slavery to freedom, from servitude to redemption, we look forward to the time that we will sing שירה חדשה shira chadasha, a new song before God.

I am certain that as we continue to find the courage to speak, act and choose with conviction, one new song after another will emerge.